Biography
First days
Hoda Hadadi was born in Tehran and lived in the city of Damavand, a district of Tehran located at the foot of Mount Damavand, Iran’s tallest mountain, until she was three years old. This early life immersed in nature had a lasting impact on her. Her father was an employee at the Office of Endowments with a background in teaching for years, and her mother was a Housewife. Hoda is the second of three children in a religious, patriarchal middle-class family. Her 4 years older sister, Mojgan, was her primary playmate, sharing in all the imaginative play, stories, and drawings that shaped their games.
A Three-Year-Old Girl Against Restrictions
When her family moved to Tehran, Hoda was three years old, the same year the Islamic Revolution took place in Iran. When she turned five, the Iran-Iraq War began and lasted for eight years. Despite the ideological environment and the encouragement of children to draw pictures of war and Islamic principles, and the restrictive, religious, and stern atmosphere of the home she lived in, Hoda’s drawings only featured girls, women, and nature.
The City of Paper Puppets
Hoda constantly drew and drew, on every piece of paper she could find. Then she started to cut out the people she drew. With her sister’s help, she created a city of a thousand paper puppets that had names, families and jobs. Both of them spent many hours each day talking for the puppets and living their lives.
Creating stories for each puppet and advancing their daily lives led the sisters to spend less time on their formal school studies. Eventually, this game was banned by their parents, and the puppets were thrown into the trash. However, some puppets were saved by the sisters, who allowed them to have children and increase in number again. But the puppets had to move under the bed and start living a hidden life.
This game continued out of their parents’ sight, until Hoda was 12, when she and her sister finally decided to end it. This game was Sister’s parallel world, only about beauty, peace, love and everyday life.
Book worm
Books, especially picture books, were an important part of Hoda’s childhood. Although her access to books was limited, one of her father’s friends, who was a teacher and noticed Hoda’s interest and talent, lent her wonderful books. At the age of five, Hoda told her parents that she wanted to be a “Painter” for children’s book when she grew up. It wasn’t until years later that she learned the term “illustrator.”
During that time, Iranian television, avoiding American or western media production, used to broadcast animations from the Eastern Bloc countries. Books were also primarily either Iranian stories or translations of Russian and other Eastern Bloc literature. One of Hoda’s favorite childhood books was “The Tales and pictures by “Vladimir Suteev” translated from Russian to Farsi and published in Moscow included many short stories of animal characters. This book was borrowed by Hoda when she was five and was given back to her father’s friend when she was eight.
This book showed her this important fact that a book writer and painter can be one person!
She confessed that she wanted to become a writer who paints her own stories in the future, and it took her years to learn that such a person is called an “Illustrator-Author”
At the age of ten, Hoda discovered Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, “The book of Kings “. It is an epic poetry book, narrating the story of all kings of Iran from the creation of the world until the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. Influenced by this book, she wrote her first poems. Then, at eleven, after reading countless novels and stories, she wrote her first stories, although she showed them to no one and eventually destroyed them.
Education
At the age of fourteen, when it was the time for choosing a special field of study in high school, her family prevented her from attending an art school, and she was forced to study experimental sciences. This restriction had two reasons: First, the family’s financial situation gradually deteriorated, pushing them from a middle-class family with a good house before the revolution to a lower-class family living in a poor neighborhood in eastern Tehran, making it impossible to afford art school. Second, Hoda’s father believed that artists were morally corrupt and irreligious in their lifestyle.
Those four years of high school were among the worst periods of Hoda’s school life. Studying a subject, she disliked at a school she disliked in a neighborhood she disliked, coupled with her family’s financial struggles, made it a difficult time.
However, she continued to draw, focusing on depicting women in various outfits and natural settings like gardens, villages, and parties, which remained her priority.
Throughout high school, she dreamed of studying art at university and devoted herself to reading art books and art history. Despite her father’s objections, she successfully passed the art entrance exam in three attempts and was admitted with a high rank to the best art university in the country, the University of Art, to study graphic design. Although tuition was free, the necessary materials and supplies were very expensive, so she began to teach in a religious primary school to cover the cost of materials. The University of Art was her most important gateway into the professional world of art.
Personality and Behavior
She used to be excessively shy, quiet in groups, and had difficulty connecting with others since childhood. The religious and patriarchal atmosphere prohibited any form of talking out loud and laughing with others, especially with males, from an early age.
Throughout the years of her shyness and silence, she suffered from not being able to express her thoughts and opinions, although she wrote everything down, but her writings had no audience. Eventually, one day at university, she received a negative grade for refusing to speak and present in front of the class. This negative point motivated her to break out of her shell, and from that day, she started speaking.
Speaking in public is still difficult for Hoda, but no one believes it because she has learned how to control her hands and jaw to not shake!
First steps in the Professional world of Children's Literature
When she entered university, she decided not to discard her writings anymore. She visited a literary magazine for teenagers (Soroush Nojavan), attended several story critique sessions there, and finally overcame her shyness to read one of her stories to the group.
The editor-in-chief of the magazine and the other writers, liked Hoda’s unconventional and unique story, and it was published in the next issue of the magazine. That story “ The Glorious AmirSohrab” won the magazine’s readers’ award that year. Hoda’s first illustrated work was also published in another magazine that same year (Keyhan Bacheha). Additionally, her poems for children were intermittently published in various children’s magazines, bringing her closer to her childhood dream of writing and illustrating children’s books.
The first book Hoda illustrated was a black-and-white collection of short stories for “Peydayesh Publishing”. Since then, Hoda has published over eighty books for children and adults in Iran and other countries, in several languages, utilizing her illustration, writing, and poetry. She has also served as the art director and manager for several major literary projects.
Marriage
Hoda got married in 2011 and has No children.
Fight against Cancer
Just two months after the arrival of COVID-19 in Iran, in February 2020, Hoda was diagnosed with breast cancer. For someone who always spoke about women and their bodies in her work, this invasion of intrusive cells into her feminine organ was not taken lightly. Now, in addition to fighting against anti-woman mindset, the society, family, religion and the government, she also had to battle anti-woman cells.
This period became more complicated due to the outbreak of the pandemic. Nothing else resembled a normal life, and she, once an active and energetic person, could no longer even perform the simplest personal tasks without the help of her husband.
But she was fortunate that her recent Iranian publisher (MirMah) was a doctor himself and was able to introduce her to one of the best breast cancer surgeons of Iran and her team. Cells were aggressive and an aggressive treatment plan was determined for her. Chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation therapy took one year until completion.
The surgeon was a woman who performed the surgery with high precision and artistry. Hoda said, “it’s shameful to think that this woman, with her incredible scientific ability and excellence as a healer, has no rights without her husband’s permission. The laws of the Islamic regime are contradictory to the reality and capabilities of Iranian women. Rules are both painful and ridiculous. For example, an Iranian champion runner not only has to compete while wearing a hijab, but she also, despite winning in the preliminary rounds, was banned from traveling by her husband, exercising his right over her, and thus she couldn’t participate in the Olympics; all her efforts and hopes were essentially doomed!”
Now she had another wish: to stay alive to see the end of this gender apartheid with her own eyes!
In addition to the skills of the medical team, she credits nature and good friends for her recovery. Since her treatment, Hoda seizes every opportunity to retreat to nature or immerse herself among women and girls of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds to listen to and collect their stories.
Current Life
Hoda engages in a daily, ongoing struggle for women’s freedom and gender equality. This struggle takes shape through writing articles, photography, illustration, and raising awareness among women and girls about their existence and rights. She believes that every woman should learn how to narrate her own story and not leave it in the hands of male narrators.
Hoda currently lives in Tehran and spends most of her time in her small studio in the eastern part of this city.
Artist Statement
Carrier Bag
My name is Hoda, which means, “Guided.” I believe that the one guiding me is nature. Nature tells me what is real and what is unreal.
For example, seasons, bodies, birth and death are real and prejudice, borders and ideology are only agreements.
I live in Tehran, a polluted and noisy city, in Iran, where for several decades—essentially my entire life—every morning has started with a politic, restrictive problem.
Despite these dark decades, Iran is a beautiful country, and I am indebted to its rich culture, the history of Persian miniature and its magnificent literature. For over twenty years, I have been illustrating and writing for children, and since childhood, I have been fascinated by the world of women, their stories, and their activities. From lullabies to tales of revenge. In most of my works, female characters are in connection with nature and narrate their own ordinary lives.
I have recently realized that throughout my life, I have been unconsciously following Ursula Le Guin’s The carrier bag theory of fiction where she suggests that contrary to popular belief, the first tool invented by human was not a hunting tool but a bag that women made to gather seeds and fruits. Every morning, I also collect interesting seeds of my surroundings and put them in my bag, and at night when I return to my cave, take them out one by one to tell their stories through words or pictures.
In praise of transparency
Collage is my technique. In collage, there are unexpected occurrences that make it delightful. An artist’s control over collage can never be absolute, and sometimes the pieces themselves lead the work. I believe that the monologue of the artist with the artwork becomes a dialogue with collage. In the past, I created narrative collages by gathering leaves and branches, but I struggled to depict light.
It was amazing watching women in sheer fabrics and the light passing through delicate materials. I loved lace. I loved transparency, which led me to silk papers. These papers conveyed a sense of freedom, lightness, softness, evoking the atmosphere of summer, celebrations in nature, and the presence of pleasant scents and tastes. In nature, the poppy wore a red sheer dress, and the dandelion wore a white lace dress. The sea wore a blue sheer gown, and the sky was dressed in thin pink linen.
I discovered silk papers for the first time in Europe. These papers are still rare in Iran and I buy them during my travels or ask my friends to bring me silk paper as souvenirs.
Hoda, the Scissor-Hand and signature
From a young age, Hoda loved scissors and cutting things. However, her parents forbade her from touching or picking up scissors. One day, while her parents were away, Hoda took her mom’s sewing scissors and cut up everything within reach—clothes, tablecloths, and curtains.
When her parents returned and asked why she did it, Hoda replied that she just really, really loved cutting. After that, Hoda got her own special pair of scissors, and she would cut up all the scrap paper and fabric scraps around the house.
Perhaps the first sparks of collage making appeared during that time and cutting out the little paper people for her paper town also improved Hoda’s cutting skills. Today, Hoda’s most important tool is still her scissors, and she owns many pairs, each with its own specific use.
She also loves accessories that resemble scissors: earrings, necklaces, pins, T-shirts, and glasses.
Signature
By mid-2024, Hoda’s artistic signature, which had previously been her full name in Persian, changed to the initials of her first and last name, shaped like a pair of scissors.
Before: 
After: 
Scissors in a new sense
In 2022, when Iranian women took scissors and cut their hair in protest against compulsory hijab during the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising in Iran, scissors once again became a symbol of freedom for Hoda, It became a symbol for cutting the ropes of ideology from the hands of life which she depicted in her illustrations.
Goal
Art, whether through illustration, storytelling, or poetry, is my language for expressing my thoughts. I do not know how I could survive without art.
I believe that childhood is the most intelligent stage of life, so we should speak intelligently to children. A significant part of global wisdom flows through the lives and experiences of women, which have been deliberately omitted from stories, films, and education.
I feel a duty to remind everyone that a female hero is not a girl who fights and hunts for territory and power but is someone who is independent, capable, alert, and natural in her everyday life.
Also to remind both children and adults that:
The world we live in is full of clichés and rules. For centuries, we have not heard the voices of the women of the world properly and have committed the greatest discrimination against humanity. We have not depicted women as they are.
We have categorized female characters into two groups: stylish and beautiful girls or warrior superheroes. We forgot the third main group. Even when we are female authors, we arrange girls and women according to the male-approved pattern. (Pippi is an exception.)
From the era of hunting to the present, we have only produced male-centered, adventure-filled stories. We have forgotten that our daily lives are themselves a story. We have forgotten to tell stories from our seed-collecting bags, like the gatherer women. We are in pursuit of creating the same models and templates.
We do not see, accept, or narrate real, non-fashionable differences. We are influenced by the media and follow its trends. We are consumers. We are not natural.
I do not know how successful I can be in conveying my thoughts, but I have tried and will continue to try to express these things through my art.
My goal is to make a small crack in this big, closed egg.