Niloofar Asadi is an Iranian filmmaker and visual storyteller—with interdisciplinary experience in visual arts, cinema, and theater—based in San Francisco. Exploring character-driven stories by evoking a human view of the characters' emotions and motives intertwined with explorations of self-identity with the power of visual storytelling lies at the core of her artistic mission. Her work signifies existential themes like resistance, remembrance, presence, time, trauma, and death, focusing on individuals' strengths and vulnerabilities in an interplay with the social identities they perform. By portraying characters in a state of crisis, she positions the viewer in an uncomfortable circumstance of witnessing suffering and pain, exposes them to the existential and psychological states of the characters, and seeks to provoke complex feelings and responses, whether self-reflective or sympathetic, in the viewer. To craft these settings, she adopts a subjective approach that draws particularly upon her own experiences to manifest how a character's response in the face of a disaster, whether vulnerability or resilience, reshapes the individual's identity. 

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Niloofar's vision in pursuit of a universal voice, yet with a strong local accent, is largely shaped by her experiences of displacement and her endeavors to redefine her artistic identity in the cultural landscape of the host society. Having experienced suppression and censorship as a female artist in a patriarchal society back in Iran, she has always maintained a critical perspective on dominant societal and cultural trends. Through a dynamic interplay between formal and expressive elements, while she establishes a precise visual storytelling framework to formally guide the viewers' eyes, she allows them to bring their own emotions and experiences, embrace the ambiguity in narratives, and contribute to dialogues with her work. Niloofar exposes the viewers to the profound existential and psychological states of her subjects, inciting an array of emotional reactions, from introspection to empathy, highlighting how human connections and individuals' engagement can ripple outwards and collectively transform the very fabric of our society.

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Niloofar adopts a visual language with distinctive visual elements rooted in her Iranian heritage appropriated in contemporary contexts. Niloofar's work is a site for negotiating questions of identity, a fusion of cultural influences a—