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Parisa Tashakori is an award-winning Iranian graphic designer and educator specializing in branding design and visual communication. Tashakori has collaborated with ad agencies, publishers, art centers, and design festivals worldwide, providing visual branding, workshops, and lectures. While Tashakori has applied her skills across various industries, her true passion lies in projects related to art and culture, as well as those with a social and environmental focus.


"They were arresting everyone and anyone", she explained, for politics, hair covering, whatever excuse they could find. She did not see her reason of arrest or her activism as extraordinary, but she exhibited signs that her behavior was outside of social norms. When she returned home from college, her family was shocked at how political she had become. Parisa explained the circumstances of her arrest and torture in mechanical terms, as if she were explaining a historical event that happened to other people. She laughs about a pair of shoes that she did not want to part with when she was arrested. These shoes seemed important to Parisa--she was somehow able to leave the prison with them! I wonder what they represented to her, perhaps dignity or some form of normalcy.

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