Shirin Neshat was born in Ghazvin, Iran on March 26 1975. She was brought up in a well-off, Western-oriented household, attended a Catholic boarding school in Teheran and moved to the US in 1979 in order to study art. In 1980, she enrolled at Domician College in San Francisco, and later graduated with two masters degrees. She moved to New York, raised a family and worked for "Storefront of Art and Architecture", an organisation founded by her husband. After eleven years abroad – and one year after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini – Neshat returned to Iran in 1990. The current situation inspired her to start the photo series "Woman of Allah" – the start of her career as an artist.

She worked in photography for several years before turning to film and video in the mid-1990s. She produced most of her video work between 1997 and 2001, and while she initially was reflecting upon Islamic culture, she was now also questioning Western values. In 1999, her video installations "Turbulent" and "Rapture" won the International Prize at the 48th Biennale in Venice.

In 2001, Shirin Neshat began her collaborations with experimental composer, singer and performance artist Sussan Deyhim. Their video "Logic of the Birds" also reflects upon Neshat's feelings and anxieties as an Iranian woman living in the United States after 9/11.
Shirin Neshat made her debut as feature film director in 2009: "Women without Men" premiered in the competition of the 86th Venice International Film Festival and was awarded the Silver Lion for Best Direction.

Despite this success, in the following years Neshat again focused on photography as well as on video installations. The role of women and their conditions of life in Iran and the Middle East remained a central topic in her works. In 2014, her works were exhibited in the Budapest and the Arabic Museum of Modern Art (Mathaf) in Qatar. In 2017, Museo Correr in Venice showed some of her most recent works under the title "The Home of My Eyes", at the same time the Kunsthalle Tübingen showed a complete retrospective called "Frauen in der Gesellschaft" (Women in Society). In Japan, she was awarded with the art prize Praemium Imperiale. Also in 2017, her second feature film was screened at the Venice Film Festival: "Auf der Suche nach Oum Kulthum" ("Looking for Oum Kulthum") tells the story about Iranian director Mitra, who wants to shoot a film about the famous Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum. The film was released in German cinemas in June 2018.

Evelyn Schels' 2018 documentary "Body of Truth" focuses on Shirin Neshat, Marina Abramović, Sigalit Landau, and Katharina Sieverding, who all deal with the female body in their artistic work, but choose very different forms and emphases. A short time later, Hermann Vaske's documentary "Why Are We (Not) Creative?" was made featuring interviews with Neshat and other artists, intellectuals, and activists to get to the bottom of the question of what can inhibit or even stifle creativity.  

In 2021, Shirin Neshat's feature film "Land of Dreams" premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The film, Neshat's first to turn to the American people, is part of a multidisciplinary body of work that also includes a series of portrait photographs and a two-channel video installation. The video installation and film follow Neshat's alter ego, Simin, as she photographs Americans in their homes and asks them to share their latest dream with her - as it turns out, on behalf of a government agency that interprets dreams to better understand and control the population. In a deliberate allusion to the longstanding political enmity between Iran and the United States, Neshat has Simin work for an Iranian authority in the video installation and for the Americans in the film.