Nazanin Pouyandeh first saw the spontaneous protests in Iran, which were sparked by soaring inflation and the collapse of the rial, scroll across her phone at the end of December 2025. The 44-year-old painter’s hope grew as the demonstrations spread from Tehran to other Iranian cities. Day after day, the slogans became increasingly political and increasingly vehement. When she heard the crowd calling for the overthrow of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Pouyandeh began to believe it could happen. The theocracy, which she saw teetering almost in real time, seemed as though it might be on the verge of collapse. The artist left Iran in 1999, a year after the assassination of her father, activist and intellectual Mohammad Jafar Pouyandeh, by the Islamic regime’s secret services. For a moment, she dreamed of returning home.

But anxiety quickly took over. On the same smartphone, the crackdown appeared in step with the protests. It was hard to measure, but deadlier than previous massacres. People spoke of about tens of thousands dead in just a few days. Since then, Pouyandeh has lived with a constant, dull sense of dread and goes to bed every night fearing she will wake up to the worst possible news. On Thursday, January 8, a WhatsApp message from her mother told her that police officers had just entered her building. “She told me they were smashing everything, trying to intimidate those shouting slogans from their windows,” the artist recounted. “Then she told me her heart was racing, that she’d write to me later. And at just that moment, the internet was cut.” Five days went by with no news, until she managed to speak to her again for just a few minutes on Wednesday, January 14.

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