Sharmin Meymandinejad on Torture Trauma, Art, and Reclaiming Agency
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/03/24
Sharmin Meymandinejad is an Iranian human rights defender, writer, and theatre artist best known for founding the Imam Ali’s Popular Student Relief Society (IAPSRS), a major volunteer network supporting impoverished and marginalized children across Iran. Trained in dramatic literature, he has written novels and plays and has taught theatre and theatre-therapy workshops. Arrest, solitary confinement, and alleged torture by Iranian authorities pushed him into exile, and he continues ongoing advocacy and art-making from the United States. Alongside public human rights work, he uses creative practice—writing, performance, and visual art—to process trauma, protect dignity, and keep memory from turning into silence.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Sharmin Meymandinejad, an Iranian human rights defender and founder of Imam Ali’s Popular Student Relief Society, on how art helps him survive torture trauma. Meymandinejad describes art as a “container” that externalizes flashbacks, turns chaos into structure, and restores agency without denying pain. Because forced confessions weaponized language, he first returned to safety through painting, where colours do not interrogate. Post-prison, his work shifts from outward activism to quieter witnessing, marked by fragmentation, shadow, and absence. Recurring images—doors, thresholds, children in light—hold testimony, dignity, and self-protective boundaries. He rejects spectacle, using beauty to keep memory from silence.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When torture memories or PTSD symptoms surge, what does making art do for you?
Sharmin Meymandinejad: When trauma resurfaces, art becomes a container. Memory, if left unspoken, turns into an internal prison. Creating allows me to externalize what I cannot carry alone. It transforms flashbacks into form, chaos into structure. Art does not erase pain, but it gives it boundaries—and boundaries make survival possible.
Jacobsen: What medium feels most protective to you?
Meymandinejad: In torture chambers, anything that is repeated becomes a form of suffering—and later, it remains etched in memory. Interrogations were often accompanied by writing: forced writing, confessions, rewriting narratives that were not mine. For that reason, the art form that had been my dearest refuge for years—writing—became a flashback to that hell.
It took time before I could trust language again. During that period, painting felt more protective. An image does not force me to explain or confess. Colours do not interrogate. In painting, I could breathe without repeating coercion, without reenacting imposed scenes. Gradually, I tried to reclaim writing—but this time not as something used against me, rather as a voice I choose myself.
Jacobsen: Has your artistic style changed since imprisonment?
Meymandinejad: Yes. Before prison, my work looked outward—focused on social injustice and collective struggle. After imprisonment, silence entered the work. There is more fragmentation, deeper shadow, and greater attention to absence. I no longer try to explain suffering; I try to witness it.
Jacobsen: Do recent protests and killings inspire your artistic expression?
Meymandinejad: Yes—but not in a romantic sense. They create urgency. Art becomes testimony. When people are killed, and their stories risk distortion or erasure, artistic expression becomes an act of preserving memory. It says: this happened; these lives mattered.
Jacobsen: To me, torture takes agency; art gives it back. Does this feel true to you?
Meymandinejad: Yes. Torture is designed to strip a person of control over their body, voice, and time. Art restores authorship. When I create, I choose the frame, shape the narrative, and determine the ending. That act of choosing is a reclaiming of agency.
Jacobsen: What recurring images or themes appear in your paintings?
Meymandinejad: Doors and thresholds. Children standing at the edge of light. Broken architecture. There is often a tension between confinement and horizon—between captivity and the possibility of movement.
In solitary confinement and torture chambers, within that darkness and black-and-white space, one is forced to bring light and colour into the mind. In places where ugliness and humiliation are deliberately arranged to break you, the mind seeks refuge in beauty to survive. That is why my paintings today give primacy to colour, light, and beauty. Even when I scatter paint onto the canvas randomly, I wait for the moment when an image full of light and living colours emerges—as if brightness is always lying in wait within darkness.
Jacobsen: Are there boundaries you keep in order to protect yourself?
Yes. I do not reproduce violence literally. I avoid turning trauma into spectacle. There are details I consciously choose not to depict—not out of fear, but out of care for my psychological survival. Art must heal more than it harms.
Jacobsen: Does appreciation for your art restore a sense of dignity?
Meymandinejad: Yes—but not simply because of praise. Recognition breaks isolation. When someone sees the work and understands even a fragment of the pain behind it, dignity is restored. Dignity lives in being witnessed without being reduced.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Sharmin.
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