Sobia Ahmad
OSGF
Interdisciplinary Residency, Five-Week, Session II
Sobia Ahmad is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in public health. Her practice explores the transcendental power of everyday experiences, objects, and rituals through film, photography, and social practice. She draws from non-western intellectual and spiritual lexicons, specifically traditions of devotional poetry and oral storytelling associated with Sufism. Often made in domestic and social spaces, her process-based work engages in conversations about relationality and reciprocity, embodied knowledge, alternative pedagogies, material experimentation, and DIY ethos. Ahmad employs analog processes that are slow and encourage sustained patience and concentration. These range from weaving and storytelling circles, invitational workshops, and socially engaged projects, to alternative and eco-friendly photochemical processes for developing still and motion picture film. Exercising the meditative potential of these processes, she considers how slowness and tactility might activate our inner lives and help us experience various spiritual and political dimensions of social and ecological engagement.
Ahmad was born and raised in Pakistan and moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2024), a B.S. in Community Health (2015), and a B.A in Studio Art (2016), both from the University of Maryland College Park. Her work has been reviewed in several major publications such as Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post and has been included in multiple collections. She has exhibited internationally—including at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, New York), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), Queen Mary University (London), Museum of Craft and Design (San Francisco), and the Women Filmmakers Festival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.). Her work has been supported by Washington Project for the Arts' Wherewithal Research Grant (2025)The Pittsburgh Foundation’s Exposure Artist Grant (2024-2025), and Allegheny County's Art revival Grant (2022). She has attended SOMA Summer Residency in Mexico City (2024), Halcyon Arts Lab's yearlong socially engaged art fellowship (2019-2020) and has exhibited her work in a solo exhibition at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington D.C. (2019). Ahmad is a 2024-2026 fellow at Hamiltonian Artists in Washington D.C.