Masoumeh Mozaffari

Masoumeh Mozaffari (; born 1958) is an Iranian painter, art educator and arts administrator. She is known primarily for figurative paintings and large-scale portraits depicting ordinary people, as well as interiors in which domestic spaces and everyday objects are used to address themes of anxiety, absence, memory and the relationship between private and public life.

Mozaffari has served two periods as head of the Society of Iranian Painters and has been involved in professional organisations and juries in Iran's visual-arts sector. She was also a member of Dena, a collective established by Iranian women artists in the early 2000s.

Early life and education Mozaffari was born in Tehran in 1958. She graduated from the Tehran School of Visual Arts in 1978 and subsequently studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Tehran. Her studies were interrupted by the closure of Iranian universities during the Iranian Cultural Revolution, and she completed her bachelor's degree in 1989. She received a master's degree from the Faculty of Art and Architecture of Islamic Azad University in 1997.

Work Mozaffari's early paintings from the 1980s and 1990s combined figurative imagery with fragmented, semi-abstract spaces. Art critic Ali Golestaneh has interpreted the development of her work over three decades in relation to changes in the social, economic and political conditions of Iran's urban middle class.

The human figure became increasingly prominent in later series. Works from Heat Stroke, Upon Their Faces, Running and In the Presence of the Others feature large portraits and figures whose restrained gestures and direct gaze create a sense of unease. Recurring details include nosebleeds, newspapers and personal objects, which Golestaneh has interpreted in relation to political and social anxiety. The later series Absence, produced around the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, depicts sparsely occupied domestic interiors and figures in conditions of isolation and waiting.

She has served on juries and selection panels for Iranian painting exhibitions, festivals and biennials.

Dena group Mozaffari was a member of Dena, an independent collective of Iranian women artists established in the early 2000s. She joined the group after its initial formation.

Retrospective In February and March 2024, the Lajevardi Foundation in Tehran presented Memories and Forgetting, a retrospective of Mozaffari's work organised in collaboration with Azad Art Gallery. The exhibition surveyed several periods of her career and coincided with the publication of a monograph on her life and work.