Donna Honarpisheh is a PhD candidate in the department of Comparative Literature and the designated emphasis program in Critical Theory at UC-Berkeley. She holds an MA from UC-Berkeley in Near Eastern studies (2016) and earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College (2013), where she wrote a thesis on women’s pilgrimage practices and sensory experiences in the shrines of Shiraz, Iran. Her research focuses on the aesthetics of Modernist Persian Film, Fiction, and Visual Culture, Francophone literature, and Postcolonial Theory. Her dissertation "Disordering Modernism: Affliction and Aesthetics in 20th Century Iran," examines late twentieth-century Iranian modernist practices in a variety of media--fiction, film, and painting--to illuminate how they express forms of psychic disorder in the face of modernity's ordering principles. Examining artistic and literary productions between 1950-1985, her work oscillates between Iran's particular historical-political conditions -- two major revolutions, a foreign-imposed coup, semi-colonial occupation -- and aesthetic theories of abstraction that draw both from local traditions and from circuits of global modernism. Her articles have been published in Symploke, Qui Parle, IranNamag Journal of Iranian Studies, Jadaliyya, and the University of London's Journal of Islamic Shi'a Studies. She recently edited and wrote the introduction for a special issue of qui parle published in the fall of 2019 entitled "Trajectories in Race and Diaspora: Entangled Histories and Affinities of Transgression" and served as the special editor of a dossier entitled "Global Student Struggles In and Against the University" in a recent issue of Critical Times. In addition to her academic work at Berkeley, Donna is assistant curator of research at the Knight Art + Research Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami and host of the museum's new podcast "Tomorrow Is the Problem," which can found on Spotify, Apple, and Google podcasts. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/466386/tomorrow-is-the-problem/