current CV available upon request.
Farrah Karapetian (1978 US) is an artist based in California. She believes in the agency of individuals in the face of forces beyond their control, and her work poses questions of that circumstance in an experimental photographic language.
Her work is in public collections that include the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco.
Recent institutional exhibitions include Como de Otro Mundo, IIC-Museo UABC Mexicali (2026); Sightlines, SFMOMA (2022); Time Share for Radical Broadcast (Performa) (2020); The Fabric of Felicity (Garage Museum of Contemporary Art) (2018); Synthesize, MOCA Jacksonville (2017); Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); A Matter of Memory, Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016); The Surface of Things, Houston Center for Photography (2016); and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, SFMOMA (2016.)
Significant group exhibitions include also Km. 4951 de Bienalsur with the Fundación El Pilar for Juntos Aparte, Cúcuta, Colombia; the California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and the Border Art Biennial, at both the El Paso Museum of Art and Centro Cultural Paso del Norte, El Paso, TX, and Juárez, MX.
Karapetian’s public art projects have been recognized by arts and civic organizations including the California Legislature Assembly and the City of Los Angeles. She has worked often with the Wende Museum in Los Angeles with their collection and civic engagement program, including a détournement of their Guardhouse into a Lighthouse in 2022. She supports the development of the Sitora art center in Uzbekistan.
Karapetian spent May 2024 in Uzbekistan as a fellow with the Art Station program. In June 2022 she was an Art Prospect Network 2021 Fellow in Tashkent. She was named a COLA 2020/21 Individual Artist Fellow. She was on residence spring/summer 2018 in St. Petersburg, Russia, as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar, investigating the contemporary resonance of Russian Revolutionary theatrical director Vselovod Meyerhold. She received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation for 2017, checking out her own family's migration patterns. She visited Russia in 2016 with a grant from CEC ArtsLink. In 2014, she was recognized with a California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship. She received a grant for Artistic Innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation in 2012 and was a resident at the MacDowell Colony in 2010. These experiences have led her to commit to transnational understanding and an interrogative posture in all projects.
Karapetian’s work is included in textbooks such as Photography: a Cultural History, (Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2021); Constructed: The Contemporary History of the Constructed Image in Photography Since 1990 (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2019); Global Photography: A Critical History/ Textbook (Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, 2019); and in Charlotte Cotton’s survey of contemporary trends in fine art photography, Photography is Magic, published by Aperture in 2015. Her work has been discussed in the LA Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Photograph Magazine among many other publications.
Karapetian’s writing about visual experience has been published in multiple publications and recognized by the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program, with a grant in 2013 for her writing about the house in and as contemporary art. Her voice has been a part of panel discussions and critiques at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Harvard University's Davis Center, Princeton University's photography and architecture programs, UCLA, LAXART, and the Orange County Museum of Art.