Neshat Shirin

Shirin Neshat (1957) was born in Qazvin, a town in northwestern Iran where her father was a doctor. Like her four brothers and sisters, she went abroad for her studies when she was seventeen. From 1974 she lived with family in Los Angeles and trained as a visual artist at Berkeley University. She gave up painting when she started a non-commercial gallery, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, with her then-boyfriend in New York in the early 1980s.