Pegah Pasalar

Pegah Pasalar is an Iranian interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker currently based in Chicago. Pasalar’s auto-ethnographic practice explores motifs such as identity convulsion, cultural memory, fragmentation, and displacement. Her work manifests primarily in film and video, branching into a hybridization of mediums using a personal, feminist, queer, and poetic way. She is a full-merit scholarship awardee at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she holds her MFA with a focus on film and video.

She was recognized in 2020 as one of Newcity magazine’s “Film 50: Chicago’s Screen Gems” and is a recipient of the City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events artist grant. Pasalar has received fellowships including the Kala Media Residency Award, Bemis Center for the Arts Residency, Yaddo, Banff Centre, and UnionDocs. She has shown her works in multiple national and international festivals and venues such as Athens International Film and Video Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Buenos Aires (FIDBA), Austria International Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival, Ecra, and more.