Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn based artist working primarily in oil painting, public art and multimedia installations. Her work is rooted in community engagement and the public sphere. She makes site specific work that considers how people, particularly women, queer folks, and Black and brown people, experience race and gender within their surrounding environments – from the sidewalk to retail stores, and from church to college campuses. 

Currently, Fazlalizadeh is Artist in Residence at the UM Institute for the Humanities where her exhibition Pressed Against My Own Glass is on view. During her residency, she will produce a public mural To Be Heard as a community engagement project in order to hear and amplify the voices of marginalized groups on the ways that they experience race and gender on campus, exploring how others engage with them based upon their identities. 

Fazlalizadeh will discuss her methodology and cover her most well known works such as Stop Telling Women to Smile, the international street art series addressing gender based street harassment, and America is Black, a series of portrait and text pieces that explore and amplify the stories of non-White people in the United States. 

Fazlalizadeh is from Oklahoma City, born to a Black mother and Iranian father. In 2018, she became the inaugural Public Artist in Residence for the New York City Commission on Human Rights. The impact of Fazlalizadeh’s work spread to popular culture when she collaborated with director Spike Lee to base all of the artwork featured in his Netflix series, She’s Gotta Have It, on her work. She also served as the show’s art consultant. In 2020, Tatyana’s debut book, Stop Telling Women to Smile: Stories of Street Harassment and How We’re Taking Back Our Power, was released by Seal Press. She has appeared in the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, and Time Magazine and has lectured about her work at Brooklyn Museum, New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, as well as several schools including Brown, Pratt, Stanford, and The New School. Her work has been exhibited at museums such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and is in the collection of institutions including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Pressed Against My Own Glass is on view at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery from September 15 — October, 2022.

Presented in partnership with the Institute for the Humanities. Series presenting partners: Detroit Public Television and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Radio.