Violence and melancholy permeate the experience of his work. Nima Nikakhlagh, who arrived in the United States from Iran in 2014, is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York and Massachusetts, working with performance art, photography, video, and poetry. Nima’s practice concerns itself with socio-political power dynamics and political resistance, approached in a poetic manner. Most of his works are performance-based, and he perceives performance art not only as a form of visual art but, more importantly, as a socio-political art form and practice. His work frequently employs situational orchestration and provocation—interrupting daily life—as mechanisms for the audience’s internalization of his concepts; the real action takes place within the consciousness of the viewer. In his words, “The lasting image of a work of art that also contains ‘sensory experience’ is no longer just an image, but a lived moment that is experiential and visceral.” Nima’s works have been performed in Iran, Europe, Canada, and the United States. Recently, he published his latest artist’s book entitled A MANUAL FOR THE WORLD’S TOUGHEST PERFORMANCES. Nima received the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art 2023-2024 Award and, currently, is a gallery director and lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.