Tina Rouhandeh

Tina Rouhandeh is a multidisciplinary artist whose work fuses Persian calligraphy with contemporary textile practices to form a material language of ritual, memory, and resistance. Born in Tehran in 1977, she graduated from the Iranian Calligraphy Association, one of the most respected institutions for classical Persian arts of script and illumination. Her early training in traditional aesthetics continues to inform a studio practice grounded in repetition, tension, and embodied gesture.

Working with thread, knots, scrolls, and relic-like objects, Rouhandeh creates contemporary pieces that merge the structural discipline of calligraphy with the physicality of fiber. Her work transforms cloth into a gestural field—one that holds grief, endurance, and cultural testimony. These pieces are not illustrative; they are tactile forms of witness, where stitching becomes presence and silence becomes form.

A defining moment in her artistic trajectory occurred in 2018, when she began her studies at the University of Windsor and joined the class of Professor Lisa Baggio. This experience marked a lasting shift toward conceptual clarity and material inquiry—deepening the way her practice bridges tradition and the urgencies of the present.

Her 2023 solo exhibition, Inquiry about Forgotten Birds, addressed the ongoing violations of human rights in Iran and was shortlisted for the GOG Awards. Constructed entirely by hand, the work used traditional calligraphic ruling systems to map large-scale surfaces, inspired by manuscript layout grids. Each line was densely filled with hand stitching, transforming the cloth into a silent script of collective grief.

Rouhandeh’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and is held in permanent collections including the Royal Ontario Museum. She lives and works in Windsor, Canada, where she continues her studio practice and teaches Persian calligraphy and hand-stitching. Her work preserves, reclaims, and reactivates—threading the invisible into form and tracing resistance through gesture, repetition, and care.