BIO

Labkhand Olfatmanesh is a multidisciplinary artist and photographer based in Los Angeles. Originally from Tehran, Iran.Her work explores the complexities of feminism, identity, and displacement through a hybrid visual language that merges portraiture, documentary, and fiction. Drawing from her own experiences of migration and cultural fragmentation, she examines the psychological and emotional landscapes of womanhood shaped by patriarchy, exile, and the pressure to conform.

Through intimate, often vulnerable imagery, she confronts inherited roles and constructs new spaces for ambiguity, resistance, and transformation. Humor, tension, and raw quality weave through her photographs and installations—acts of reclamation that challenge silence and make room for self-invention. Her practice is both personal and political, blurring boundaries between the internal and external, the visible and the hidden.

Labkhand’s work has been exhibited internationally and nationally at venues including Photo London, Rencontres d’Arles (France), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), the Peabody Essex Museum (Boston), CICA Museum (South Korea), the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (New York), and Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles)) . She is a recipient of the LensCulture Portrait Awards Jurors’ Pick, 1st place at LACP’s Fine Art Competition, Side Street art center artist resident (Pasadena) and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Dodho Magazine, and LUM Art Magazine. She is a board member of Level Ground, an artist-in-residence at18th Street Arts Center and a participant in the Arts for LA Innovator Leadership program 2021. She has also featured and presented workshops and videos at universities such as USC, UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly, and NMSU Art Museum. She received a Bachelor of Graphic Design from AZAD University in Tehran, Iran.