Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Printmaking, Installation
Website: instagram.com/golbanoum
Golbanou Moghaddas is an Iranian-American narrative visual artist born in 1980 and raised near the Caspian Sea in Iran. She relocated from Tehran to London in 2008, where she completed an MA in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She subsequently earned an MFA fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2012, which brought her to the Bay Area, where she has lived and worked in San Francisco ever since. Her illustrated work gained early international recognition when she created the drawings for The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson, published by Granta Publications (UK) and University of Chicago Press (USA), earning her the Best of British Illustration Award in 2011.
Her career has been shaped by prestigious Bay Area residencies and fellowships. She received the Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award in 2013, a Manhattan Graphics Center Scholarship in 2016, and was named a Kala Art Institute Fellow for 2017–18. She has served as an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts from 2018 to 2022 and has been an awardee of the International Print Center New York’s New Prints Program. Her work is held in collections at Columbia University, the Turner Prize Museum, and numerous private and public collections across North America and Europe.
Moghaddas works primarily through miniature etching, drawing, and installation. She develops series of small-format etchings — typically 3 × 3 inches — on Japanese Gampi paper with chine collé, which she presents in installation format alongside site-specific murals painted directly on gallery walls. Her compositions draw deeply from 16th- and 17th-century Persian manuscripts and Safavid Dynasty visual traditions, reinterpreting their imagery and layout through a contemporary lens. A recurring figure in her work is the Hoopoe bird from the 12th-century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds — a symbol of wisdom and unity that she invokes to address contemporary themes of division, belonging, and diaspora. As she has said of the bird: “The Hoopoe was a messenger of unity. I’m calling on Hoopoe to make a comeback and offer its wisdom to our divided world.” Her practice also reaches further back into pre-Islamic Persian heritage: her 2023 YBCA commission Seven and One Tales Under the Desert Stars evoked Sassanian religious architecture and Zoroastrian cosmology through a shrine-like structure housing seven small framed works on etched plywood.
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