Ava Ansari
MA Arts Politics Class of 2011
BA Public Relations and Journalism, The Communication School of Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran
Ava Ansari practices celebration and connects distant communities across the globe. The 3rd-wave Iranian immigrant antidisciplinary social art practitioner uses performance art, networked technologies, and grassroots institutions as material for empathic healing. Her ongoing projects include "Poetic Societies," a non-profit curatorial agency & performance lab for cultivating transnational celebratory memories, and "Iranian American Museum (IAM)," a non-profit museum project asking why Iranians have never had a Museum in the US.
Ava has presented her work at The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), The International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA), The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB), La MaMa Experimental Theater, Eyebeam Art+Technology Center, and Dixon Place. As an art curator and community organizer, she has worked in numerous management and production roles with international art spaces, museums, universities, and grassroots initiatives across the US and SWANA since 2007.
Ava is a recipient of MAP Fund 2018 and Doris Duke Foundation "Building Bridges" Grant of 2013. Poetic Societies, a non-profit curatorial agency and performance lab she founded in Detroit in 2017, is a finalist for the Knight Foundation's Match Grant of 2019.