Shahrzad Changalvaee

Shahrzad Changalvaee is a visual artist based in Brooklyn. Working across installation, sculpture, photography, performance, and video, her practice is rooted in sculptural thinking. Her post-migration work is largely generated through found and basic visual materials and engages the tension between language and physicality, as well as the space between wording and making. Through structures that are often temporal, fragile, and fragmented, she constructs narratives that interrogate binaries such as local/global, information/anecdote, language/communication, and alienation/exoticism. 

Her exhibitions include Glot at the CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2024); Vertigineuses at Seleb-Yoon Gallery, Dakar, Senegal (2024); A Feast of Friends at Gollestani Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany (2022); In Absentia, In Effigie at The Chimney NYC, Brooklyn (2019); The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away at Soho20, Brooklyn (2018); You Cannot Step in the Same River Twice at O Gallery, Tehran (2016); the Shanghai Biennial, Shanghai (2015); and Recalling the Future: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Arts at Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London (2014). 

Born in 1983 in Tehran, Iran, Shahrzad recalls thinking about becoming a teacher on her very first day of school. She has taught courses and workshops at institutions such as the American University of Beirut, Yale School of Art, Caldwell University, SUNY, and others. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2015 and her BA in Visual Communications from Tehran University in 2006. Shahrzad has been teaching art at universities including Caldwell University, The Cooper Union, and RISD since 2019.