Shirin Neshat Asks: What Is America
4 min readWhen Shirin Neshat presented her work Do U Dare! at the Venice Biennale in 2026, it had tremendous layers of meaning. Neshat, who has lived in the U.S. since she was 17, can’t stop thinking about the recent war in Iran, where she was born and raised and where much of her family remains.
Neshat’s three-part film series was inspired by Nasim Najafi Aghdam, an alienated Iranian American woman with a large internet following who opened fire at the YouTube offices in 2018. Each video follows a young woman, who resembles Neshat, navigating life in America. In one, she sees a politician giving a speech about American values that rings false to her. In the second, she witnesses the excesses of Wall Street. And the third takes place in a suburb much like the California one Aghdam lived in. The piece is about immigration and America and how lonely it can be to find yourself as a young Iranian woman, as Neshat was, in a culture that seems like it has no place for you. It’s about her, in a sense, recalling her first years in America, when she felt lost and alone. But Neshat’s and Aghdam’s stories diverged as her experience shifted. Neshat found, in this country, a career, a community, and a husband she loved. She sees the many flaws that America has but also believes in the values it promises.
Do U Dare!, which received strong reviews in Venice, reflects some of the complicated feelings that Neshat has about her adopted country. “I have lived longer in this country than in my own. This is a country I worship for its idea of democracy,” she says. “I come from Iran, which is a totally authoritarian society. One of the main objectives of this work is [speaking about] the hypocrisy of an American democracy that’s slowly vanishing.”
The 2025 Paris staging of Neshat’s Aida.
Neshat, 69, was raised in a close Muslim family and spent two years at a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Like Aghdam, she had a very difficult time adjusting when she moved to the U.S. for schooling and attended UC Berkeley. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, she was unable to return home. “Because of the revolution, there was this huge disconnect with Iran and a lot of anti-Iranian sentiment in American culture. Those were some of the darkest years of my life, which found its way in my work eventually.” In 1990, Neshat visited Iran for the first time since she’d left and was shocked by how much had changed.
Early in her career, Neshat, who is rarely without her signature dramatic eyeliner, spent a decade working at the nonprofit Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. “I didn’t blossom in art school at Berkeley,” she says. “The failure at school—and, more, my intellectual development as a human being in New York, and exposure to art while working at an art gallery—opened my eyes to what art could be.”
She began creating her own work in the early ’90s. Her series “Women of Allah” featured photos of Iranians overlaid with Persian calligraphy. She also worked in film, and in 1995 and 1999, she participated in the Venice Biennale. Her work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Broad museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Women Without Men, her first dramatic feature film, received the Silver Lion for Best Director prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 2009. Neshat’s work never stops evolving. This past spring, a photo by Neshat appeared on the cover of Peter Gabriel’s single “Won’t Stand Down,” and she’s currently thinking about creating 3-D art for the first time.
A still from Do U Dare!
The political turmoil in Iran brings up mixed feelings for many in the Iranian diaspora who were opposed to the fundamentalist government of Ali Khamenei, but unwilling to support the American military action. “It’s been very complicated. I’m against the regime and live in exile, but happy that they’re defending our country, and our country is not being allowed to be taken apart in pieces,” she says. “I mean, I’ve been going back and forth. I’ve been attacked a great deal on social media by the Iranian community because I’m antiwar, and many people accuse me of being pro regime.
“My husband and I often think about it, because we’ve become very disillusioned by what’s happening here and the direction things are going. But at the same time, I can’t think of any other country that I want to make my roots in again. I can’t go back to Iran. So at the moment, I’m really optimistic that things will change in the US, that the Americans will rise against this form of fascism that is growing,” she says. “I’m really hoping that there will be this raising of consciousness and awareness within America, because I believe in this culture. I feel invested in this country. I want to live here and I want to see a change. I don’t want to give up.”
This story appears in the September 2026 issue of ELLE.
