Abbas Kiarostami  (Iranian, 1940) 

Versatile artist Abbas Kiarostami (Iranian, b.1940), best known as a film director, is also a screenwriter, a film producer, and a photographer. Born in Tehran, Iran, Kiarostami began his artistic career with painting, and even won a painting competition when he was 18 years old. He attended the University of Fine Arts of Tehran and worked as traffic policeman to support his studies. In the 1960s, he worked in advertising as a painter, designer, and illustrator. In the late 1960s, he created credit titles for movies and illustrated children’s books. In 1969, the Iranian Nouvelle Vague arrived on the art scene. During the same year, Kiarostamis collaborated with Ebrahim Forouzesh to create a film-making department at the Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanun) in Tehran. Kanun became one of the two public structures for film producing, and later one of the most modern locations for film development.

In the 1970s, Kiarostami had a prominent role in the renewal of Iranian cinema. After a few features films, such as Experience and Mosafer, he directed some short features addressing a variety of themes, such as life and death, spiritual and material journeys, and suicide, in a realistic style to present a new vision of Iran. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran became an Islamic republic and wanted to create a unique national genre, a pure cinema without any link to the Occident. Despite the political situation, Kiarostami decided to stay in Iran, and continued to direct short features produced by the Kanun. In the 1990s, Kiarostami gained critical acclaim; Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or tied with the Eel by Shohei Imamura at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997, after being banned from Iran for one year. His film entitled Close-Up received recognition from Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Werner Herzog, among others.

During the mid-1990s, Kiarostami began to produce around the world. He wrote scripts for his former assistant, Jafar Panahi, for The Journey and the White Balloon. Like Ridley Scott, Jean Cocteau, or Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kiarostami expand his art to many different media, such as poetry, painting, and photography. In between two books of poetry, he published his photographs in Untitled Photographs, which featured 30 pictures of Tehran in the snow between 1978 and 2003. The artist participated in many festivals and received awards including the Federico Fellini Gold Medal (1997) from the UNESCO, the Akira Kurosawa Award (2000), and the Fellowship of the British Film Institute (2005).