About

Saya Behnam is an Iranian-American artist with two decades in fine art, based at the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Her work is rooted in Biophilic Design — the philosophy that human beings need a living connection to the natural world, brought into interior space not as decoration but as sensory experience.

Her signature body of work is a series of handmade-paper wall reliefs: raised, tactile surfaces built petal by petal from thousands of individually formed sheets, hand-layered with mineral pigments she gathers and prepares herself. The colors are drawn from the earth — ground minerals, dried flowers, spices, and pigments both ancient and contemporary — mixed using the recipes of old masters and indigenous artists, stabilized through her own archival layering.

Behnam's work is held by the U.S. Embassy in Nicosia (Art in Embassies), the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Art Bank, the DC Department of Health, and Wiley Rein LLP. Recent exhibitions include the National Museum of Women in the Arts Committee, the George Washington Masonic National Memorial, Strathmore, Hill Center, and Art Basel Miami Beach. She was a Global Art Awards Finalist in 2017 and 2018.