Robert Farid Karimi

With 25 years of expertise as cross-disciplinary performer, poet, educator, filmmaker, and social engagement artist, RobertFaridKarimi brings nourishment, playfulness, and interactive storytelling to spaces worldwide – from General Mills to Off Broadway to Nuyorican Poets Café to HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, Hawaii International Film Festival, The Smithsonian, and South by Southwest. With his Iranian-Guatemalan heritage as a point of departure, Karimi plays a diverse group of characters in his solo shows, from the mystical Disco Jesus to pop star Freddie Mercury to the idealist cook Mero Cocinero, who has cooked for luminaries MF Doom, Yuri Kochiyama and families and change makers worldwide.

Karimi made healthy messaging delicious with the Diabetes of Democracy: a culinary engagement project which inspires audiences to exchange their cultural culinary histories, connect with one another over humor& food, and discover their own power towards personal balance. DoD served over 80000 people from 2009-2022.

A Creative Capital artist, Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, RobertFaridKarimi featured their work on NPR, TheSmithsonian, SouthXSouthWest, HBO’s DefPoetryJam, Los Angeles Times, Callaloo, Mizna, Total Chaos: an anthology of Hip Hop theory, Asian American Literary Review, and A Good Time for The Truth: Race In Minnesota and various platforms/spaces worldwide. 

Karimi now designs games and interactive performance experiences to spark audiences/players, in all manner of civic spaces, to imagine worlds of mutual community nourishment. New work includes a series of poems and stories centered on a home for Muslim misfits, the disproportionate amount of people of color who cannot swim and a series of interactive analog immersive game experiences involving topics such as police brutality and the illegal detention of Central American immigrant youth. Their research focuses on the power of play and playfulness in socially engaged art and the role of cultural collision in shaping the non-binary imaginary. Karimi is always working on ways to bring nourishing fun to every environment he enters.  Karimi serves as Assistant Professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theater department at Arizona State University. RobertFaridKarimi.com.