My Story
Zahra Saleki is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist based in T’karonto (Toronto), working across photography, video art, installation, and dance film. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the fragile space between displacement and belonging, silence and resistance, body and landscape. Through light, gesture, and movement, she transforms emotional experience into visual language — translating what cannot be spoken into form and atmosphere.
Her recent practice extends into dance film, where choreography and cinematography merge as a single expressive form. These works embody her long-standing fascination with the body as a vessel of memory, intuition, and resistance — tracing the invisible movements between longing, loss, and becoming.
Saleki’s projects have been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Aga Khan Museum, and Nuit Blanche, and she received the Catherine Bratty Award for Best of Art Fair at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair (2024). Major bodies of work include This Storm Is You, Girl Talk, and I Will Stay There, Even If in Pieces — series that weave photography, movement, and memory into intimate narratives of resilience.
Her work has been featured in CBC, VICE, NOW Magazine, and Canadian Art, among others. Saleki holds a BA (Honours) in Fine Art Cultural Studies from York University, and has pursued advanced studies in photography and film through Toronto Metropolitan University and self-directed practice.
Through her art, Zahra Saleki continues to explore how image, body, and light can become instruments of empathy, truth-telling, and transformation.
