Afshar began her career as a photographer in 2005 and completed her BA in fine art photography at Islamic Azad University, at the Faculty of Art and Architecture, Tehran, the following year. She moved to Australia in 2007 and received a PhD in creative arts at Curtin University, Perth, in 2019. Exhibitions have included the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan (2022), her solo exhibition Speak the Wind, shown at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, as part of the PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography, and Thinking Historically in the Present at Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023). Prizes won by Afshar include the National Photographic Portrait Prize, awarded by the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2015), and Monash Gallery of Art’s Bowness Photography Prize (2018). In 2021, she won the People’s Choice Award in the Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. She was awarded a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship the same year. Afshar’s works are held in collections including the V&A, London, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Art Gallery of South Australia, University of Auckland Art Collection, New Zealand, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Afshar’s first monograph, Speak the Wind, was published by MACK in London in 2021. She lectures in photography and fine art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.