Sareh Z Afshar is a graduate of the Department of Performance Studies at NYU, where they successfully defended their doctoral dissertation, “Dying to Be Somebody: Performances of Death, Power and Personhood in Postrevolutionary Iran,” later selected as Tisch School of the Arts’ nomination for an NYU University-Wide Outstanding Dissertation Award in AY22. They hold an MPhil and MA from the same department, and an MA in communication and MS in learning technologies and media systems from other U.S. institutions. Their areas of research include the aesthetics of everyday life, materiality of visuality, minoritarian memory and trauma theory, transnational feminisms, and new media ecologies. Their current book project, “Authority and Ambiguity,” theorizes what they call “performances of death” (PoD)—i.e., hypervisual performances that materialize around death and its commemoration in postrevolutionary Iran—to question how PoD inform the sociopolitical agency of Iranian subjects born and raised during the Iran-Iraq war (1978–88). Examining photographs, films, fiction, art installations, animations, and urban murals and rituals, they argue for PoD’s potentiality in diluting the sense of fatalism deeply rooted in the Iranian imaginary, consequently making possible the conjuring of alternative collective futures. They have taught courses at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, College of Arts & Science, and Tandon School of Engineering, as well as at Montclair State University and Purdue. Author of “Are We Neda? Iranian Women, the Election, and International Media,” they have served as assistant editor to TDR: The Drama Review and managing editor to e-misférica and Ravagh (in Persian). They have lost two cities—lovely ones, Montréal and Tehran—but deem New York a most soothing compromise. Currently, they are based in Brooklyn, where they split their time between their scholarship and their position as Senior Foundations Portfolio Manager for the People & Communities program at NRDC, an international non-profit environmental advocacy organization.