Sholeh Asgary

Instagram: sholehasgary

Website: https://www.sholehasgary.com/

Bio: Asgary’s debut album, آبان (Aban), was released in 2024 through Sming Sming Books and Crystalline Morphologies to critical acclaim. A member of UCLA’s Art|Sci Collective, her work is featured in the 2024-25 Getty Pacific Standard Time Atmosphere of Sound exhibition and has been presented by institutions such as Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, The Lab, / slash art, and Stanford University. Asgary is a 2023 Artadia Finalist, and her Audio Archive Booth is short-listed for a 2025 Creative Capital grant. Her practice is featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue” and reviewed in international publications. She has received support from institutions such as Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center, Culture Hub, and ARoS Kunstmuseum, and her awards include a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, a California Arts Council Grant for MAJLES, and funding from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation for her compositional work for Dance Elixir. Asgary is a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts and serves on the Southern Exposure curatorial council. She holds an MFA from Mills College and a BA from San Francisco State University.

Statement: Sholeh Asgary (b. Tehran, Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist and performer whose practice engages sound, hybrid forms, and performance to investigate, memorialize, and express the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences. Her primary material and deepest conceptual concern is sound. Through site-specific installations, sculptures, performances, archival projects, and collective collaborations, her work challenges colonial assumptions of what is heard, proposing new futures. As a performer, Asgary approaches sound as an embodied, fugitive force, processing voice, objects, field recordings, and prepared instruments through electronics to create an unsettled, slippery vocality informed by traditional Iranian singing.