Farrah Karapetian

Farrah Karapetian (b. CA 1978) processes narratives of change and agency through writing, visual artwork, and social practice. Her artwork is collected in institutions such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It has garnered support from the Pollock Krasner and Fulbright Foundations, among others. It has been discussed in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Art in America. Her writing has been published widely, from the Brooklyn Rail to the Los Angeles Review of Books, and has earned her the Warhol Arts Writers Grant. Her chapter, "You Don't Have to Believe Me," about her project in Uzbekistan, was published in Performative Representation of Working-Class Laborers: They Work Hard for the Money (Palgrave Macmillan 2024.) She holds a BA from Yale University (2000) and an MFA from UCLA (2008). Based on the border between California, U.S., and Tijuana, Mexico, she is an Associate Professor at the University of San Diego, where she is faculty with the Department of Art, Architecture + Art History, as well as with the Africana Studies minor. Residencies through the MacDowell Colony, the CEC Artlink program in Russia, and the Art Prospect Network in Uzbekistan led her to support transnational exchange by joining the boards of the international After Post-Photography conference and the Flux Factory, New York. In each of these roles, she encourages transboundary practices that use doubt, curiosity, and nuance to combat monolithic political or personal certainty.