Elham Nafisi was born in Tehran in 1983. She received her BA in Painting from Azad University of Tehran in 2006 and then continued her education and received her MFA in Painting from Azad University in 2010.

Nafisi has won numerous awards since the beginning of her career; She won the 6th Annual Iranian Contemporary Design award from Barg Gallery (2001) and also won the second prize in the First Biennial of Mural Painting and Environmental Graphics, from the research department of the Organization of Tehran Beautification (2011).

Nafisi's works are full of details and influenced by Iranian gardens, Japanese Zen gardens, museum works of oriental and Iranian arts, illustrations of Kalileh and Demeneh, oriental and Iranian paintings, pottery, Persian textiles and carpets, and other images of oriental gardens. She explains the process of creating her works in this way: “Creating a work is a time-consuming process for me; The way I build the canvases and create my favorite texture on them, thinking about the subject and the way of doing the work, executing and editing the work over and over again, is more like a kind of mental refinement. For me, details are as important as generalities.”