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Biography
1990 Studied Painting and Illustration with Farideh Lashaye & Ahmadreza Dalvand
1991 Junior Graphic Designer at Adineh Magazine.
1992 Graphic Designer at Behkam Magazine.
1996 Art Director at ColorTone™ . Worked on “Think Different” Campaign for Apple Computers.
1997 Art Director at Brandfusion™, Created Fashion Campaigns for Westfield Malls.
2002 Art Director at L’Oréal Paris.
2003 Art Director at Nautica Blue.
2004 Created NIMANY clothing line in New York City.
2005 Maxim Magazine Calls NIMANY, Essential Brand of the year.
2006 NIMANY clothing line signs exclusive contract with Fred Segal in Los Angeles.
2006 NIMANY opened the first showroom in New York City.
2007 NIMANY starts selling in London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles & San Francisco.
2007 Washington Times, Teen Vogue, Gloss Magazine, Rolling Stone and City Magazines
featured NIMANY.
2008 NIMANY starts selling in Beirut, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Untied Arab Emirates & Japan.
2008 Nima Behnoud Launched his painting Studio in Brooklyn, New York.
*Beautiful hues of bright ceries red, sky blue and orange hit you in Nima’s works, with streaming colors into
calligraphic abstract forms. Nima is an amazing colorist, bringing motifs of his Persian culture and calligraphy into a new livelihood, imbuing them with the emotional weight of Persian poetry that they illustrate.
As the son of Iran’s most influential journalist, Nima Behnoud grew up in an intellectual circle in post revolution Iran, an oppressed society that left few outlets for youthful energy and expression. Yet the repression conversely functioned as the strongest form of stimulus for creativity among the youth. Nima practiced painting, drawing and silk screening in his teenage years: a practice that later on became the basis for creation of his clothing line NIMANY that he established in 2004 in NY. Today Nima is the creative director of NIMANY, which is being sold in over 25 countries and has gained critical acclaim by being worn by celebrities such as Heidi Klum, Nicky Hilton,
Jim Carrey and Kevin Spacey and has appeared in publications like Vogue, Maxims and Washington Times.
The idea behind the clothing line was bringing Nima’s studio paintings, sketches and drawings inspired by calligraphy
and forms reminiscent of Persian arabesques onto clothing: making wearable art.
Both in his wearable art, the dimension of his practice oscillating between fashion and art and in his studio art, the colors are bright and sharp. Despite the melancholic meaning of the poetry that may be legible or poignant story of the newspaper print, the sensation evoked is pure pleasure. His work is inspired by Warhol’s aspiration to be Matisse, creating dreamy palettes of a master colorist and adopting his machine like production. He recreated
Warhol’s populist glamour in an entirely different language, he made pop art that is entirely Iranian and of his own. His art puts a sheen on the heavy meaning that underlies the writings of the calligraphic forms or other prints that he uses, instead he makes it a representation of the glamour and éclat that runs through the environment
of Iran’s youth that has been created despite all the suppression, imposition of blackness, forbidding colors and celebrating death as a center point of the revolutionary culture.
“The concept of hand-modified clothing started when I was 15 with a group of friends. We made hand-distressed denim and held shows in the underground parties in northern Tehran. We sold them to the hipster crowd not to make money but to be cool.
Today same hunger and fascination has turned into an organized clothing line -- NIMANY -- and now my dream is to show the world the magical teenage years that we had in Tehran. My focus is the lifestyle that developed in the alternative scene of Tehran and how modernity was born within the unexpected: the underground life of a country like Iran.
“Most of what we are presented today, through the context of Iranian culture and image in the art scene is a melodramatic depiction referring to a tragic former existence that is no more. That detached and
melancholic presentation of the Iranian psyche bothers me; not because it does not exist, but because it ignores an entirely
different face of life, which drives and energizes the youth of Iran.” Nima Behnoud.
WASHINGTON POST
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