Sheida Soleimani
Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) lives and works in Providence, United States.
Sheida Soleimani is an artist, educator, and licensed wildlife rehabilitator whose work examines power, environmental crisis, queerness, migration, and care. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani draws on archival materials, props, and sculptural elements to create visually lush, politically incisive tableaux. She works across various mediums, investigating themes such as oil politics and human rights abuses, confronting the systems of violence linking the SWANA region and the United States, unraveling their implications in American culture.
Though her images are dreamlike, they are grounded in lived experience: her parents frequently appear as subjects, in compositions made from elements of their (sometimes harrowing) tales. Increasingly, wildlife enters the frame – injured and orphaned birds, with their own quiet stories of migration and survival. Before the lens, these animals encapsulate Soleimani's multifaceted practice: care as art, storytelling as resistance.
Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in institutions such as the International Center for Photography - ICP (New York, US), the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (US), Photoforum Pasquart (Biel, CH), Providence College Galleries (US), Castello San Basilio (Basilicata, IT), Southern Utah Museum of Art (Cedar City, US), CUE Art Foundation (New York, US), Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati, US), Atlanta Contemporary (US), and MoMA PS1 (New York, US), to name a few. Soleimani has participated in group exhibitions in institutions such as the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (Waltham, US), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts - PAFA (Philadelphia, US), the deCordova New England Biennial (Lincoln, US), the South London Gallery (UK), The Living Art Museum (Reykjavik, IS), and many others.
Soleimani’s work is held in permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, US), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (US), the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts - PAFA (Philadelphia, US), MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, US), Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, US), and KADIST (Paris, FR). Her work has been recognized internationally in both exhibitions and publications such as Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, Interview Magazine, and many others. Alongside her artistic practice, Soleimani is also an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University. In 2018, she founded Congress of the Birds, (originally) a home-based clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, where she provides care for wild birds.
In 2025, Soleimani won the MAST Photography Grant on Industry and Work for her new series, Flyways.
