Newsha Tavakolian is an Iranian photographer, visual artist and educator, and a member of Magnum Photos. Born in Tehran in 1981, she began working as a photojournalist at sixteen. Her practice moves between documentary photography and more personal, conceptual work. Her photographs often deal with the human condition, the lives of women in Iran and beyond, political restriction, conflict, memory and the weight of history.
Her book And They Laughed at Me (Kehrer Verlag, 2026) returns to the photographs she once rejected. After the death of her father, she went back to broken negatives, torn prints and overlooked pictures made between 1995 and 2001, and joined them with work from 2017 to 2019. The book was shortlisted for the Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2026 and Les Prix du Livre 2026. The project has been exhibited at Mudec in Milan and in Tehran, Yerevan and Sarajevo.
Her other projects include Listen, Look, Blank Pages of an Iranian Photo Album and For the Sake of Calmness. Her work is held in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received the Prince Claus Award as principal laureate and the Carmignac Gestion Photojournalism Award, and took part in the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in 2006.
