Tatyana Fazlalizadeh | Artist Overview

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a Brooklyn based artist working primarily in oil painting, public art, and multimedia installations. She is from Oklahoma City, born to a Black mother and Iranian father. Tatyana's work is rooted in community engagement and the public sphere. She makes site specific work that considers how people, particularly women, queer folks, and Black and brown people, experience race and gender within their surrounding environments -- from the sidewalk, to retail stores, to the church, to the workplace. She is the creator of Stop Telling Women to Smile, an international street art series that tackles gender-based street harassment. Tatyana has spoken about her work and process at institutions such as National Museum of African American History and Culture, Brooklyn Museum, New Orleans Contemporary Art Center, as well as several schools including Brown, Pratt, Stanford, and The New School. Fazlalizadeh has been profiled by the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, and Time Magazine. In 2018, she became the inaugural Public Artist in Residence for the New York City Commission on Human Rights. The impact of Fazlalizadeh's work spread to popular culture when she collaborated with director Spike Lee to base all of the artwork featured in his Netflix series, She's Gotta Have It, on her work. She also served as the show's art consultant. In 2020, Tatyana's debut book, Stop Telling Women to Smile: Stories of Street Harassment and How We're Taking Back Our Power, released from Seal Press.