1988 Fereshteh Daftari received her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University. Her dissertation, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky, was published by Garland in 1991. As a curator in the department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked from 1988 to 2009, she organized a number of exhibitions with contemporary artists such as Xu Bing, Paul McCarthy, Shahzia Sikander, Shirin Neshat, and Y.Z. Kami. Interested in global modernities and cross-cultural currents, she guest curated an exhibition of Iranian modern art at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery (2002) and Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking at The Museum of Modern Art (2006).

Her publications include Another Modernism: An Iranian Perspective (2002); Beyond Islamic Roots –Beyond Modernism in RES (Spring 2002), and Islamic or Not in Without Boundary (2006). Since 2009, she has written several essays on contemporary Iranian artists such as Ali Banisadr (Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris), Mahmoud Bakhshi Moakhar (Saatchi Gallery, London), and Shiva Ahmadi (CANVAS, March-April 2011).