Rashin Fahandej
Rashin Fahandej is a transdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and assistant professor of emerging and interactive media at Emerson College. Her projects center on marginalized narratives and foster the role of media, technology, and public collaboration for social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her projects as “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces.
She is the founder of “A Father’s Lullaby, “ a multi-platform co-creative project that highlights the role of men in raising children, and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system in the United States. Another of her projects is “Marginalia,” a series of poetic documentaries where Baha’i immigrants of Iranian descent narrate their historical persecution in their homeland.
Fahandej has served as a 2017 Boston Artist-In-Residence with the Mayor’s Office of Art and Culture, a 2018 Public Art Resident at Boston Center for the Arts and a fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab. She is the 2019 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and an Artist in Residence at ThoughtWork Arts and Scatter VR. Fahandej was the 2019 recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize, and her immersive and interactive installation was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, August through December of 2019.
As a 2020 lead artist at American Arts Incubator-Austria Fahandej launched “Future of Inclusion Lab” in partnership with Ars Electronica. Future of Inclusion Lab is an experimental laboratory to incubate ideas and project prototypes that aim for collective and radical imaginations of our social systems; a virtual program and an ongoing incubator centred on art, emerging technology, and community co-creation as collective tools to address local and global social justice challenges. During the one-month virtual incubator, four project prototypes were developed by four teams that were presented at 2020 Ars Electronica Festival.
