Rana Amirtahmasebi

ABOUT RANA AMIRTAHMASEBI

The Memory of Things. The Memory of Places.

Rana Amirtahmasebi is an Iranian-born, New York-based artist and cultural worker whose practice explores how objects, images, and everyday places hold personal and collective memory. Working across ceramics, printmaking, cartography, and installation, she transforms maps, architectural patterns, and ornament into material records of place.

Trained as an architect and urban planner, Rana brings the same curiosity to the cultural life of cities and neighborhoods. Through field research, interviews, mapping, and community-based processes, she examines histories embedded in streets, historic landscapes, local production, artistic communities, and daily rituals.

Her cultural work has taken her to Ghana, Cyprus, São Tomé and Príncipe, Rotterdam, and Gaza, as well as Norris Square in Philadelphia and Gowanus in Brooklyn. Across these places, she has explored how cultural identity and local knowledge persist through change, migration, conflict, and recovery.

From a handmade vessel to a city, her work considers what we remember, what we carry, and how culture is continuously remade.