(b. 1969)
Born in Tehran, Hadieh Shafie immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of fourteen. She completed a MFA in Painting at the Pratt Institute in New York in 1999. Shafie’s thesis exhibition September Promises in 1996 featured a large body of work comprised of “eshghe” drawings on mylar plastic sheets and her first video installation Spin (1995). Although she uses a variety of media, the fundamental aspects of process, repetition and time continuously appear throughout her current work. Other works also focus on performance and video art. Shafie’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has been the recipient of grants from the Kress Foundation, RTKL and MSAC Individual Artist Grant (2010 and 2008); the Mary Sawyers Baker awards from the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund (2009) and the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund 2011. Most recently Shafie was nominated for the Jameel Prize (2011). Shafie has had several major solo shows since 2008 in Dubai, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Baltimore.