Sahra Motalebi

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Sahra Motalebi is an interdisciplinary artist. Her performance-exhibitions and installations explore the intersections of visual art, architecture, and performance through paintings, sculptures, texts, vocal compositions, and video. Her recent project Directory of Portrayals (2016–2020) is an autobiographical, open-form opera and book about geography, representation, and transnational family.

At the Radcliffe Institute, Motalebi is working on “Motherboards,” an intertextual performance script and speculative exhibition. Within this project, she continues her research on digitality’s effects on narrative and relationality—both within the processes of creative utterance and in the structures of everyday life. “Motherboards” presents an upending of our categories of knowledge and identity as they relate to the etymology of the word “motherboards” itself and to the developments of technology more broadly.

Motalebi’s projects have been exhibited and she has performed at the Kitchen, MoMA PS1, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Swiss Institute. She has been an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, New York University’s 80 Washington Square East Gallery, the Watermill Center, and Yaddo. In 2019, she participated in the 79th Whitney Biennial.