Bio | un-formula.com

Nazanin Bahram

Born in Tehran in 1991, Nazanin Bahram is a multi-faceted artist who works in the fields of performance, collage, and photography. Her artistic journey began at the age of fourteen, initially in the field of acting in the theater and cinema of Iran. She holds a bachelor's degree in "Acting and Directing in Theater" from Tehran University. Her professional career in the field of performing arts began during her second year at the university, where she began to perform and direct her own performances. In 2020, she began her master's degree in Applied Theatre Studies at the University of Giessen.

In 2011, Nazanin co-founded a research-based artist group in Iran, initially called "Still Life." The group's goal was to bridge the worlds of performing and visual arts using theoretical insights from the social sciences and humanities, including media studies, cognitive linguistics, cultural studies, and sociology. Their common interest has been in the complex connections between cultural change and concepts of performativity, theatricality, and mediality. In 2022, the group was renamed "Un-formula."

Nazanin Bahram's artistic endeavors are deeply rooted in the use of performative means to capture the complex notion of death and express grief as an essential component of community development. She understands performing mourning as a feminist and countercultural response to the prevailing social narrative.

Omid Mashhadi

Omid Mashhadi Abdolrahman is a scholar of performance studies as well as a theatre director and performance artist. In 2011, he founded and has since co-directed the research-artistic group “Still Life” in Iran, which aims to merge the performing and visual arts, while adopting the theoretical achievements within disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, such as media studies, cognitive linguistics, cultural studies, and sociology. His research interests center on the interrelation between cultural transformations and the concepts of performativity, theatricality, and mediality, both in literary-artistic productions and creative-subversive practices of everyday life. Against this backdrop, he investigated the effects of the mediality of online platforms on the contemporary landscape of critical literature for his MA thesis (entitled “A Study on the Impact of the Theatre Critiques and Reviews in Social Networking Websites on the Contemporary Performances in Tehran). His Ph.D. project grew out of his MA thesis, transferring and expanding the study of ‘literature outside the editorial hierarchies’ from the textual sphere of criticism to the intermedial realm of performance, focusing on the political and cultural implications of amateurism in performing arts.
He was a Fellow at the EXC “Temporal Communities” from January to June 2021, and Since October 2021, He is a member of both the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and the EXC “Temporal Communities”, where he works as a doctoral researcher on the project “Counter Narrative Potency of Amateur Performance: An Aesthetic Strategy”