Mahshid Modares is an artist, art historian and art collector. Since 1990, she has focused her talent on being a mixed media artist. Her three major series, Black Reality, Gabeh and Termeh, are the artist’s journey to comprehend her heritage and roots as an Iranian artist. In her paintings, the artist reminds the viewer of the splendor and excellence of Iranian traditional arts, often mislabeled as handcraft. She invites her audience to see Iranian indigenous art thoroughly and admire the generations of artists in many different fields of art, all of whom share a keen understanding of form, color, coordination, and mathematics behind the geometrical and arabesque patterns. She explains: “From the beginning, I realized that my hidden tendency to abstractionism is somehow related to geometric forms and colors of tiles in mosques, klim, and Persian art in general.” With her compositions, Mahshid intends to communicate the same sense of harmony, rhythm and spiritual gradations that can be found in traditional Iranian art. The artist believes in art as an international visual dialogue that should embrace characteristics of the artist and the culture he or she grew up in.

Mahshid is also an art historian and researcher. She plans to strengthen her academic career by continuing her research and publications while pursuing a Ph.D. She is concentrating her studies on the history of visual arts in Iran during the 18th-20th centuries. Her M.A. thesis Qajar Painting in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century and Realism discusses the correlation between Iranian paintings of the Qajar period with European art. Mahshid’s thesis was nominated for The Outstanding Thesis Award in 2006. She, also, received two scholarships and one fellowship for her papers.