Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is a visual artist working in public art, illustration, and oil painting. A native of Oklahoma City, she currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is the 2018, inaugural, Public Artist in Residence for the New York City Commission Human Rights. Tatyana is a 2015 Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient; and has been profiled by The New York Times, NPR, TIME Magazine, and Brooklyn Magazine, where she was listed as one of Brooklyn’s Most Influential People. She has lectured at the Brooklyn Museum, New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, and several universities including Stanford, Brown, USC, and Pratt Institute. Since 2013, Tatyana has become a major voice in the public conversation on activism and public art. Her project Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art series that tackles gender-based street harassment around the world; her work can be found on walls from New York to Paris, Los Angeles to Mexico City, and more, amassing international attention for tackling violence against women in public spaces. Tatyana’s op-eds on street harassment and women’s rights have been published in Reuters, The Huffington Post, and Creative Time Reports. She has been interviewed and/or profiled on PBS, MSNBC Live, Al-Jazeera America, Melissa Harris-Perry Live, Huffington Post Live, News 12 Brooklyn, Oxygen Network’s Street Art Throwdown, BET’s Black Girls Rock!, and CCTV America. She has also done illustrations for various children’s books, including Libba: The Magnificent Musical Life of Elizabeth Cotten (Chronicle Books, January 2018); and her illustrations have been published in such publications as Mother Jones. Tatyana’s work crosses between the gallery and the street, reaching audiences where they are and positioning issues where they will best reach intended audiences. In addition to her street art work, she has exhibited her oil paintings and wheat paste installations in galleries and museums across the country. She has been commissioned by institutions and media companies to produce social justice projects in public spaces. These include Amplifier Foundation, Fusion Digital, and Columbia College Chicago. In 2014, film director Spike Lee took inspiration from Tatyana’s Stop Telling Women to Smile project and asked Tatyana to be the Art Consultant for the TV adaptation of his first movie She’s Gotta Have It. Tatyana created all of the paintings for the show’s main character, and served as the consultant to the writer’s room. Her work was a crucial point of the series. The series debuted on Netflix in November 2017 to much fanfare.