Back #inmystudio because I was scolded …
A few nights ago, my late mom visited me in a dream … to scold me … for not making art. She was offended that i’ve been sobbing, fretting and brooding for the past several months. She did the same when I was at Oxford Uni working toward my doctorate: “You look too unhappy. You should become a full time artist. Stop lying to yourself.” Imagine a mother who tells her child to drop out of an ivy league university to become a full time artist. That was my mom. A true Persian Lioness. Mom knows best. #worksinprogress #theaterart
Any other time in my life, I would be ecstatically eager to share this news promptly but these haven’t been ordinary times. This article is from … two weeks ago.
Thank you so much @talketalksart for the opportunity to voice my grief on this scale 🙏🤍🕊️
“Iran Cannot Be a Matter of Indifference to Us
The West’s engagement in supporting the protests against the regime in Tehran has declined. Feminist artists in the American diaspora are pushing back.”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung @faz
By Jana Talke
Saturday, February 21, 2026
🎭 Saw a powerful play @fearof13broadway starring the supremely talented @adrienbrody . Written by @lindseyferrentino & produced by @kimkardashian , Fear of 13 is the true story of Nick Yarris, a man who spent 22 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. The production runs through July at the James Earl Jones Theatre.
📸 The audience were asked not to photograph the performance which I did not. I only took this photograph of the surprise talk afterwards to introduce the terrifically important @innocenceproject !
🎨 #AdrienBrody, graphite on archival paper, 21x18ins, 2026
🎭 Saw a funny play called #TheBalustersBroadway @mtc_nyc , last night. It’s directed by Kenny Leon whose last play I saw was @othellobway starring @jakegyllenhaal & Denzel Washington.
🎨 #WIPs (works in progress) Jake & Denzel, graphite & oil on archival paper, 21x21 ins, 2025. (That’s my late mom’s easel the works are sitting, which I use every day in my temporary studio.)
📸 Photos are taken with my iPhone in natural light inside my studio, so not the best representation of the images.
Last week, the historic Eugene O’Neill Theatre closed indefinitely due to fire in spotlight booth which had caused major damage and resulted in the venue receiving a vacate order.
The theatre’s auditorium interior is a New York City designated landmark.
Late last year, I finally saw @bookofmormon which has been playing on broadway since … 2011. I asked a friend who is an observant Mormon what she and others in her church thought of the play. She said, “Those of us with a sense of humor think it’s funny. Others … not so much.”
The theater was designed by Herbert J. Krapp and was constructed for the Shubert brothers. It opened in 1925 as part of a hotel and theater complex named after 19th-century tragedian Edwin Forrest. The modern theater, named in honor of American playwright Eugene O’Neill, has 1,108 seats across two levels and is operated by @ATG Entertainment.
#EugeneONeill, graphite and oil on canvas, 18x24 ins, 2025.
#InMyStudio random weekend photo dump 🎨
#WIP works in progress, graphite & oil on canvas or archival paper (Anne Frank; Ralph Fiennes; Denzel Washington / Jake Gyllenhaal Othello; Ali Reza Pahlavi)
#InMyStudio making autobiographical works inspired by my decades long love for the theatre. All works in progress #IanMcKellwn portrait is based on one of my earliest, most memorable experiences: Richard III, @bam_brooklyn , 1992. Jacob Adler of Yiddish Theatre; Bertolt Brecht; @grofffsauce in @justintimebway ; & my mom’s old (1990s) paints and brushes that I keep in my studio. Graphite & oil on canvas or archival paper. #wip #workinprogress
“One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We’re not scientists. We don’t always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.” Stella Adler
Staying #inmystudio for eternity … painting on my mom’s easel 🎨
Empress Farah’s Architecture of Patronage, Part I
“The Preservation of Our Culture” at Asia Society, January 1978
“Empress Farah appears to have understood that culture is not a luxury. It is infrastructure. A museum is not neutral because its vitrines are made of glass. A festival is not innocent because it looks exquisite at dusk. These are instruments through which a society rehearses value, belonging, authority, and ambition. They tell a public what deserves reverence. They instruct a nation where to feel.“
Full article on SUBSTACK @museumviews LINK in Bio.
“Farah Pahlavi,” graphite on archival paper, 18x20 inches, 2025, Homa Taj
Nowruz 2585 Pirouz
A new year arrives, as it always does, with hyacinths, mirrors, fire, and that old Persian genius for survival. But this year, some of Iran’s most beloved historical sites stand closed. Tom of Hafez is hushed. Persepolis waits behind locked gates. Hegmataneh (Ecbatana), older than every official statement ever issued in its name, remains where it has always been: watching.
Nowruz has never belonged to comfort. It belongs to renewal, to defiance, to the annual insistence that winter does not get the last line.
So we greet this year with grief, resilience, and tremendous hope for a free and prosperous Iran. With memory intact. With fire intact. With the unfashionable conviction that culture belongs to people, not power.
Nowruz Pirouz.
May light enter, even through locked doors.
About Last Night #OSCARS:
I write this as an Iranian with family still in the country, watching bombs fall on a homeland already exhausted by grief. I have no interest in the dainty etiquette that insists one must choose between condemning war and condemning the Islamic Republic. I can do two things at once.
The regime is a machinery of repression, execution, censorship, and regional havoc, and it should go. I loathe wars. I lived through the Iran-Iraq War, on the Iranian side, for three and a half years. It was horrific. A bomb is never abstract for long. Very often it lands on someone’s aunt, someone’s child, someone’s window, someone’s ordinary Tuesday. Or someone’s father. Mine, perhaps. I have had no news of him since February 28, because the Iranian regime has once again committed its familiar species of human-rights crime by cutting off the internet.
That distinction matters. Wanting the demise of one of the most sadistic criminal regimes of the late modern era, a regime that happens to occupy one’s motherland, is not the same thing as cheering war. Propaganda, like bad theatre, is forever overselling its own heroism.
Link in bio
