Negin Mahzoun is a New York–based artist whose practice operates at the intersection of material studies, photographic theory, and embodied labor. Her work investigates how images and bodies are shaped, altered, and reconstituted through time-based processes, with particular attention to repetition, touch, and material memory.
Working across photography, textile, sculpture, and installation, Mahzoun treats the image not as a stable representation but as a mutable structure. She frequently begins with a photographic self-portrait printed onto fabric, subjecting it to sustained acts of sewing and stitching that progressively disrupt its legibility. Through this process, the image becomes a site of negotiation—where visibility, erasure, and transformation coexist. The work resists resolution, privileging duration and accumulation over completion.
Textile functions in Mahzoun’s practice as an epistemic material—one that absorbs gesture, records pressure, and retains traces of intervention. Sewing is approached as a form of embodied cognition, in which knowledge is produced through the hands rather than extracted through interpretation. These gestures draw from a lineage of domestic and professional textile labor within her family history, while simultaneously engaging broader feminist and post-photographic discourses around care, labor, and the politics of making.
Rather than depicting trauma directly, Mahzoun examines its structural presence: how social and cultural forces inscribe themselves onto bodies through repetition, discipline, and internalization. The needle becomes an analytic tool—both marking and binding—revealing how acts of damage and repair are often inseparable. In this sense, her work shifts the conversation from representation toward process, asking how meaning is generated through sustained material engagement.
Mahzoun received her MFA in Studio Art from the City College of New York. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions, art fairs, international festivals, and biennials.