Nilou Yekta is a PhD candidate within the Vidi project Iran's Secular Shift: A Mixed Methods Approach to Nonreligion and Atheism in an Islamic Republic, focusing on the visualization of secularity in contemporary Iran. Her work takes the Woman, Life, Freedom movement as a pivotal turning point in Iranian visual culture to explore aesthetic formations of secularity. She studies digital media to understand how online counter(visualities) circulate transnationally and emerge as a specific form of difference that reimagines dominant narratives, such as martyrdom.

Nilou brings an interdisciplinary background that blends political communication, media studies, and sociology to explore questions related to gender, identity, resistance, and social movements, following the digital, visual, and affective currents that shape lived experience.