HODA AFSHAR was born in Tehran, Iran (1983), and is now based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. She completed a Bachelor's degree in Fine Art–Photography in Tehran, and her Ph.D. thesis in Creative Arts at Curtin University. Hoda began her career as a documentary photographer in Iran in 2005, and since 2007 she has been living in Australia where she practices as a visual artist and also lectures in photography and fine art. Hoda is represented by Milani Gallery in Brisbane, Australia.
Through her art practice, Hoda explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making. Working across photography and moving-image, she considers the representation of gender, marginality, and displacement. In her work, she employs processes that disrupt traditional image-making practices, play with the presentation of imagery, or merge aspects of conceptual, staged, and documentary photography.
Hoda’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally and published online and in print. Her work is also part of numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, UQ Art Museum, Art Gallery of South Australia, MUMA Collection, Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of Western Australia and more.
Throughout her career, Hoda has been shortlisted for many prestigious art awards, and in 2015 she won Australia’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, in 2018 won Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Australia, and in 2021 she won the people’s choice award of the Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia. She was also selected as one of the top eight young Australian artists to exhibit at Primavera 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Hoda is a member of ‘Eleven’, a new collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators, and writers whose aim is to disrupt the current politics of representation and hegemonic discourses.
