Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

December 1922 – 20 April 2019) was an Iranian artist and a collector of traditional folk art. She is noted for having been one of the most prominent Iranian artists of the contemporary period,and she was the first artist to achieve an artistic practice that weds the geometric patterns and cut-glass mosaic techniques of her Iranian heritage with the rhythms of modern Western geometric abstraction. In 2017, the Monir Museum in Tehran, Iran was opened in her honor

hahroudy was born on December 18, 1922, to educated parents in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran. Farmanfarmaian acquired artistic skills early on in childhood, receiving drawing lessons from a tutor and studying postcard depictions of western art. After studying at the University of Tehran at the Faculty of Fine Art in 1944, she then moved to New York City via steamboat, when World War II derailed her plans to study art in Paris. In New York, she studied at Cornell University, at Parsons The New School for Design, where she majored in fashion illustration, and at the Art Students League.

As a fashion illustrator, she held various freelance jobs, working with magazines such as Glamour before being hired by the Bonwit Teller department store, where she made the acquaintance of a young Andy Warhol.[5] Additionally, she learned more about art through her trips to museums and through her exposure to the 8th Street Club and New York's avant-garde art scene, becoming friends with artists and contemporaries Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Joan Mitchell