Pantea Karimi in studio

Statement and Bio

 

Pantea Karimi is an Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in San Jose, California. She worked and studied in Iran and the UK before she settled in the US in 2005.

Karimi researches historical documents and early illustrated scientific manuscripts for their unique representation of knowledge in visual forms. She primarily focuses on mathematics and medicinal botany because her family passionately introduced these topics to her as a child and they are representative of her cultural heritage and way of thinking. Utilizing a variety of media from virtual reality, animation, sound, drawing, and print to performative video and installation, her body of work includes multiple thematic series. Within each, she transforms scientific subjects into images and visual narratives often informed by her two-time immigration, upbringing in post-revolutionary Iran, and historical and contemporary geopolitical tensions.

Karimi’s works have been exhibited in solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Croatia, Mexico, the UK, and the United States, including San Jose City Hall, San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, New Bedford Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Art, Montefiore Einstein, and Rotch Library at MIT. Karimi’s works are held in private and public collections at YouTube, Stanford University, University of California San Francisco, and University of California Davis.

Karimi is a 2024 City of San Jose Creative Ambassador, a 2023 Kala Art Institute Honoree in Berkeley, California, and a 2019 Silicon Valley Artist Laureate. She is the recipient of Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant (2022), City of San Jose Arts and Cultural Exchange Grant (2019) and Artist Residencies at MASS MoCA (2022 and 2024), Santa Fe Art Institute (2024), Montalvo Art Center’s Lucas Program (2024-2026), University of California San Francisco Library (2021-2022) and Kala Art Institute Fellowship (2017). KQED Arts & Culture published an article on Karimi’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom work followed by a live interview on KQED Forum, aired on April 26, 2023.

Pantea Karimi holds Master’s Degrees in both Graphic Design and Fine Arts and is a member of the international Substantial Motion Research Network, affiliated with Simon Fraser University in Canada, and an Adjunct Faculty of Studio Arts and Digital Media at the College of San Mateo, California.

Photos by Carolina Porras Monroy, Studios at MASS MoCA, May 2022.