Farrah Karapetian works with photography in an expanded field. Her applied theatrical strategies posit that working with narratives of the agency of individuals in the face of political or personal change can honor the experiences of participants, slow down and capture elements of contemporary life’s slippery photographic circulation, and reveal parts of micro-political culture that evade the dramatic binaries of media’s algorithms. Her work is influenced by the Russian avant-garde tradition which strongly ties abstraction, photography, and political expression. 

Farrah’s artwork is in public collections that include the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. She is a recipient of a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (2020), a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia (2018), a Pollock-Krasner Award (2017), a California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship (2014), and a Warhol Arts Writers Grant (2013), among other honors. Recent exhibitions include The Fabric of Felicity, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018); Synthesize, MOCA Jacksonville (2017); Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016); The Surface of Things, Houston Center for Photography (2016); and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change,  SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2016.) 

Farrah holds an MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles and a BA from Yale University. She leads the photography area of the Department of Art, Architecture + Art History at the University of San Diego, where she works on decolonizing the medium of photography and connecting students to community partners in the Baja California region. 

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