Biography
Tina Rouhandeh is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice weaves Persian calligraphy into the language of contemporary fiber art, crafting works that are not merely observed but deeply experienced—bodily, emotionally, and spiritually. Born in Tehran in 1977, she graduated from the Iranian Calligraphy Association, one of Iran’s most esteemed institutions for the classical arts of script and illumination. Her early immersion in traditional aesthetics laid the foundation for a lifelong engagement with visual culture—one that bridges personal memory, historical resonance, and formal experimentation.
Rouhandeh’s work is characterized by its poetic layering of text, thread, fabric, and silence. Through meticulous hand-stitching and calligraphic gesture, she creates intimate topographies of loss, longing, and resilience. Her pieces are not illustrations, but ritual enactments—embodied responses to displacement and absence. In her hands, thread becomes more than material: it becomes witness, voice, and testimony.
A pivotal shift in her artistic trajectory unfolded in 2018, when she began her studies in Visual Art at the University of Windsor. There, she encountered Professor Lisa Baggio, whose quiet intensity, visual acuity, and deep commitment to the poetics of mark-making became a grounding force in Rouhandeh’s transformation. What began as structured academic instruction evolved into a profound artistic dialogue—an exchange shaped by trust, intuition, and challenge. Under Professor Baggio’s guidance, Rouhandeh stepped into new conceptual territory, embracing vulnerability as medium, refinement as resistance, and stitching as an act of radical presence—each thread placed with intention, each gesture a form of testimony. This encounter signaled more than technical growth—it marked a shift in artistic consciousness that continues to reverberate through the material and spirit of her work.
Her 2023 solo exhibition, Inquiry about Forgotten Birds, shortlisted for the GOG Awards, exemplifies her lyrical approach to textile-based storytelling—intertwining personal memory with shared cultural grief. The work invites viewers to pause, to listen, to trace the delicate edges of absence. Like many of her pieces, it speaks in a tactile, temporal language where gesture becomes voice and silence becomes form.
Rouhandeh’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and acquired by permanent collections including the Royal Ontario Museum. She currently lives and works in Windsor, Canada, where she continues her studio practice and teaches Persian calligraphy and hand-stitching. Her art is both offering and invocation—preserving the threads of tradition while reimagining them into forms that speak with quiet intensity to the urgencies of the present.