Sahar Tarighi is a Kurdish interdisciplinary artist based in Columbus, OH. Working across ceramics, sculpture, installation, video, and social practice, her work is rooted in the lived experiences and collective memory of displacement and marginalization.

 

Drawing from ancestral myths, material culture, and oral histories—those kept alive through the voices of Kurdish women—she explores themes of resilience, cultural erasure, and embodied resistance. Through clay, textiles, yarn, and found objects, she creates spaces where personal and geopolitical histories resurface, where body and land intertwine as living archives.

 

Her research and studio practice examine the intersections of memory, identity, and the decolonial imaginary, with a focus on Kurdish feminism, alternative epistemologies, and storytelling as acts of resistance to hegemonic structures.

 

Sahar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in South Korea, the United States, Chile, and Russia.
She has received several awards and fellowships, including Second Place at the 2025 Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum (The Ohio State University) and support from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for Project M at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. Other honors include the Maxwell Hanrahan Foundation Scholarship for the Watershed Residency and full scholarships to the Penland and Arrowmont Schools of Arts and Crafts through the Windgate and TCN Fellowships.