Azadeh Akhlaghi (b. 1978, Shiraz, Iran) is a visual artist and photographer based between Tehran and New York. Trained in computer science at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, her practice combines historical research, staged photography, and cinematic production to examine the construction of collective memory and the politics of representation.
Akhlaghi is best known for her series By an Eye-Witness, a body of work that reconstructs the unphotographed final moments of significant figures in Iran’s modern history, spanning the period from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Through meticulously staged tableaux grounded in archival research, eyewitness accounts, and historical documentation, her work interrogates the boundaries between documentary and fiction, absence and evidence, and the role of images in shaping historical narratives and collective memory.
Her work has been exhibited internationally at major institutions and events including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Somerset House; Paris Photo; and the Shanghai Biennale and Seoul Biennale. Her photographs are held in public and private collections including the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Didi Museum, and the Alkazi Foundation.
In 2009, Akhlaghi received the UN-Habitat Photography Prize in London. In 2019, she was awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The fellowship supported the development of her long-term project From Iran: A Visual Testimony, a series reconstructing pivotal moments in modern Iranian history. An extensive exhibition of the project will open at the Peabody Museum in May 2026 and remain on view through March 2027.
