Sholeh Asgary

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist, educator and organizer who references lens-based media through sculpture, painting, installation, and sound. Her multidisciplinary works address the way objects can create disambiguation and break down representation by utilizing painting, photography, light, sculpture and sound to create objects and environments. Using everyday objects, both found and fabricated, her practice takes on an alchemical process of distilling the symbolic representation of these objects into messengers of liminal spaces. These liminal spaces are experienced by the viewer as light and shadow, object and image, sound and silence.

Asgary received her BA from San Francisco State University in 2007, studied at the Accademia di Belli Arti in Florence, and received her MFA from Mills College in 2011. Asgary completed a residency at Krowswork in Oakland, CA in 2016, was a workshop participant and performer with La Pocha Nostra at SOMArts in San Francisco, CA in 2018, and was a performing sound artist at the 2018 Soundwave Biennial.

Her curatorial and programming proposals as previous Curator and Director of Education and Public Programs at Incline Gallery in San Francisco received an Alternative Exposure Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation in 2014. During her tenure there she founded The Project Room, where she oversaw and implemented social practice initiatives. Currently, she serves on the Board of Directors for Artists’ Television Access, and is a member of ArtTable.

Her practice as an educator is informed by her multidisciplinary studio practice. She lectures on various contemporary, historical and cultural topics in photography and studio practice as an adjunct professor at San Francisco Bay Area colleges and Universities.