Biography
Amir Soleymani grew up in Iran, where at the turn of the century he worked as a hardware engineer installing broadband internet in people's homes — going door to door with modems as the internet arrived in the country. While setting up someone's email one day, he came across the handle "mondo" and liked it. He went home and created his own: @mondo_ir, adding "ir" for Iran. The name followed him through years of collecting physical art, then art on the blockchain, then NFTs, and eventually into building a gallery. He moved to the UK in 2011 and started a gallery in Liverpool in 2021. By January 2023 he had opened Mondoir Gallery on Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Boulevard in Downtown Dubai. He has built what he describes as "the operating system for contemporary art" — a physical gallery alongside an AI valuation tool, a marketplace where artists keep 90–92% of each sale, an iOS app, a ChatGPT integration, and long-form market research he writes himself. He holds over 4,000 digital artworks and 700 physical pieces. He has spoken at Christie's Art & Tech Summit, Sotheby's, Art Dubai, Dubai AI Week and NFT Paris. He has written two books: The Art of Connectivity and Fools & JPEGs. He is also a practising artist — working across acrylic and spray paint, with a recurring skull motif he describes as representing introspection and transformation. His stated vision is to accelerate the maturity of art and culture in the UAE by creating conditions for creativity, connections between artists and collectors, and new pathways into the art scene. The hardware engineer who liked a username and built a platform around it.