Shirin Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran in 1957. She was sent to the United States to complete her education inn 1974, at the age of seventeen. After receiving a BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983, Neshat moved to New York, where she soon began working at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, an interdisciplinary alternative space in Manhattan...

Born in Tehran, Iran in 1976, Ali Banisadr moved to America with his family when 12 years old, already having experienced –if not intellectually for his age, but emotionally - a revolution and a war by then. As a teenager living in San Francisco, Banisadr was part of a well-known group of graffiti artists. After briefly studying psychology, he left the Bay Area to attend art school in New York...

After completing a BA in Painting at the University of Maryland Shafie moved to New York in 1993 to live and to study painting at Pratt Institute, where she graduated in 1999 with an MFA in painting. Shafie presented her thesis exhibition September Promises in 1996 which featured a large body of work comprised of "eshghe” drawings on mylar and her first video installation Spin (1995)...

Environmental crises and the need to resurrect a pure environment call for a new art form. Environmental art can play an important role. Art is capable of illustrating the crisis, critiquing its conditions, and describing a utopian world.

The sculptor, illustrator, painter, Reza Lavasani was born in 1962 in Sarcheshmeh; one of the old residential quarters of Tehran which in his own words: continue their life only in films today; a neighborhood with small bazaars, narrow alleyways and their unique gorgeous light, arcades, carved wooden doors, stained glass windows of their houses, with the sound of peddlers, green-grocery and secondhand-clothes vendors echoing daily in them, associating times when beauty and aesthetics, art, science and philosophy were part of every day life and not the subject of academic discourses...