biography

Arya Badiyan is a New York–based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, printmaking, digital media, and film. Born in Chicago to an Iranian mother and Polish father, Badiyan spent her early years in Grenada and has lived in seven countries—including Mexico, Switzerland, China, Italy, and Germany—experiences that infuse her work with diasporic depth and global perspective.

At once devotional and defiant, Badiyan’s work offers a visual poetics of reparation—recasting the American mythos as a site of spiritual reckoning and collective renewal. In her ongoing body of work reimagining U.S. iconography, Badiyan explores what it would take to become truly patriotic—honoring the spirit beneath the symbol, and recasting national emblems as sites of grief, reckoning, and visionary repair. Her OFFERINGS FOR A DIVIDED NATION series transforms founding myths into future-facing portraits of pluralism and dignity. Her ALCHEMY works extend this inquiry inward, engaging the politics of healing, the feminine body, and spiritual resistance.

Arya’s art has been featured in human rights campaigns, educational movements, and community healing spaces. Her animated short Forgetting’s Remembrance was a finalist at the International Fine Arts Film Festival in 2022. She frequently releases select works into the public domain as part of her Art for Activism project.

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