Born in Iran in 1952 to American diplomats, Steven Naifeh is an artist whose works are included in numerous museum and public collections and have been exhibited extensively throughout the Middle East, the United States, Africa, and Asia.

After studying art history at Princeton University, Naifeh received degrees from both the Harvard Law School and the graduate pro­gram at the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, where he collaborated with Glenn Lowry, now Director of the Museum of Modern Art, on a study of the influence of traditional Islamic architecture on the wave of new construction that swept across the region between Morocco and northern India in the 1970s and 1980s. That project took the artist to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Kuwait, Riyadh, Jeddah, Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Tunis, Algiers, Fez, New Delhi, and Agra.

Naifeh is also an accomplished writer whose most recent book is Van Gogh and the Artists He Loved. Together with co-author Gregory White Smith, Naifeh has written five New York Times bestsellers, including Van Gogh: The Life, which Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times called “majestic”. Their biogra­phy Jackson Pollock: An American Saga won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired the Academy Award–winning film Pollock as well as John Updike’s novel Seek My Face.  

Naifeh has been profiled in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, USA Today, and People, and has appeared twice on CBS’s 60 Minutes.