Hello, I am Somayeh Kashi
Somayeh Kashi is an Iranian-American visual artist currently living and working in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Born in the United States to Iranian parents who immigrated in the late 1970s, Kashi grew up between cultures, including several formative years spent living in Iran. Art became part of her life early, through classes, private instruction, and an ongoing connection to the visual traditions, landscapes, and stories that surrounded her.
Kashi earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, with a concentration in Architectural Design, followed by a Master’s degree in Secondary Education. For more than a decade, she worked as a visual arts educator in New Hampshire while developing a multidisciplinary practice encompassing photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture.
In 2026, Kashi left teaching and relocated with her family to northern Thailand to dedicate herself fully to her studio practice.
Her current work marks a return to clay, storytelling, and Iran's cultural memory. Working primarily in figurative ceramic sculpture, Kashi draws from Persian mythology, regional folklore, and stories carried across generations. She is particularly interested in lesser-known figures and traditions from different regions of Iran and the Persian Gulf, reimagining them through a contemporary lens.
In her sculptures, these figures enter the present, becoming vessels through which she explores war, displacement, environmental crisis, women’s rights, cultural memory, and the shifting relationship between people and homeland. Rather than treating mythology and folklore as artifacts of the past, Kashi approaches these stories as living forms, capable of reflecting contemporary struggles while carrying their histories.
Living and creating outside both Iran and the United States has further shaped Kashi’s relationship to place and belonging. Her practice exists somewhere between inheritance and discovery, between the stories we are given, the places we leave, and the histories we choose to carry forward.
Photo Credit : Matt Creem - https://mattcreem.com