Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Cyanotype, Ceramics, Installation
Website: alaebtekar.com
Ala Ebtekar was born in 1978 in Berkeley, California, and grew up in Berkeley and Oakland in a family that had emigrated from Iran. Before and during art school he studied in Tehran with the master coffeehouse (qahveh-khaneh) painter Mohammad Farahani, an encounter with traditional Persian narrative painting that shaped his early work. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002 and his MFA from Stanford University in 2006. He lives and works between San Francisco and Tehran.
Ebtekar was a visiting lecturer in UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice in 2007–08, and since 2009 he has taught at Stanford University, where he is a lecturer across Art & Art History, the Institute for Diversity in the Arts, Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, and the Program in Iranian Studies. At Stanford he founded and directs Art, Social Space and Public Discourse, a global initiative examining changing ideas of public space. His residencies include the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2006), the San Francisco Center for the Book Imprint Award residency (2008), the Visions from the New California Award at 18th Street Arts Center (2009), ZKM Karlsruhe (2011), Maraya Art Centre in Sharjah (2013), Sazmanab in Tehran (2015), and the King Artist in Residence at Arion Press in San Francisco (2025).
His work is held in the collections of the British Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young and Legion of Honor), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, di Rosa, Stanford University, the SFO Museum public art collection, the Deutsche Bank and Microsoft collections, and the Farjam Collection. He is represented by The Third Line in Dubai and has long exhibited with Gallery Paule Anglim (later Anglim Gilbert/Anglim Trimble) and Gallery 16 in San Francisco.
Ebtekar’s early work fused the iconography of Persian coffeehouse painting and illuminated manuscripts with hip-hop and graffiti culture, often drawn directly onto antique book pages. Over the past decade his practice has turned toward light, time, and the cosmos: he coats canvases, book pages, and clay tiles with cyanotype solution and exposes them to sunlight, moonlight, or starlight, frequently through negatives drawn from the Hubble Space Telescope archive or historical glass-plate negatives from Lick Observatory. Over the resulting deep blue fields he paints stylized clouds and wind forms derived from Persian miniature painting.
The work proposes a reversal of perspective — the universe, or the moon, gazing back at us across immense spans of time — and places scientific imaging in dialogue with Sufi poetry, Persian architectural ornament, and the history of the book. Recent projects have extended this approach into ceramics and large-scale public commissions.
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