Jasmine Melvin-Koushki

College, Berkeley '07 from Other

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. After a year in Boston handling Near East materials for the Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at Harvard and a year in New Haven cataloging Persian materials for Yale’s Near Eastern Collection at Sterling Memorial Library, Jasmine is now ready to begin work in the fall with illustrated Persian manuscripts in Kuwait's al-Sabah Collection of Islamic Art. An artist and philosopher at heart, she is also co-director, with neurocognitive scientist and medical doctor Aaron Mishara, of 'Beauty and the Brain', an interdisciplinary working group at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center designed to explore the relationship between cognition and the visual arts. This summer, she can be found in the hallways of the Architecture department at Kuwait University, where she plots to create a line of stylin’ organic hijab and teaches a course on the architecture of ancient civilizations.

---