Neda Moridpour (she/they) is a Kurdish-Iranian cultural futurist, artist, and organizer whose research investigates cycles of violence that lead to displacement, discrimination, and systemic inequities. Through community-based participatory research methodologies and socially engaged art projects, they create collaborative spaces that center mutual care, community building, and the visualization of future world-building. Their teaching, organizing, and art-making intersect through lens-based practices, public interventions, and digital-physical platforms that transform everyday experiences into acts of speculative resistance and solidarity.

Moridpour is the co-founder of three artist-activist collectives: LOUDER THAN WORDS, recognized by Los Angeles Mayor’s Office; [P]Art Collective, whose animation LA DOLCE VITA was officially selected for the Buffalo and Burbank International Film Festivals; and the Hamdel Futurist Collaborative, recipient of the 2025 MacDowell Fellowship. Their work has been exhibited internationally in the U.S., Iran, and China, and is held in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Denver Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, Printed Matter, JUSTSEEDS, Palestine Poster Project, Art Against Apartheid, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

They continue their research and education as a PhD candidate in the Interdisciplinary Doctorate Program at Tufts University, while teaching as Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tisch College of Civic Life. Moridpour is a Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab through the Royal Shakespeare Company Interdisciplinary Fellowship Program. Their recent honors include the 2025 Boston Center for the Arts Studio Residency, the 2025 Un-monument: Temporary Monument Award from Boston’s Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, the 2025 Mass Cultural Council Grant for Creative Individuals, and the 2025 MacDowell Fellowship. At Tufts, they have also been awarded the 2025 Tisch College Community Research Center Grant, 2025 Universal Design for Learning Fellowship, 2023 MacJannet Artist Residency, 2018 Tisch Faculty Fellowship, and the 2024 MUSE Award among others

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Project Statement

Embodied Creative Disobedience: Archiving Global Strategies of Speculative Resistance

Initiated by the Hamdel Futurist Collaborative, Embodied Creative Disobedience is an interactive, multi-platform art project that reimagines the archive as a living, participatory space of care, solidarity, and shared memory rather than a static repository. At its core lies an open-access archive of more than 10,000 performances, rituals, and protest artworks created in solidarity with the intersectional feminist movement in Iran. The project highlights how acts of creative disobedience emerge from local embodied practices of resistance while also tracing how these reiterative gestures move across borders and diasporas, carrying strategies of speculative resistance and world-making into transnational solidarities.

Spanning a web-based interface, XR installations, and live algorithmic performances, the project invites audiences to move beyond passive viewing and engage as ethical participants, co-authors, and stewards of memory. These immersive encounters underscore how embodied resistance endures across digital infrastructures, even under conditions of surveillance, censorship, and displacement.

By framing creative disobedience as both archive and strategy, the project raises urgent questions: How can participatory archives sustain transnational solidarities? In what ways does feminist visual culture serve simultaneously as testimony and protest? And how might immersive technologies transform acts of disobedience into shared tools for survival, connection, and collective imagination?