In Moon-faced (2022), Morehshin Allahyari reimagines Persian Qajar-era portraiture to restore the non-binary gender representations that were once a hallmark of the visual culture of the country, but were gradually erased through Westernisation, European realist painting, and the advent of photography. In ancient Persian literature, the term moon-faced described beauty in both men and women; today, in Iran, it refers exclusively to women. Working with a multimodal AI model trained on archival Qajar paintings (1786–1925) and prompted with carefully researched keywords, Allahyari generates new genderless portraits that seek to repair this loss. The resulting video portraits reanimate a queer, gender-fluid tradition obscured by history, accompanied by an original score by Mani Nilchiani.

Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, organizer, and educator. Recognised as a leading global thinker by Foreign Policy magazine in 2016, Allahyari was born and raised in Iran before relocating to the United States in 2007. Her practice engages with political, social, and cultural contradictions, utilising technology as both a philosophical framework and a poetic medium to document contemporary struggles. She is the co-author of The 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016) with Daniel Rourke, and her critically acclaimed project Material Speculation: ISIS — which reconstructs ancient artefacts destroyed by ISIS — has been exhibited worldwide. Allahyari’s work is held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collections, San Francisco, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and other major institutions. She has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies at prestigious institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, Venice Biennale di Architettura, Venice, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Tate Modern, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, Montreal, the Queens Museum, Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston. She has been an artist-in-residence at BANFF Centre, Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk Pier9, the Vilém Flusser Residency Program in Berlin, and Eyebeam in New York City. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Wired, NPR, Parkett Art Magazine, Frieze, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, and Al Jazeera. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award (2025), The University of California, Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2024), The United States Artist Fellowship (2021), The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2019), The Sundance Institute New Frontier International Fellowship (2019), and the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine. Allahyari is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University.