Shahira Hammad is an Egyptian-American architect, artist, and exhibition designer based in New York. She creates embodied encounters with ecological and cultural conditions that shape place yet often escape everyday attention.
Her practice spans sculptural, spatial, and olfactory forms, from portable atmospheres to site-responsive installations and exhibition environments. Scent functions as a spatial mediator, holding memory, emotion, and the material life of a place in dialogue. Projects develop through fieldwork, research, experimentation, olfactory composition, and spatial choreography.
Trained in architecture, she holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and a Bachelor’s degree in Architectural Engineering and Environmental Design from the Arab Academy for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Egypt.
She is the founder of Studio Shahira Hammad and a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, design and technology. Her work has been presented in museums, galleries, universities, and public landscapes, including the New Museum, Brown University, Künstlerhaus Vienna, Gypsum Gallery, Olfactory Art Keller, Outsider Art Fair New York, and Le Petit Versailles.
APPROACH
Scent plays a central role in her practice because of its intimate relationship to memory, emotion, and bodily awareness. Smell operates before language and resists visual hierarchy. It requires closeness and attention, and it unfolds over time rather than at a glance.
In her work, scent functions as an environmental medium rather than an aroma or object. It shapes atmosphere, orientation, and movement through space, allowing ecological and cultural registers, such as labor, decay, ritual, and transformation, to coexist without resolving into a single narrative.
This makes scent a spatial tool, one that activates perception and situates the body within an environment rather than representing it from a distanc.