Shadia Nilforoush
Cartographies of Ruin, 2026
Pigmented inkjet print, birchwood, acrylic, wax
8" x 8"
 
Artist Bio
Shadia Nilforoush (b. Denver) is an Iranian-American artist working across photography, video, performance, and mixed media. Her practice situates womanhood as an inherited condition shaped by migration, ritual, domestic labor, and motherhood, examining how these forces are inscribed through the body and material culture. Through material-driven processes and restrained, repetitive gestures, she produces works that function as both record and residue.
She positions the body as a site where cultural memory is produced, altered, and maintained over time. Working with organic and intimate materials, her practice moves between documentation and embodied process, tracing how lived experience becomes a mechanism through which inherited structures are sustained and transformed.
Shadia is the recipient of the Crandall-Cordero Fellowship and the Barbara Bullitt Christian Memorial Award, and was a semi-finalist for the 2020 U.S. Fulbright Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including in New York, Hartford, Boston, and New Orleans. She received a BFA from the Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville and an MFA from the University of Connecticut. She was raised in Houston, Texas, and currently lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky.