Hossein Khosrowjah, Abbas Kiarostami and Iranian National Cinema

Join the History of Art and Visual Culture program at CCA for our HAVC Writers Talk series: conversations between HAVC faculty members and invited guests about recent and ongoing research. 

Professors Hossein Khosrowjah and Fatemeh Tashakori will discuss Khosrowjah’s latest publication, Abbas Kiarostami and Iranian National Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). In this insightful study, Khosrowjah provides an in-depth exploration of Abbas Kiarostami’s body of work, examining how his filmmaking explores questions of cinematic representation, identity, and the myth of national unity. Challenging dominant auteurist interpretations of Kiarostami's work, Khosrowjah situates his analysis of his filmmaking within the historical context of Iranian national cinema. Through close readings of key films, including Close-Up (1990), Taste of Cherry (1997), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and 10 (2002), he investigates Kiarostami's radically anti-allegorical representational strategies. He also considers the national and global circulation of these films, the effects of censorship in Iran, and the intersection of art, politics, and creative freedom.

About the Author:

Hossein Khosrowjah teaches art history, museum studies, and film at Saint Mary's College of California (SMC-CA). He has also taught visual studies and art history at CCA since 2011, and he is very sad to see the sun set on this invaluable institution. Hossein is the author of Abbas Kiarostami and Iranian National Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 202) and is working on the second volume. He has also contributed book chapters (Trends in Iranian Cinema: Local and Global Perspectives, chapter titled: "Growing up on a Global Stage", 2024 by Bloomsbury publishing), articles, and essay reviews on a broad range of topics including film history, autobiography, social media, and and history of American higher education to a variety of journals and anthologies.

About the Guest:

Fatemeh Tashakori is a Professor of Art History and Philosophy of Art at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetic Studies from The University of Texas at Dallas and later held a postdoctoral research appointment at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, where she collaborated with the Dallas Museum of Art on 17th-century Islamic scientific and astronomical manuscripts. Her research focuses on modern French philosophical discourses on the body, gender, and sexuality in Islamic art and early modern visual culture. She is a contributing author to the forthcoming volume, Empiricism, Globalism, and the Creative Imagination in Seventeenth-Century Iran, and the guest editor of the special issue “Islam Encounters Modernity” for the journal, Visual Anthropology.

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