Born in Tehran and based in Vienna, Tara Najd Ahmadi is a scholar, artist, and non-fiction filmmaker. Her recent body of work focuses on creating a panorama of fragmented stories gleaned through oral histories. In this space, she explores how thinking subjects move against their marginality and articulate their hopes, frustrations, and desire to resist.

Solo screenings of her work have taken place at the Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Bristol Experimental Expanded Film, Belgrade’s Academic Film Center, and Vienna’s Depot: Kunst und Diskussion, among other venues. Her films have been presented at various festivals and institutions, including Dokufest Prizren, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

In 2019, she received her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester (New York), where she was awarded the George Eastman Museum Graduate Fellowship. Her dissertation, which examines the notion of “incompletion” in artworks and films produced during revolutionary times, was nominated by the Visual and Cultural Studies graduate program for the Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Humanities in 2020. She has received several awards and grants, including the Susan B. Anthony Research Fund for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, the Flaherty Seminar Fellowship, and support from the New York State Council on the Arts Media Arts Assistance Fund.

Her film collection is preserved at the Slovenian Cinematheque, and her films are distributed by sixpackfilm and Third World Newsreel. She is currently teaching at Kunstschule Wien.

email: tara.experimental[@]gmail.com

All images © Tara Najd Ahmadi