Badri Valian is an Iranian-American contemporary painter whose expressive figurative paintings explore the human body, identity, memory, and political experience. Drawing on influences from Egon Schiele and Tracey Emin, her paintings combine expressive gestures, emotional intensity, and personal narratives. Her artistic practice is deeply informed by an ongoing fascination with photographic archives, particularly family photographs and historical images documenting revolutions, political movements, and defining moments in collective history. Like Gerhard Richter, whose photo-based paintings and extensive photographic archive have shaped contemporary painting, Badri explores the relationship between photography, memory, and the construction of historical narratives. She often draws on these images as starting points for reinterpreting personal and collective histories. Her work moves between figurative painting, abstraction, and installation, addressing questions of gender, displacement, and the body as a site of personal and political experience.