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 present

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

a curatorial competition and exhibition

Following the resounding success of the inaugural Art Iran competition and the critically acclaimed exhibition held at the Craft Contemporary from January 27 to May 5, 2024,

Farhang Foundation and Craft Contemporary are proud to announce the Art Iran 2 Curatorial Competition and Exhibition.

We invite curators and arts professionals with demonstrated experience in developing focused, thematic group exhibitions, preferably with a concentration on Iranian art and culture, to submit proposals for this second edition. The selected exhibition will be presented at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles from May 21, 2027 - November 14, 2027.

Phase 1 Submission Deadline
November 17, 2025

READ THE PRESS RELEASE

ART IRAN 2: Jury Panel

Ladan Akbarnia

Ladan Akbarnia brings over 20 years of curatorial and research expertise in the arts of the Islamic world, with a focus on Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia. She will begin her new role as Head of Curatorial and Professor of Islamic World Collections at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge in September 2025, following key positions at The San Diego Museum of Art, The British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Iran Heritage Foundation. At SDMA, she organized the major NEH-, NEA-, and Getty-funded exhibition Wonders of Creation: Art, Science, and Innovation in the Islamic World (2024–2025). At the British Museum, she was a lead curator of the Albukhary Foundation Gallery of the Islamic World. She has taught Islamic art history at Smith and Wheaton Colleges and consulted for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Ladan holds advanced degrees from UCLA and Harvard, and has published widely on topics including Iranian and East Asian exchanges, Sufism, and contemporary Middle Eastern art. At the Fitzwilliam, she will lead curatorial research on Islamic art and material culture.

Naz Cuguoğlu

Naz Cuguoğlu works as a curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where her work explores themes of intersectional identities and diasporic experiences. In 2024, she was appointed to co-curate the inaugural American Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale and received the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant and the AAMC Propel Award. Her curatorial experience includes exhibitions and programs at documenta fifteen, 15th Istanbul Biennial, Taiwan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She has previously held roles at institutions such as KADIST, The Wattis Institute, de Young Museum, and SFMOMA. Her writings have appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Hyperallergic, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. As a co-founder of Collective Çukurcuma, she experiments with collaborative curatorial practices through reading groups and international exhibitions.

Fereshteh Daftari

Fereshteh Daftari is a curator and art historian who received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University (1988). During her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1988 - 2009), she curated a number of international exhibitions including Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (2006). Her curatorial work in the field of Iranian modernism includes Between Word and Image at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 2002, and Iran Modern at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2013. She has also focused on contemporary art. Action Now, the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian performance art, was held in Paris (2012); Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (2013); and Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2017). Dr. Daftari has published widely and her most recent book is titled Persia Reframed: Iranian Visions of Modern and Contemporary Art (London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2019).

Frida Cano

Frida Cano is a Mexican visual artist and Senior Curator at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. She is the creator of Arttextum, Tejido de agentes culturales inspirados en Latinoamérica, a research-based art project that maps metaphorical relationships between cultural producers, likening artists to rivers, venues to mountains, and theory to climate. From 2012 to 2020, Arttextum collaborated with Spain’s Ministry of Culture. Cano holds a BFA from La Esmeralda, National Center for the Arts in Mexico City, and an MFA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her exhibitions and talks span Mexico, the U.S., Germany, Japan, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Spain. She has worked with institutions including SPACE Collection, Centro de la Imagen, Kurimanzutto Gallery, Walter and McBean Galleries, and Marciano Art Foundation. Her awards include the Endesa Scholarship (Spain), the Jumex Foundation, and Fulbright-Comexus. She is co-author of Geografía artística de Arttextum –El mundo que también habitamos (2019) and serves on the board of Blue Roof in Los Angeles.

Shulamit Nazarian

Shulamit Nazarian was born in Iran and immigrated to the US in 1979. She studied architecture at Pratt Institute in NYC.
In 2006 she began curating art exhibitions out of her personal residence. In 2012, Nazarian opened her first permanent gallery in Venice Beach, CA. The gallery originally focused on presentations by artists from the Middle East, and then expanded to a global program of artists.
In 2017, Nazarian opened a new gallery in Hollywood, located on La Brea at Melrose. In 2019, she founded the Shulamit Nazarian Foundation, which supports artists building cultural bridges between the Middle East and the West through contemporary art. Her foundation has collaborated with institutions such as MCA Chicago.
Ms. Nazarian is a member of the board of The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA), the Center of Contemporary Art (CCA) in Tel Aviv-Yafo, and the Artis Contemporary Israeli Art Fund.

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. In 2022, Neshat was the subject of a comprehensive installation of her photographs and video works, “Land of Dreams” at The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, which travelled to SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2019, Neshat was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, “Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again” at The Broad, Los Angeles, which traveled to The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including: ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Copenhagen; Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, Austria; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013. Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), and the Praemium Imperiale Prize (2017). In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for “Best Director” at the 66th Venice International Film Festival.

Ed Schad

Ed Schad is Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad in Los Angeles, where his curated exhibitions include Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows, Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, and Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again. Ed's writing has been included in Art Review, Frieze, Modern Painters, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, The L.A. Weekly, Gagosian Quarterly, Truthdig, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition, he has contributed essays to dozens of mono-graphic catalogs, including on the work of Robert Irwin, Natalie Frank, Roy Dowell, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Sterling Ruby, and Kaz Oshiro. His first collection of poetry -- Letters Apart, a collaboration with the painter Liat Yossifor -- was published in Spring, 2023 by University of La Verne, and his poems have been published in the Blue Collar Review, Suturo, and The Nonconformist. In 2021, he became a fellow of The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC.