Shiraz Arts Festival, 1967-1977 with Mahasti Afshar

May 23, 2025

Mahasti Afshar joins us to discuss her book Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis 1967-1977 (Mage Publishers, 2025), an international event that was held every summer between 1976-1977 in Shiraz and Persepolis. The festival presented outstanding works in music, dance, drama, and film from around the world with the goal of generating a cross-cultural dialogue and enriching the Iranian creative domain in the process.

Afshar explores the festival’s formation under the patronage of Queen Farah Pahlavi and its administration by the National Iranian Television under the direction of Reza Ghotbi. Many of the classical, modern, and experimental works that stood out for the audience and cultural critics are summarized in the book. These include Iranian music, Shia passion plays and Shahnameh recitations, and new and original plays, feature films and documentaries by Iranian artists, as well as works commissioned by the festival from foreign artists created in dialogue with Iran’s cultural heritage.

An English article on the Shiraz Festival is available online at Iran Namag 4, no. 2 (Summer 2019) and under the name of Mahasti Afshar in www.academia.edu.

Mahasti Afshar was an employee at the National Iranian Television responsible for recording the Shiraz Festival programs live for later broadcasting on television. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European Folklore and Mythology at Harvard and pursued a career as a nonprofit executive at the Getty Conservation Institute and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She now devotes herself to translating and writing, most recently Lament for Siavash, which she presented at Stanford last spring, Simorgh: Portraits on My Mind, and Shiraz Arts Festival (in Persian).

Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts