Maryam Safajoo: Our Story Is One

Persian American artist Maryam Safajoo is a visual ethnographer and narrative painter based in Morgantown, West Virginia. Recently awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, her work preserves and shares the experiences of members of the Iranian Bahá’í community, a religious group that has been systematically persecuted since the 1979 revolution. The individual stories she shares, including those of her family members, are meticulously depicted based on conversations, interviews, and archival research. Safajoo finds purpose as an artist in sharing these stories of resilience in the hopes that one day the world will be free from prejudice.