Shadi Harouni is a visual artist with a practice that spans across modes and media, from site-specific interventions and sculptures to film and photography. Her research is centered on marginalized and disavowed histories of dissent, chiefly in her ancestral Kurdistan, connecting quiet personal acts of resistance to global mass movements. Harouni’s work is rooted in spaces, objects and sentient subjects imbued with both the utopian dreams and broken promises of exodus and revolution. Her photographs and films made in cemeteries, mountain quarries, timeworn dwellings, and abandoned factories throughout Iranian Kurdistan look at mountain and monument, home and homeland as sites of remembrance and resistance, despair and possibility. Harouni’s art and writing have been featured in Art Forum, The Guardian, New York Times, among other publications. Her projects have been exhibited at Queens Museum (NY), Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), Prague City Museum (CZ), Pecci Center for Contemporary Art, and Museum of Asian Art (IT). She has been awarded a Gattuso Prize, Harpo Foundation Grant for Artists, residencies at Civitella Ranieri (IT), SOMA (MX), Ratti Foundation (IT), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), where she also served as Acting Director in 2019.
Shadi Harouni was Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Art and Art Professions at New York University Steinhardt, from 2017 to 2023. Harouni is currently Assistant Professor and Head of Photography and Video in the Department of Art and Art Professions.