Sheila Karbassian, born in the United States, moved to Iran at the age of 11, two years into the Iran and Iraq war, post the 1978 Islamic Revolution, contrary to what most Iranians were doing—leaving Iran.

This journey has deeply influenced her expressive and diverse visual vocabulary, bringing into color and formation the continued expansion and contraction of self-identity and existence in the context of modernity and tradition, being an immigrant, a woman, a mother, a widow, a survivor of loss, an observer of war, a partner, an Iranian, an American and all other dimensions of being a human.

Sheila holds a BA in Communication Arts from Tehran’s Azad University and an MA in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica. Today, she lives and works in Santa Monica, California.