Shirin Towfiq (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. Towfiq focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and reflects on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.

Towfiq’s art has been featured in galleries and museums across the globe. Currently, the artist is featured in exhibitions at ICA San Jose, New Museum Los Gatos and USC Roski School of Art and Design. She received a BA in Practice of Art from UC Berkeley and her MFA from Stanford University. She is currently working on her PhD at UC Santa Cruz.

SEE(d) invites you to meet Shirin Towfiq on Saturday, December 7, from 4 - 6 PM, hosted at Clio’s, a new literary and cultural hub in Oakland. Cari Borja, Ph.D., cultural anthropologist, multidisciplinary creator, and professor at California College of the Arts, will moderate the conversation exploring themes from Shirin’s work— cultural memory, family histories, the legacies of trauma, transnational migration, archival silences, and the complexities of translation. Join us in the spirit of belonging!