Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sound, performance, installation
Website: sholehasgary.com
Sholeh Asgary was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up navigating multiple countries and borders before settling in the San Francisco Bay Area. She earned her BA from San Francisco State University and her MFA in studio art from Mills College, Oakland. She has lived and worked in Oakland for many years and has taught as a Lecturer in Art Practice at UC Berkeley and as a faculty member at California College of the Arts. She currently holds a position as Assistant Professor of New Genres at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.
Asgary has received support from a wide range of institutions, including the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2021), the Kenneth Rainin Foundation New Project Grant (2019), the California Arts Council Artists in Communities Grant (2020/21), and a 2014 Alternative Exposure Grant supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was named a 2023 Artadia Finalist and was featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue.” In 2026, she was selected as one of 16 finalists for SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award, which recognizes exceptional Bay Area artists.
Asgary’s practice centers on sound as its primary material and deepest conceptual concern. Through site-specific installations, sound sculptures, performances, archival projects, and collective collaborations, she investigates the complexities of joy and survival inherent in diasporic and refugee experiences. Her work draws on water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, and voice — bridging vast stretches of time and history in what she describes as “future mythological excavations.” The work challenges colonial assumptions about what is heard and proposes new futures through sonic means.
Her performances and participatory scores implicate viewer-participants in collective, embodied inquiry. The MAJLES project — named after the Arabic and Persian word for “council” — frames community gathering as a form of decentralized governance, situating the body as a site of knowledge. Her debut album آبـان (Aban) (2024) brought her electroacoustic practice to a recorded form for the first time, featuring manipulated vocals, santur (an Iranian hammered dulcimer), insect recordings, and atmospheric silence in a work she described as dream-like, with elements that “come into sharp focus and then fade out.”
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.