Sanaz Sohrabi

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Sanaz Sohrabi (b.1988, Tehran) is a researcher of visual culture, artist-filmmaker. Sohrabi works with essay film and installation as her means of research to explore the shifting and migratory paths between still and moving images, situating a singular image in a continuum of historical relations and archival temporalities. Since 2017, Sohrabi has done extensive archival research at the British Petroleum archives to engage with the history of photography and film practices of the British controlled oil operations in Iran, conducting a visual ethnography of resource extraction in relation to the media infrastructures of BP.  

Sohrabi’s works have been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions and international film festivals including: Berlinale Forum Expanded, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Iran Cinéma Vérité Festival (Winner of International Mid-length), IndieLisboa (Silvestre Section Best Short Film), Valdivia International Film Festival Chile (Special Jury Mention), Mimesis Documentary Film Festival (Best Documentary Short), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Jury Award),  Montréal International Documentary Film Festival (RIDM), Sheffield Doc/Fest, Kasseler Dokfest, Videonale, VideoEX Zurich, FIDBA Argentina, among others. Sohrabi’s recent solo and group exhibitions and commissions include Ljubljana Biennale (2023), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal, Centre Clark, and Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon.  Sohrabi has been supported by fellowships and artist residency awards such as Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, RAW Académie, SOMA Summer School Ciudad de México, Est-Nord-Est résidence d’artistes, and Vermont Studio Center. She received her BFA from Uni­ver­sity of Tehran College of Fine Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a merit scholarship. She is currently a Fonds de Recherche du Québec Société et Culture (FRQSC) doctoral fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, Montréal. 

Selected Filmography

  • Scenes of Extraction 2023, 43 mins | One Image, Two Acts 2020, 44 mins | Notes on Seeing Double 2018, 11 mins | Script for Groundless Images 2018, 13 mins  | The glory, the human, and the mother: a cartography 2017, 17 mins | Auxiliary Mirror 2016, 12 mins | Disposables 2015, 7 mins