Hoda Afshar

Hoda Afshar (born 1983) is an Iranian documentary photographer who is based in Melbourne. She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre run by the Australian government. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions and is held in many permanent collections across Australia.

Since 2019 and Afshar teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne. She earned a bachelor's degree in fine art (photography) with first class honours

Afshar's two-channel video work, Remain (2018), includes spoken poetry by Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani and Iranian poet Bijan Elahi. Afshar describes her method as "staged documentary", in which the men on the island are able to "re-enact their narratives with their own bodies and [gives] them autonomy to narrate their own stories". The video was shown as part of the Primavera 2018 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, from 9 November 2018 to 3 February 2019. One of the photographs of Boochani taken for this project won the Bowness Photography Prize.

In 2019 Afshar completed her PhD in creative arts at Curtin University, with the subject of her thesis being "images of Islamic female identity". In 2019 and Afshar started teaching at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne.

Afshar's book Speak the Wind (2021) documents the landscapes and people of the islands of Hormuz, Qeshm, and Hengam, in the Persian Gulf off the south coast of Iran. She got to know some of the people there, travelling there frequently over the years, and they told her about the history of the place. She said that "their narrations led the project", and she explores "the idea of being possessed by history, and in this context, the history of slavery and cruelty".

In March 2021, an exhibition of Afshar's portraits of nine whistleblowers was mounted at St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne, in an exhibition named Agonistes (after the Greek word agonistes, meaning a person engaged in a struggle).

From September 2023 to January 2024, the Art Gallery of New South Wales mounted an exhibition of Afshar's work over the past decade, A Curve is a Broken Line. It contained several of her earlier works, along with a series of 12 large photographs commissioned by AGNSW, In Turn. The photos featured four Iranian Australian women plaiting one another's hair, and first holding a white dove before releasing it. This is based on a kind of ritualistic practice among Kurdish female fighters before setting out to fight Islamic State. The photographs are a response to the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in Iran in September 2022.

She is a board member of the Centre for Contemporary Photography. 2015: Winner, National Photographic Portrait Prize, winner for Portrait of Ali 2017: Finalist, Bowness Photography Prize, finalist for Untitled #1 2018: Winner, Sotheby's Australia People's Choice Award, for Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island 2018: Winner, Bowness Photography Prize, for Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island 2021: Finalist, Ramsay Art Prize (2021), Art Gallery of South Australia and People's Choice Prize, for Agonistes 2021: Winner, Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, an award of given to mid-career creatives and thought leaders 2025: Winner, National Photographic Portrait Prize, for "Untitled #01" (from the series Code Black/Riot)

Publications Speak the Wind. London: Mack, 2021. With an essay by Michael Taussig. .

Selected exhibitions Solo Behold (2017), Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Melbourne Speak the Wind (April–May 2022), Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne. One of a series of official exhibitions of PHOTO 2022: International Festival of Photography, taking place in Melbourne and regional Victoria A Curve is a Broken Line (September 2023 – January 2024) Art Gallery of New South Wales

Group Primavera (2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Enough خلص Khalas: Contemporary Australian Muslim Artists (2018), UNSW Galleries Women in Photography 2019: Remedy for Rage (2019), Objectifs The Shouting Valley (2019), Gus Fisher Gallery, (2020) The Physics Room Just Not Australian (2019), Artspace Visual Arts Centre Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia (2019), Museum of Photographic Arts Civilization: The Way We Live Now (2019), National Gallery of Victoria Refracted Reality (2020), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts f_OCUS (2020), Counihan Gallery The Burning World (2020), Bendigo Art Gallery Five Acts Of Love (2025), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Collections Afshar's work is held in the following permanent collections: National Gallery of Victoria: 8 works (as of 27 December 2024) Monash Gallery of Art: 8 prints (as of 27 December 2024) Art Gallery of New South Wales: 17 prints (as of 27 December 2024) Monash University Museum of Art (Behold #1, Behold #6, and Behold #12) University of Queensland Art Museum (Remain) Murdoch University Art Gallery: (Westoxicated #7, Westoxicated #9, Westoxicated #3, Westoxicated #1, Westoxicated #5, and Westoxicated #4) Buxton Contemporary (University of Melbourne) (Westoxicated #1, Westoxicated #2, Westoxicated #4, Westoxicated #5, Westoxicated #6, Westoxicated #7, and Westoxicated #9) Deakin University Art Collection Art Gallery of Western Australia (Remain)