Laleh Mehran
Professor; Director, EDP
Emergent Digital Practices
303-871-3264 (Office)
Shwayder Art Building, 2121 E. Asbury St. Denver, CO 80208
What I do
Laleh Mehran is a Professor of Emergent Digital Practices creating immersive, interactive, and digital art experiences focused on socio-political issues.
Professional Biography
Laleh Mehran was born in Iran and relocated with her family to the United States at the start of the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Issues revolving around dissent and exile are of particular interest and concern to Mehran. The progeny of Iranian scientists, her relationship to these subjects is necessarily complex, and is still more so now given a political climate in which certain views are increasingly suspect. Mehran's research, often modeled on and about the very ideas of science and technology, takes advantage of their cultural importance in order to articulate a set of ideas which require precisely these kinds of mediations from both political and religious intolerance.
Dissenting from culture requires an awareness of the consequences. Indeed, we live in an era in which some speech is increasingly censored – often with the most extreme outcomes for the speaker, and as such Mehran's work is of necessity as veiled as it is explicit, as personal as it is political and as critical as it is tolerant. In short, it has been the challenge of her work over time that it develop a language elaborate enough to accommodate her own highly complex relation to this contemporary tangle of science, politics, and theology.
Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Electronic Time-Based Media. Her work has been shown individually and collaboratively in the USA and international venues including the ISEA (United Arab Emirates), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), FILE (Brazil), ACT Festival (South Korea), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Massachusetts), Mattress Factory Museum (Pennsylvania), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pennsylvania), The Georgia Museum of Art (Georgia), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pennsylvania), Denver Art Museum (Colorado), Biennial of the Americas at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Colorado), 404 International Festival of Art & Technology (Argentina), Next 5 Minutes 4 Tactical Media Festival (Netherlands), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Currents: The Santa Fe International New Media Festival (New Mexico), and the Pittsburgh Biennial (Pennsylvania). Mehran is a Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver.
Dissenting from culture requires an awareness of the consequences. Indeed, we live in an era in which some speech is increasingly censored – often with the most extreme outcomes for the speaker, and as such Mehran's work is of necessity as veiled as it is explicit, as personal as it is political and as critical as it is tolerant. In short, it has been the challenge of her work over time that it develop a language elaborate enough to accommodate her own highly complex relation to this contemporary tangle of science, politics, and theology.
Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Electronic Time-Based Media. Her work has been shown individually and collaboratively in the USA and international venues including the ISEA (United Arab Emirates), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), FILE (Brazil), ACT Festival (South Korea), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Massachusetts), Mattress Factory Museum (Pennsylvania), Carnegie Museum of Art (Pennsylvania), The Georgia Museum of Art (Georgia), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pennsylvania), Denver Art Museum (Colorado), Biennial of the Americas at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Colorado), 404 International Festival of Art & Technology (Argentina), Next 5 Minutes 4 Tactical Media Festival (Netherlands), European Media Arts Festival (Germany), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Currents: The Santa Fe International New Media Festival (New Mexico), and the Pittsburgh Biennial (Pennsylvania). Mehran is a Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver.
Media Sources
Featured Publications
. (2017). All In: Laleh Mehran's Inherent Control Ciphers. Inherent Control Ciphers. Bucknell University.
Performances
. (2012). Men of God, Men of Nature. Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA.
. (2018). The Interstitium. Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh, PA.
. (2014). W3FI: Taiwan . National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan.
. (2017). Inherent Control Cyphers. Samek Art Museum, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA, USA.
. (2014). Entropic Order . Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, Arvada, Colorado, USA.
Presentations
. (2015). Art in the Age of Digital Fabrication. Wuhan, People's Republic of China: Central China Normal University .
. (2019). “The Wind Will Carry Us,” by Abbas Kiarostami. Denver, CO, USA: Clyfford Still Museum.
. (2019). The Design of Beliefs. Pittsburgh, PA, USA: Mattress Factory Museum.
. (2019). The Shape of Reflections. Colorado Art Education Association. Breckenridge, CO, USA: Colorado Art Education Association.
. (2020). Topographic Ideologies. Kalamazoo, MI, USA: Gwen Frostic School of Art, Western Michigan University.
. (2015). Space for Subversion. Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, Korea: ACT Festival.
. (2014). Politics of Place. Tokyo, Japan: Department of Interactive Media, Tokyo Polytechnic University.
. (2014). 3D Printing, Scanning, and Digital Fabrication for Creativity. Enhancing Mutual Understanding Program. Royal University for Women, Riffa, Bahrain: US State Department.
. (2012). Artists of the 2012 404 Festival. 404 International Festival. Rosario Argentina: National University of Rosario.
Awards
- Distinguished Professor, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, People's Republic of China,
- Dean's Award for Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
- Top Ten Women Artists in Colorado, http://adobeairstream.com
- Faculty Career Champion , DU Career & Professional Development
- Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences Stapleton Research Fund, University of Denver
