Raheleh Filsoofi

Raheleh Filsoofi is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist based out of Nashville, Tennessee. She is a professor of ceramics at Vanderbilt University.

Filsoofi was a lead faculty member of the Chautauqua Visual Arts School from 2019 to 2022.

Imagined Boundaries (2017)
Filsoofi's project Imagined Boundaries, consisting of two separate exhibitions, debuted synchronously in a solo exhibition at the Abad Art Gallery in Tehran and a group exhibition (Dual Frequency) at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, Florida in 2017. Drawing on an expansive archive of Middle Eastern art and history, the exhibition featured an installation of white box vessels that connected audiences in the U.S. and Iran through digital interfaces on the nights of the show openings. Each box had a cutout of a traditional Iranian shape drawn from visuals that can be traced back to the Music Room of Ali Qapu Palace in Isfahan. Made to facilitate intercultural dialogue, Imagined Boundaries was inspired by the Safa Khaneh community in Isfahan in the early 1900s.

BITE (2021)
BITE, is a performance by Raheleh Filsoofi in which the artist imprints a clay plate with her teeth to create a decorative pattern. A commentary on colonial narrative, Filsoofi creates her own artifact as a way to value marginalized existences. The act is both labor and ritual as Filsoofi offers her body as a tool to embed identity in the soil of the earth.

Odyssey (2022)
Filsoofi's series of rotating, jump roping self-portraits pays tribute to the artist's foundations in ceramics; with origins in the phenakistoscopes developed by Joseph Plateau in 1841, as well as ceramic plates from 10th-century Islamic art, Filsoofi uses this traditional style of ceramics amidst a digital age.

Awards and honors

 * 2023 MacDowell Fellowship
 * 2023 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship
 * 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art by Gibbes Museum of Art in 2022.
 * Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship, 2021