Yassi Mazandi

Yassi Mazandi (b. Tehran, Iran) was raised in Great Britain and lives and works in Los Angeles. She describes nature and her reaction to it, both conscious and subconscious, as the driving forces behind her art. She sculpts in porcelain, clay, and bronze, and also creates works on paper and canvas, expanding her practice through constant experimentation that combines traditional hand-intensive skills with new technologies: she completed her first video artwork in 2019, and her first NFT and first AR artwork in 2021.

Her solo exhibition Born-Porcelain was presented at Make Room, Los Angeles, in 2023, and her work was included in the group exhibition I Go To Seek a Great Perhaps at Make Room in 2024. In 2022, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented Yassi Mazandi: Language of the Birds, a kinetic installation of bronze birds suspended from the Resnick Pavilion, drawn from the twelfth-century Persian poem by Farid al-Din 'Attar in which one hundred birds set out in search of the mythical Simurgh.

In 2012, Mazandi was in the first group selected by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation for its artist residency on Captiva Island, Florida. Her work is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the University of California, as well as other public and private collections in the United States and internationally. She was the subject of a BBC video interview in 2013, and her work has been covered by LA Weekly.