Sheida Soleimani Iranian artist raised in Cincinnati. Her upcoming solo show will feature multi-media installations centering on her parents’ escape from Iran, memory, identity, and transnational experience.

"And I remember my dad was like, really excited about that at the moment and was like, “Oh, Papa, we should find a ghostwriter to write a story about our life.” And I knew that he would never do it. And lo and behold, he never did. And so I remember calling them and asking them, after a lot of thought, “Is it OK if I ghostwrite your story and photograph? And they said, “Yeah.” And they said under one condition: our faces remain anonymous. And I said, absolutely. You know, thinking about also how I experience and think about the medium of photography, the faces aren’t important to me. People don’t need to see faces to understand, like, you know, the trauma that they’ve experienced or their pain or their stories."