Morehshin Allahyari

Morehshin Allahyari is a Stanford Digital Media professor and Iranian-Kurdish artist who uses 3D printing as a tool for counter-colonial resistance and archival recovery. Her practice centers on reconstructing ancient artifacts destroyed by ISIS, transforming digital fabrication from a industrial technology into an act of cultural preservation and political defiance.

Allahyari's body of work interrogates how technology intersects with colonialism, mythology, and identity. Through projects like Material Speculation: ISIS (2015-16) and The 3D Additivist Manifesto, she reimagines Islamic mythology through feminist and queer theoretical frameworks while critiquing digital colonialism itself. Her exhibitions have been shown at the Venice Biennale, Whitney Museum, Pompidou, MoMA, and the V&A Museum. In 2016, Foreign Policy named her among its Leading Global Thinkers, recognizing her contributions to contemporary discourse on art, technology, and cultural resistance.

Allahyari's work speaks to audiences interested in how artists deploy emerging technologies to challenge dominant narratives, recover erasure, and build alternative archives. She demonstrates that 3D printing and digital fabrication are not neutral tools but rather sites of ideological struggle where questions of ownership, authenticity, and representation become material and urgent.