Born in Tehran, Shahbazi moved to Germany in 1985, studying photography and design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund from 1995 to 1997.

Her first successful sequence Goftare Nik/Good Words of color photographs taken in Iran (published as a book in 2001 with Hatje Cantz[2]) led to the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 2002.

At the Venice Biennale in 2003, she presented The Annunciation, an enormous installation in the central pavilion with murals by Iranian painters based on her photographs and a ceiling of lilies.

[1] The exhibition Then Again (2012) at the Fotomuseum Winterthur presents 18 large-format works demonstrating how a photograph can be transformed from a depiction of reality into a geometric abstraction.

At the construction site of the Swisscom Tower in Ostermundigen during the renovation from early to mid-2020, Shahabazi and the Danish-born and Zurich-resided artist Cristian Andersen created a geometric installation made of ceramic plates.