Mobina Nouri Ph.D
“Between myth and memory,
new worlds begin to emerge.”
Statement: I am a female Iranian artist, years away from my family, exiled from a homeland that gave the world poetry, art, and culture, and is now spoken of mostly as a battlefield of oil, missiles, and nuclear threat. I seek to share the other Iran, the one I carry within me. Dots are my DNA, rooted in memories of my mother weaving Persian carpets, where I first saw dots as pixels and turned them into stories about the animals and trees I imagined within the patterns.
The "Starborn" series is the evolution of those stories: a constellation of mythic, composite creatures, each holding countless beings, memories, and energies within a single form. This work carries my Persian heritage into a universal language, offering creation as my answer to a world fluent in destruction, a reminder that the stars above us belong to no single nation.
Photo by Darya Orlova
Biography:
Mobina Nouri (b. Isfahan, Iran) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work draws on storytelling, mysticism, poetry, and symbolism to explore identity, memory, and transformation. Her multidisciplinary practice blends calligraphy, drawing, installation, Performance and time-based media, creating visual narratives that reflect the emotional and philosophical complexities of displacement and belonging.
Trained in Performing Arts and Design at Tehran University, Nouri later earned a PhD in Creativity Science from City University of London. Her work is deeply informed by the literary and mythological heritage of Persia, reinterpreted through a contemporary lens. Nouri’s art creates a contemplative space where the poetic and the visual converge, an invitation to return to what is sacred, intuitive, and timeless.
Nouri’s practice is rooted in visual storytelling, she inscribes poetry on skin in her Poetography series, maps cosmological rhythms in Cosmic Dance, and reimagines tales from A Thousand and One Nights in layered, symbolic compositions. Her process combines traditional hand techniques with experimental materials, often inviting viewers into ritual-like encounters.
Nouri’s work has received international recognition, including the 2019 Juror’s Choice Award from the San Francisco Women Artists Gallery, the 2020 MOZAIK Future Art Award, and the 2020 “Art Saves Humanity” Juror’s Choice, selected by leading art figures including Jerry Saltz. She served as a juror for MOZAIK’s 2021 “Re-Imagining Democracy” and was an artist-in-residence at Djerassi in 2022.
Nouri is currently working on two major research initiatives, the AI-driven project Lost City proposing to Lacma and a series of immersive installations that integrate Mix Reality with traditional hand drawings.
