Mitra Khayyam is a Los Angeles–based photographer

whose work examines American mythology, inherited memory, and the emotional architecture of nostalgia. Using portraiture, landscape, archival material, and staged imagery, she explores how identity is shaped through advertising, masculinity, consumer culture, and acts of performance.

Her ongoing project Grand National uses the culture surrounding the 1982–1987 Buick Grand National as a lens through which to examine Reagan-era mythology and its afterlife in the present day. Through portraits, domestic interiors, car culture, and found objects, the work considers aspiration, decline, masculinity, and the persistence of American self-invention.

A parallel body of work, Inherited Memory, draws from family archives and constructed imagery to explore displacement, intergenerational trauma, and spectral presence shaped by her family’s history in Iran and Europe.

Khayyam lives and works in Los Angeles.