About

Taravati began photographing in 2007 and studied industrial design at the Art University of Tehran. From 2015 she ran her own studio in Tehran, working on portrait, fashion, lifestyle and industrial photography.

She photographed film productions, talk shows and concerts, and ran release campaigns for Iranian filmmakers and musicians, including Rakhshan Banietemad, Bahman Farmanara, Payman Maadi, Homayoun Shajarian and Sohrab and Tahmoures Pournazeri. Her backstage work includes Duet by Navid Danesh and Sheeple by Houman Seyedi.

Through an Instagram account followed by more than 230,000 people she has worked with brands including Dior, Guerlain, Fila and Samsung. Her photographs have been published by Libération, The Guardian, BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and TIME.

Alongside commissions she makes personal series about women in Iran: My Persian Fridah, Am I Invisible? and Mirrors and Women.

Reihanet StudioFounder Karobar StudioFounder

Reihanet Studio is the studio she founded. It produces photography, video and written content for brands, films and musicians, and runs their Instagram accounts.

Karobar Studio, which she also founded, is a job-ads page run by Reihanet Studio on Instagram, followed by about 22,000 people. Businesses send it their vacancies, and it publishes them for people who look for work on social media rather than on LinkedIn or job sites, many of them young. Its posts also talk about work culture: how managers speak to their teams, how women are treated at work in Iran, and why a job ad should not ask for a gender or an age.

In 2014 she was art director of Happy Iranians, a Tehran version of Pharrell Williams's "Happy". The six people in the video, Taravati among them, were arrested and shown on state television; she received a suspended sentence of one year in prison and 91 lashes.

She was arrested again in 2019 over a fashion shoot without compulsory hijab, and in May 2022, after her involvement in the Iranian #MeToo movement and her videos on workplace safety for women. She was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison and later sentenced to six years in prison. On her lawyers' advice she left Iran in 2023 and has lived in Paris since.

She has spoken about freedom of expression at the Assises Internationales du Roman in Lyon, at a lycée in Bourgoin-Jallieu, and at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. In 2016 Elle named her "La femme de la semaine".