Laleh Mehran

Laleh Mehran is a Professor of Emergent Digital Practices creating immersive, interactive, and digital art experiences focused on socio-political issues.

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.