Curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University (1988). During her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1988 – 2009), she curated a number of international exhibitions including "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking" (2006). As an independent curator and scholar she has continued writing and curating international exhibitions of Middle Eastern art, with a focus on the modern and contemporary art of Iran. Her curatorial work in the field of Iranian modernism includes "Between Word and Image" at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 2002, and "Iran Modern" at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2013. She has also focused on contemporary art. "Action Now," the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian performance art, was held in Paris (2012); "Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists" at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver (2013); and "Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians" at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2017). It traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and then to the Asia Society Museum in New York. Daftari has published widely and her most recent book is titled Persia Reframed: Iranian Visions of Modern and Contemporary Art (London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2019).