Born in Tehran in 1982, Shirin Salehi is a visual artist, art educator and translator based in Madrid. Through an interdisciplinary practice that moves across printmaking, drawing, sculpture and video, Salehi investigates the poetic dimension of language through ideas such as illegible writing, erased matter and the hidden image. Trained in printmaking, her work is shaped by an interest in incision, imprint and time, which she explores through language itself. Paying close attention to the formal resolution of her works, she focuses on the conceptual qualities of materials, building a body of work in which restraint and austerity create the conditions for subtle conversations with the viewer.

She regularly teaches at the Center for Book Arts in New York, where she has designed critical development workshops on artists’ books for artists, poets, thinkers and other creative practitioners interested in critique and theoretical discussions related to book arts and works with a specific emphasis on bookness. Since 2021, she has also taught poetic reasoning in the Visual Narrative and Photography Editing course at LENS School of Visual Arts in Madrid. She has participated as a lecturer in conferences and seminars at the Museum of Málaga, the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía Museum.

Her work has received several awards, including the First Prize of the Ankaria Foundation for Artist’s Books, Madrid, in 2015, and the Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby’s Biennial Award for Artistic Creation in 2019, for a co-creation project with artist Inma Herrera. In 2022, she was nominated for the Queen Sonja Print Award in Norway.

She has been an artist-in-residence at the Spanish Academy in Rome in 2021, the French Academy, Casa de Velázquez, in Madrid in 2014, and Fondazione Il Bisonte in Florence in 2016.

Alongside her artistic and teaching practice, she has worked since 2020 as an interpreter and mediator for Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers and refugees.