Overview
Sharifa “Elja” Sharifi (she/her) is an artist and scholar from Herat, Afghanistan. She has a deep interest in both contemporary and traditional Persian art, particularly that of Herat. She is also interested in exploring gender and sexuality in early Persian painting, focusing on the Timurid period, and comparing the role of Afghan women during this period—the most glorious era of Herat's history—with their situation today under Taliban rule (1996–2001 and 2021 to present). Additionally, she is keen to investigate how religious views, and the rise of extremism have shaped the oppression of women during these particular periods.
Before the Taliban came to power in 2021, Sharifi served as director of the National Gallery of Herat. As an artist, her paintings and drawings primarily highlight the challenges faced by Afghan women and have always been closely aligned with her activism for women's and human rights. Sharifi holds a BFA from Herat Art School and two diplomas in English. She left Afghanistan for Iran in September 2021, following the Taliban's takeover, to pursue graduate studies in art research at a university in Tehran.
Sharifi came to Cornell in 2022, and for two years she was a visiting scholar at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, supported by the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Artist Protection Fund Fellowship and by an Afghan Challenge Fund Fellowship from the Threatened Scholars Initiative of the Open Society University Network at Bard College. She curated two exhibitions at the Johnson Museum: The Poetic World of Persian Art (2023), based on her research into the museum's Persian art collection, and Hakim Karimzada: Herat and Me (2024), highlighting the work of an Afghan master calligrapher from Herat who now lives in the U.S.