Mehrdad Afsari (b. 1977, Khoy, Iran) is an Iranian fine art photographer, documentary film director, and video artist. He received a BFA in Photography from the University of Tehran in 2000 and an MFA in Photography from the Tehran University of Art in 2006. He has been a professor at the Tehran University of Art for 14 years. He is an honorary member of the Iranian Visual Artists Society.
Since 2001, he has held sixteen solo exhibitions in different galleries in Iran and his works have been shown in more than eighty exhibitions around the world, including Photo London 2018, UK; the Venice Biennale, Italy; Paris Photo, France; Contemporary Istanbul, Turkey; the Queens Museum, USA; the MOA Museum of Art, Japan; The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; Georgia Museum of Art, Georgia; the University of Westminster, UK; and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMOCA), Iran.
He has been a jury member, lecturer, and curator of many national and international festivals and exhibitions, such as 11th Fajr Visual Arts Festival at the Iranian Academy of the Arts.
In Mohsen Gallery in Tehran, Afsari has curated two group exhibitions: Confined Landscape in 2012 and Winter in 2015. At the Nabshi Center in Tehran, he curated The Land of Bewilderment exhibition, displaying Mohammad Sayyad’s photographs of Iraqi Kurd refugees. These photographs were exhibited after more than thirty years.