Bani Khoshnoudi

Director, artist
Iran, Mexico

Filmmaker and visual artist, Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran and immigrated to the United States in 1979 during the revolution. She studied architecture, photography and cinema at the University of Texas in Austin, then ten years later at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York. Her works, inhabited by displacement and uprooting, explore themes of exile, modernity and its effects, memory and the concept of the invisible. While her documentary and fiction films (The Silent Majority Speaks (2010-14), Luciérnagas (2018), A People in the Shadows (2008), Transit (2005)…) dig into the layers, stories and experiences related to global migrations, nomadisms and historical struggles for freedom, her photographs and installations also work with the textures and traces of these stories; architecture and ruins, human imprints on the earth. Since 2009, she divides her time between Paris and Mexico City. In 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Herb Alpert Award for the Arts.