Shirin Ebadi (Persian: شيرين عبادى‎ Širin Ebādi; born 21 June 1947) is an Iranian lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. On 10 October 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was the first ever Iranian, and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize.

In 2009, Ebadi's award was allegedly confiscated by Iranian authorities, though this was later denied by the Iranian government. If true, she would be the first person in the history of the Nobel Prize whose award has been forcibly seized by state authorities.

Ebadi lives in Tehran, but she has been in exile in the UK since June 2009 due to the increase in persecution of Iranian citizens who are critical of the current regime. In 2004, she was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "100 most powerful women in the world". She is also included in a published list of the "100 most influential women of all time."

Nasrin Sotoudeh (Persian: نسرین ستوده‎, also spelled Sotoodeh) is a prominent human rights lawyer in Iran. She has represented imprisoned Iranian opposition activists and politicians following the disputed June 2009 Iranian presidential elections as well as prisoners sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were minors. Her clients have included noted journalist Isa Saharkhiz and Heshmat Tabarzadi, the head of Iran's banned opposition group, the Democratic Front. Sotoudeh was arrested in September 2010 on charges of spreading propaganda and conspiring to harm state security and has been imprisoned in solitary confinement in Evin Prison. In January 2011, Iranian authorities sentenced Sotoudeh to 11 years in prison in addition to barring her from practicing law and from leaving the country for 20 years. According to her husband, Reza Khandan, She has stated that she has withdrawn her appeals request.

Nasrin Sotoudeh was born in 1963 in a "religious, middle class" Iranian family. She had hoped to study philosophy in college and ranked 53rd in the Iranian national university entrance exam but lacked high enough marks to get a place and ended up studying law at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran. After completing her degree in international law from the university, Sotoudeh took and passed the bar exam successfully in 1995 but had to wait another eight years to be given her permit to practice law.

|name=Shirin Neshat |image= Viennale talk (2), Shirin Neshat.jpg|thumb|Neshat at the Viennale 2009]] |caption= |birth_date= (1957-03-26) March 26, 1957 (age 55) |birth_place=Qazvin, Iran |occupation= Artist }}

Shirin Neshat شیرین نشاط (born March 26, 1957 in Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City. She is known primarily for her work in film, video and photography.

Neshat's father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. Neshat has stated about her father, “He fantasized about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both my parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class”. As a part of Neshat’s “Westernization” she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Through her father’s acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat’s father encouraged each of his daughters to “be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world", and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education.

Hamid Dabashi (Persian: حمید دباشی‎), born 1951 in Ahvaz, is an Iranian-American Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York City.

He is the author of over twenty books. Among them are his Theology of Discontent; several books on Iranian cinema; Staging a Revolution; an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema; and his one-volume analysis of Iranian history Iran: A People Interrupted.

Born and raised in southern city of Ahvaz in Iran, Dabashi was educated in Iran and then in the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in sociology of culture and Islamic studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff, the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic. He lives in New York with his wife and colleague Golbarg Bashi.

Hamid Dabashi’s books are Iran: A People Interrupted, which traces the last two hundred year's of Iran's history including analysis of cultural trends, and political developments, up to the collapse of the reform movement and the emergence of the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Dabashi argues that "Iran needs to be understood as the site of an ongoing contest between two contrasting visions of modernity, one colonial, the other anticolonial".