Hoda Afshar was born Tehran, Iran in 1983. She completed a BFA (Photography) in Tehran, and PhD in Creative Arts at Curtin University. Afsha began her career as a documentary photographer in Iran in 2005, and since 2007 has been living and working in Melbourne as a visual artist and lecturer in photography and fine art. Afshar won the National Photographic Portrait Prize in 2015, Bowness Photography Prize at Monash Gallery of Art, Australia in 2018, and in 2021 she won the people's choice award of the Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia. Afshar is a member of 'Eleven', a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators, and writers whose aim is to disrupt the current politics of representation and hegemonic discourses. Her work is also held in numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, University of Queensland Art Museum, MUMA Collection, Murdoch University Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, and Monash Gallery of Art. In 2023 her work was included in The National 4, TarraWarra Biennial and the Sharjah Biennial 15. The same year the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented her first major solo exhibition, Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line, which includes the full suite of work created in collaboration with detainees from Manus Island. Alongside her artistic practice, Afshar is a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts.
