Massumeh Farhad

Massumeh Farhad

Reading between the Lines: Text and Image in Sixteenth-Century Iran

Massumeh Farhad joined the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in 1995 as Associate Curator of Islamic Art. In 2004, she was appointed Chief Curator and Curator of Islamic Art. She is a specialist in the arts of the book from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iran. Farhad has curated numerous exhibitions on the arts of the Islamic world at the Freer and Sackler, including Art of the Persian Courts (1996), Fountains of Light: The Nuhad Es-Said Collection of Metalwork (2000), Love and Yearning: Mystical and Moral Themes in Persian Painting (2003), Style and Status: Imperial Costumes from Ottoman Turkey (2005-6), The Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in the Moscow Kremlin (2009), Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009-10), and Roads of Arabia: History and Archaeology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (2012).

She received her Ph.D. in Islamic Art History from Harvard University in 1987 and has written extensively on seventeenth-century Persian painting, co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites in Safavid Iran (2004) and Falnama: The Book of Omens (2009), and is a frequent contributor to the Encyclopaedia Iranica.