Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian was born Monir Shahroudy in Qazvin, Iran on January 13, 1923. In 1944, she sailed first to India and then to Los Angeles before traveling cross-country to New York. She studied fashion illustration at the Parsons School of Design and danced with Martha Graham's company. In 1953, she took a job at the department store Bonwit Teller, where her drawing of a bouquet of Persian violets wound up adorning its shopping bags. She eventually moved to Tehran with her second husband.
She was an abstract artist whose mirror-encrusted geometric compositions drew on Islamic architecture. Her autobiography, A Mirror Garden, was published in 2008. She died on April 20, 2019 at the age of 96.
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