Sarah Cole, Dean of the School of the Arts, has announced that award-winning artist Shirin Neshat will address graduates at the School’s convocation, hosted on Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 6:30 pm. The ceremony will recognize MFA graduates in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts + Sound Art, and Writing, and MA graduates in Film and Media Studies from the 2025–2026 academic year.
"We are thrilled that Shirin Neshat will be addressing our graduating students this spring," said Cole. "An intensely creative, multidisciplinary artist, she inspires us all, and we very much look forward to including her in our beautiful ceremony in May."
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat works and continues to experiment with the mediums of photography, video, film, and opera, which she imbues with highly poetic and politically charged images and narratives that question issues of power, religion, race, gender, and the relationship between the past and present, East and West, individual and collective through the lens of her personal experiences as an Iranian woman living in exile.
Neshat has held numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally including the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
She has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017), and most recently Land of Dreams (2021), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival
Neshat directed her first opera, Verdi’s Aida, at the Salzburg Festival in 2017 and 2022. The opera was recently restaged at the Paris Opera House in 2025 to high acclaim.
Across her work in visual arts and filmmaking, Neshat has been the recipient many prestigious awards, including the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006) and in 2017, she received the prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award in Tokyo.
She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, Goodman Gallery in London and Lia Rumma in Milan/Naples.
Join us here at 6:30 pm ET on Wednesday, May 20, 2026 to watch Neshat's address.
