About Me

Zahra Habibizad is a curator, museum expert, and cultural writer with over two decades of experience, working fluidly across institutional frameworks and independent, cross-cultural platforms. Her practice bridges archival scholarship with contemporary narratives and seeks to activate exhibitions as spaces of critical dialogue, emotional resonance, and collective inquiry.

She has been a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) since 2010, contributing to global conversations around museum practices and cultural preservation.

In her institutional roles, she has led major curatorial and archival projects, including the transformation of a significant modern and contemporary art collection into the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bank Pasargad. At the Music Museum, she served as Archive Director, overseeing the digitization of over 65,000 historic audio recordings of traditional and contemporary music.

Within that archive, she conceptualized and initiated thematic displays that combined visual art with historical sound materials. The positive public response to these interdisciplinary exhibitions led to the establishment of a permanent gallery within the museum—a space she founded and curated to explore the intersections of music and contemporary visual culture through exhibitions, installations, and educational programming.

Beyond institutional work, Zahra has cultivated a strong independent curatorial voice. She co-founded O4 Gallery, where she works with artists whose practices engage themes of identity, change, and social narratives. She has curated exhibitions in various international contexts, frequently collaborating with artists in research-driven, multidisciplinary formats.

As a writer, she authored Ecomuseum, Human & Environment—the first publication on ecomuseums in the region—and contributed the Iran section to Peter Davis’s international encyclopedia on the subject. She regularly produces curatorial statements, essays, and articles that bridge theory and practice, and reflect on the role of art in shaping contemporary cultural awareness.

Working across media including painting, sound, installation, performance, and archives, Zahra views curating as a form of authorship and care—connecting memory with vision, research with intuition, and individual experience with shared meaning. Her practice is grounded in critical thinking and emotional sensitivity, aiming to foster meaningful engagement and lasting resonance through contemporary art.