Niloufar Talebi

Niloufar Talebi is an author, award-winning translator, multidisciplinary artist, educator, producer, and TEDx speaker. Her books include Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems by Ahmad Shamlou (World Poetry Books, 2025)—a landmark bilingual centennial edition she edited and translated—Self-Portrait in Bloom (2019), a hybrid memoir/cultural meditation with selected translations of Nobel Prize–nominated poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000), and the bilingual anthology Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World (2008). Talebi co-created and produced the opera Abraham in Flames (2019, composer Aleksandra Vrebalov), the operatic companion to her memoir. Her theatrical projects include ICARUS/RISE (2007), The Persian Rite of Spring (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010), Fire Angels (Carnegie Hall, 2011), and other works commissioned and presented by Stanford Live, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Cal Performances, and the Kennedy Center. Her distinctions include artist residencies at Omi Writers, La Maison de Beaumont, San Francisco School of the Arts, and Washington National Opera, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship for her translations of Ahmad Shamlou.