Shahira Hammad is an architect, olfactory artist, and exhibition designer based in New York. Her practice engages scent, material processes, and spatial experience to explore how environments are perceived, inhabited, and remembered over time. Grounded in architectural thinking, her work approaches space as a lived and relational condition, shaped through movement, proximity, and sensory presence.

Her projects investigate how ecological and cultural histories persist within sites, often in forms that are invisible, buried, or erased. Rather than representing these conditions, she creates environments in which they become perceptible through the body. Sensory atmospheres and spatial choreography operate together, allowing meaning to emerge through attention, duration, and shared experience.

She designs installations as spaces to move through, where perception unfolds over time and visitors encounter the work individually while inhabiting a collective spatial condition. This coexistence of subjective experience and shared presence is central to her practice and to how reflection and empathy can arise without prescribing a single interpretation.

Foraging and fieldwork are integral to her process, situating her body within the landscapes she works with and informing both material and sensory decisions. Scent plays a central role due to its close relationship to memory, emotion, and bodily awareness. In her work, smell functions as an environmental medium, shaping atmosphere and orientation while holding layered ecological and cultural registers in tension.

Her work has been presented internationally in gallery, institutional, and public contexts, including Olfactory Art Keller, the Outsider Art Fair, Plexus Projects, Gypsum Gallery, and the Center for Architecture. She is currently a member of the Creative Science track at NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, design, and technology.





© Shahira Hammad 2026