Pantea Karimi

Pantea Karimi’s work combines historical research, world-building, and interdisciplinary image-making, drawing on classical Persian paintings, scientific archives, politics, and women’s narratives to examine how power is structured and exercised. Since 2024, her ongoing project has reimagined women from classical Persian paintings as action-figure guardians, weaving contemporary narratives with historical research to build an evolving mythological world across multiple media. 

Pantea Karimi is a 2024 City of San José Creative Ambassador and the 2019 Silicon Valley Artist Laureate. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant (2022) and a City of San José Arts and Cultural Exchange Grant (2019), and residencies at MASS MoCA (2022 and 2024), Santa Fe Art Institute (2024), and 18th St. Arts Center (2027).  

Her work was exhibited at The San Diego Museum of Art and Boston’s McMullen Museum of Art as part of the Getty’s 2024 PST ART: Art & Science Collide and is held in the permanent collections of YouTube HQ, Stanford University, and the cities of Palo Alto, San José, and Berkeley, California. KQED Arts & Culture featured her 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom social practice project, followed by a live interview on KQED Forum in 2023.