Shaghayegh Cyrous


Shaghayegh Cyrous is an Iranian-American artist and curator based in San Francisco. Her interactive time-based investigations, participatory projects, and video installations have been said to "create a poetic space for human connections."

Early life

Cyrous was born in Tehran and obtained her BA degree in Visual Art Studies from the University of Science and Culture in Tehran. She lived in Iran until the Iranian Green Movement, when political tensions made her decide to move to the United States in 2011. She settled in San Francisco, where she graduated with a Master of Fine Arts Social Practice from the California College of Arts in 2017. Immediately after graduating, Cyrous became a fellow at Escuela de Arte Útil, managed by Tania Bruguera.

Career

Together with the Iranian artist Keyvan Shovir, she put up the mural In Memory Of in Clarion Alley in 2015. The mural depicts three famous Iranian women writers - Simin Daneshvar, Simin Behbahani, and Forough Farrokhzad. Cyrous and Shovir had already created another work there, portraying writers and artists imprisoned in Iran, and Cyrous installed her Lost Rug Project in Clarion Alley.
Cyrous co-curated Inside Out Iran, an exhibition of Iranian urban art in London in 2015. She was the executive producer of Mutiny of Colours, a feature-length documentary film about street art and graffiti in Iran.
She curated the video exhibition Eleven and a Half Hours in Oakland in 2017, displaying the works of the Iranian artist Shirin Abedinirad and the American artist Dionne Lee. Cyrous combined the two with the intention of "blurring lines between the two cultures... making Iran and Oakland feel like the same place." She chose that title because eleven and a half hours is the time difference between San Francisco and Tehran. Her own work A Window to Tehran, with a video diptych synchronizing the San Francisco sunrise with the Tehran sunset, was based on the same idea.