This article is part of Kveller’s Jewish Artists Spotlight, featuring Jewish artists who work in a variety of media in New York, Israel and elsewhere. The project combines a series of profiles with live, online events that explore the experiences of being a working Jewish artist today, brought to you with the support of UJA-Federation of New York.
Growing up on Long Island as the youngest child of Jewish Iranian immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. in 1968, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar was the unofficial “family documentarian” who always had a camera in her hand. So perhaps it’s no surprise that she grew up to be an artist who specializes in photographs and video.
“I remember tearing apart the family photo albums, and telling stories about the pictures — especially the ones that were from before I was born,” she tells Kveller. “I destroyed the albums — they were never put back together.”
After studying film and English literature in college and completing a one-year program at the International Center of Photography (ICP) from 2001 to 2002, Mehrfar’s career took off when a portfolio review led to a cover story for The New York Times Magazine. She went on to work extensively as a freelance photo editor for publications like People and InStyle, until love led her to move to Australia, her husband’s home country, where they lived from 2008 to 2016.
Though Mehrfar had shown at galleries in several group shows, in Australia, Mehrfar turned her attention to her fine art practice full-time. This eventually led her to publish her first photo books, “Tall Poppy Syndrome,” a 2012 collaboration with fellow American photographer Amy Stein — the name comes from an Australian expression that describes how successful people get cut down to size — and, in 2021, “The Moon Belongs to Everyone.”
“The project is about being an immigrant, and what happens when you no longer feel tied to the landscape that you find yourself in,” she said of the latter. “The idea was that no matter where you come from, you have a relationship to the moon. You have a relationship to color, which is another theme throughout my work. It is kind of like playing with perception and color and ideas of color.”
From “The Moon Belongs to Everyone,” courtesy of the artist
Mehrfar’s artistic practice is deeply rooted in her experience as a first-generation American growing up in a Farsi-speaking household — a language she describes as inherently metaphysical and poetic, where individual words have multiple layers of meaning. “Even if a [Farsi] word is the name of something, it also has a physical or a spiritual or a conceptual underlying ideology,” she said.
This embrace of multiplicity has inspired Mehrfar to reject straightforward representation in her photography, despite her early love of documentary photography. Instead, she uses light, color and perception to evoke depth and visceral emotions.
Kveller caught up with Mehrfar — who returned to New York in 2016, where she lives with her husband and two children — to discuss her art, her background and her latest project, which draws upon Jewish text.
Tell us a bit about your childhood and your family background.
I grew up in a really socioeconomically diverse town. There was every kind of person from every economic background and many different cultures and religions — but I knew that I was different. Growing up, I knew my house smelled different; the food smelled different. I knew that I spoke a language that nobody else spoke. I knew that I looked different than many of the American Jews.
I only knew of one or two other Persian families in my town, and my parents spoke only Farsi to each other. They would speak to us in Farsi, and I would respond in English and say, “I’m American.” It wasn’t until I came back from college that I realized, “Oh, that’s pretty cool. I know another language. I should speak it.”
And then you yourself became an immigrant when you moved to Australia, where you lived for eight years. What was that like?
It was incredible. It was beautiful, far, alien, lonely, wonderful. The light is so different — everything’s different. All of a sudden you’re like, “What is going on? Where am I?” They speak English, but it’s a totally different English. So you feel like it’s really not a big deal. It’s a Commonwealth culture, very different from American culture.
From “Memory,” courtesy of the artist
How did your experiences in Australia inform your project “The Moon Belongs to Everyone”?
The project is about being an immigrant, and what happens when you move homes and no longer feel tied to the landscape that you find yourself in. “The Moon Belongs to Everyone” was the idea that, no matter where you come from, you have a relationship with the moon. You have a relationship to color, which is another theme throughout my work.
No matter where we came from — and no matter where we end up — being an immigrant meant that we had so much more in common in understanding our experience of the world, and experience of what home is, and of identity. I had these conversations all the time when I was living in Australia. You felt more in community with other immigrants, regardless of where we all came from.
Tell us about the project you’re working on now, which is inspired by your father’s passing in July 2024.
This project, “Aleph,” is the first time I’m using Jewish text as inspiration.
I had spent a month with my mom in Long Island — three weeks while my dad was in the hospital, and then one week of shiva. I came back to the city in August, and the sun was so striking.
You know when you walk around the city in the summer or on a hot sunny day, and you turn the corner and you get hit by a shaft of light? Whenever I was hit by the light, I felt this zap — this metaphysical, visceral feeling that I cannot describe. I was fragile, I was grieving, and I felt I needed to make pictures.
I have hundreds of rolls of expired film. After my dad died, I was like, “You know what? I’m gonna shoot that expired film.” It’s a good metaphor, and I never knew what to use that film for because I don’t like things that aren’t perfect or intentional — I took the film and I said I’m going to follow the light.
From “Aleph,” courtesy of the artist
Where does Jewish text fit in with this project?
I asked Ruby Namdar, who is the senior faculty director at LABA NY [a Jewish artists’ fellowship based at the 14th Street Y, which Mehrfar did in 2025], “Can you please find me Jewish texts that speak about the afterlife?”
He found me this quote in the Talmud: “In the future world, there is no eating, nor drinking, nor propagation, nor business, nor jealousy, nor hatred, nor competition, but the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads, feasting on the brightness of the divine presence, as it says, and they beheld God and did eat and drink.”
I took this to mean that in the afterlife we become light — because if we eat light and drink light, then we become light. And so then I started to think, well, if that’s true, does that mean that the sunlight that we see on the street is filled with the souls of those who lived before us? And if that’s true, then when we’re crossing through the light, are we being energized by the souls of those who lived before us? I became obsessed with this idea.
Join Kveller and 70 Faces Media on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 7:30 p.m. ET for “Picturing the Unseen: An Artist Talk with Stacy Arezou Mehrfar.” During this free, virtual gallery tour, Mehrfar will present selections and share stories from her extensive body of work as well as answer questions from our audience. Learn more and register here.
Mehrfar’s work is currently on view as part of “Nature Represented and Reproduced,” a group show at CLAMP gallery (247 West 29th St.) through Oct. 31.
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