Haley Darya Parsa works in a variety of mediums, engaging in painting, drawing, cyanotypes, textile, print, and sculpture. Parsa investigates the ways in which images, objects, and rituals embedded in personal histories can relate to a larger cultural context. Having grown up in Texas as Iranian-American, she places her family and heritage under an intimate meditative lens, reflecting on ideas of distance, separation, memorialization, and connection.
She explores the power of objects and examines how we read, identify, and value images. Within her paintings, she pairs textiles, heirlooms and photographs from her family’s archive with everyday items. She pulls from what is close and far, to piece together a love letter across time, place, and memory. Across all mediums, she draws inspiration from Persian rugs–in form, design, motifs, poetry, ritual, and the repetition of hand-knotting–with each brushmark becoming a hand-stitched thread.
Her cyanotype (sun-printing) practice is seasonal, as she uses natural outdoor sunlight as both medium and subject. She approaches the sun as a conceptual, poetic, and political force: living in the U.S. while much of her family is in Iran and elsewhere, the sun becomes a border-crossing mechanism and symbol of resistance and connection, and she finds comfort and connection in its daily cycle. In cyanotypes, there is power in shadows. A shadow is a companion, ghost, silhouette, signifier of the past, vessel, proof of both absence and presence, and something removed from its origin but forever tied to it, much like a memory.
Haley Darya Parsa (b. 1996) received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin before moving to New York, NY where she lives and works.
In 2023, a solo presentation of Parsa’s work, “Tracing a Border (Dissolved with the Sun)”, was on view at Stop-Gap Projects, Columbia, Missouri. In 2020, Parsa's work was the subject of two solo exhibitions at Third Room Project, “The sun leaves me to find you” in Portland, OR and “Sharing Suns” online. In 2019, a solo presentation of her work, “What is Lost in Distance and Separation”, was on view at Winterfeldtstr 56, Berlin, Germany. Parsa has participated in a number of group exhibitions, most recently “Fold”, Stop-Gap Projects, Columbia, Missouri (2025), “After-Hours: People Who Work Here”, David Zwirner, New York, New York (2024), and “Tall Shadows in Short Order”, Wassaic Project, Wassaic, New York (2024).
Parsa was an artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project in 2025, attended the New York Arts Practicum in 2017, is the 2016 recipient of the University of Texas System Regents' Outstanding Student Awards in Arts and Humanities, and is the 2016 recipient of the Marshall F. Wells Scholarship and Fellowship Endowment to attend the Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI.
Parsa’s work appeared in the Northeast issue No. 176 (2025) and issue No. 158 (2022) of New American Paintings. In 2021, Parsa’s work appeared in issue 22 of Art Maze Magazine and issue 12 of Maake Magazine.
Contact: haleyparsa@gmail.com