Raha Raissnia

Raha Raissnia (b. 1968, Tehran, Iran) lives and works between New York City, United States, and Athens, Greece. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992 and her MFA from Pratt Institute in 2002.

Over the years, Raissnia’s practice has unfolded within a permutational, self-reflexive structure. Her earlier architectonic black-and-white drawings echoed postwar European abstraction, composed of intersecting vectors. Since 2009, her Expanded Cinema practice—incorporating 16mm films and 35mm slides—has increasingly influenced her paintings. All three areas of her work—painting, drawing, and filmmaking—are interconnected and interdependent. Raissnia’s work balances the gestural and the photographic, the figurative and the abstract, creating ambiguous passageways and irrational architectures.

Solo institutional exhibitions of her work were held at The Drawing Center, New York (2018); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); 13th Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2015); and the 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale (2015). Further solo exhibitions include Galerie Xippas, Paris (third solo exhibition); Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne (2023); Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2022); and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (sixth solo exhibition, 2019).

Selected group exhibitions include Galeria Wschód, Warsaw (2025); ROH, Jakarta (2025); Portrait and Portrait II, Galerie Khoshbakht, Cologne and New York (2025); Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid (2024); MoMA PS1, New York (2021–22); CSS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2020); The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019); Looking Back – The 8th White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York (2014); The Kitchen, New York (2011); and Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis (2010), among others.

Raissnia’s film and slide projection performances, often created in collaboration with Aki Onda, Panagiotis Mavridis, and Charles Curtis, have been presented at Empty Gallery (Hong Kong); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York); REDCAT (Los Angeles); Kunsthal Rotterdam; Arnolfini – Center for Contemporary Arts (Bristol, UK); The Drawing Center (New York); ISSUE Project Room (New York); and Emily Harvey Foundation (New York), among others.

Her work is held in the collections of M+ Museum (Hong Kong); Museum of Modern Art (New York); Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); Pejman Foundation (Tehran); Colección INELCOM (Madrid); Pinault Collection; Tumurun Museum (Surakarta) and the Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania).