Location: Santa Cruz, CA
Medium: Installation, textiles, printmaking, photography, performance
Website: shirintowfiq.com
Shirin Towfiq is a second-generation Iranian refugee artist born and raised in Oceanside, California. Her parents and grandparents fled Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, fleeing religious persecution as members of the Baha’i faith, and settled in San Diego. Towfiq received her BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley (2016) and her MFA from Stanford University (2020), where she was awarded the prestigious Jack and Gertrude Murphy Cadogan Contemporary Art Award—a $40,000 prize given to an MFA student of exceptional caliber. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, where her research focuses on the Iranian diaspora and intergenerational communication. She has taught at Stanford Continuing Studies and held a lectureship at San Diego State University.
In 2024, Towfiq received both a Harpo Foundation Grant for Visual Artists and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship from the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County, which included a $20,000 award and a solo exhibition at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. Her work has been shown at major Bay Area institutions including the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the de Young Museum, SOMArts, and ICA San José, and has traveled nationally and internationally to venues such as the Mingei International Museum (San Diego), Four Freedoms Park (New York), and c3artspace (Melbourne, Australia).
Towfiq’s interdisciplinary practice spans installation, sculptural photography, textiles, printmaking, and video. She selects materials conceptually—gauze fabric, embroidery, lint roller paper, tea bags, dye sublimation on aluminum—to embody the fragility, layering, and partial visibility of diasporic memory. Persian rugs and carpet patterns recur across her work as a vehicle for thinking about cultural heritage, folklore, and the psychic weight of exile: the motif of the magic carpet transforms from fairy tale to meditation on displacement, evoking both the promise of flight and the impossibility of return.
Her practice is rooted in archival research and intergenerational dialogue with her family. She investigates the silences and gaps in inherited histories—photographs lost and recovered, stories avoidance-coded through the serving of tea and sweets, the buffering symbol as historical lacuna. The result is work that holds grief and tenderness simultaneously, inviting viewers into intimate environments (handmade beanbags, Persian sweets, tea) while engaging with the structural conditions of migration, religious persecution, and the making of Iranian-American identity.
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