Jasmine Melvin-Koushki

Born in Revolutionary Iran to a Persian father and an Irish-American mother, Jasmine received her B.A. from Yale in the History of Art. Raised in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Kuwait, her focus on Islamic art and architecture was only natural; fueled by a passion for ornament and unorthodox perspective, her thesis on Persian miniature painting was inevitable. Fresh off a summer at Kuwait University, where she taught a course on the architecture of ancient civilizations, she is currently Kuwait culture correspondent for Dia Diwan, an online Middle East fashion/culture/lifestyle magazine based in London and Beirut. An artist and philosopher at heart, she is also co-director of 'Beauty and the Brain', an interdisciplinary working group at Yale designed to explore the relationship between cognition and the visual arts. Previously, she spent a year handling Near East materials for the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at Harvard, and another year cataloging Persian materials for Yale’s Near Eastern Collection at Sterling Memorial Library. This winter, she begins works toward her next goal of creating a fashion line that bridges the aesthetics of east and west.