Deanna Kashani is a PhD candidate in the Visual Studies program at the University of California, Irvine. She received her B.A in the History of the Modern Middle East at Brown University. Her doctoral dissertation is an investigation into the contemporary art exhibition practices of Iran. She has researched institutional, underground, and public art exhibition spaces through art historical and anthropological methodologies in her fieldwork based in Tehran, Iran and Dubai, U.A.E.

Modern and contemporary Iranian art, the history of exhibition practices in Iran, feminist art history, and the history of the modern museum