Iranian mime artist Ghajar awarded 2025 ‘Golden Hands’
The World Mime Organization awarded its 2025 Golden Hands special prize to Iranian performer and educator Sasan Ghajar for what it called his “outstanding contribution” to the art of mime, according to an official letter signed by the group’s president Marco Stojanović.
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Belgrade, Serbia, the organization grants the Golden Hands award annually to honor individuals who have made a lasting mark on non-verbal physical theater.
Ghajar joins a list of international recipients including France’s Corinne Soum, Spain’s Carlos Martínez, and Sweden’s Stanislaw Brosowski, IRNA reported.
Ghajar, a veteran stage and screen actor from Zanjan, began his mime career in the 1990s, inspired by silent film legends Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Over the years, he has played a central role in popularizing the craft in Iran, where mime had little institutional presence. “He has done something extremely rare in the world,” the Organization wrote, praising Ghajar for turning mime into a “family art” that brings together people across generations.
Trained under instructors affiliated with France’s Jacques Lecoq school, Ghajar went on to found Iran’s International Pantomime Festival, which has held three editions so far. The fourth is currently in the works. He also took part in professional workshops and performed in the Tehran Pantomime Festival with a piece titled ‘The Musician’.
The World Mime Organization operates in collaboration with the International Theater Institute (ITI) and has built a network of mime professionals across four continents, including Iran. Since 2017, the group has hosted specialized and hybrid global conferences and regularly conducts masterclasses and training sessions for emerging artists.
In welcoming Ghajar to its growing circle of laureates, the organization said, “You are both a leader and a follower, a student and a teacher.”