Maryam Kashani

Biograpgy

Maryam Kashani’s research and work explores the possibilities of visual perception, cinematic narrative and representation. Producing ‘moving portraits’ of individuals, families, buildings and transportation infrastructures, she examines the passage of time in everyday life through social movements.

Kashani is an assistant professor in gender and women’s studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She participated in the Zaytuna Project, a series of videos and installation work produced in conjunction with her ethnographic monograph on Zaytuna College, Berkeley, California. The project was based on ethnographic research and filmmaking conducted amongst Muslim communities in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.

Her work has been shown at film festivals, universities and museums internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Her film insulation, Our Look Was as If Two Lovers or Deadly Enemies and Signs of Remarkable History premiered at Sharjah Biennial 12 (2015).

She holds a BA in Film Studies and Interdisciplinary Field Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2000) and an MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts (2003). She also earned a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin (2014).

Born in 1977 in San Francisco, USA, she currently lives and works in Illinois, USA.

SAF participation:
Sharjah Film Platform 5
Sharjah Biennial 12