Shama Shams

Shama Shams is a Bellevue-based mixed media artist, writer, and storyteller whose work explores memory, identity, and the layered experience of belonging. Working primarily with photographic transfer, paint, and texture, she creates pieces that blur the boundaries between image and emotion, documentation and interpretation. Her practice is rooted in the belief that what we remember and how we remember it are shaped as much by absence and fragmentation as by clarity.

Drawing from her experiences as an immigrant and a lifelong observer of human behavior, Shams is interested in the quiet, often overlooked moments that carry deeper narratives. Her work reflects a tension between visibility and obscurity, inviting viewers to engage with what lies beneath the surface. Through layering and disruption, she transforms her photographs into textured, tactile pieces that evoke both fragility and resilience.

Whether through visual art, writing, or teaching, Shams’s work centers on the connection between past and present, self and community, and the visible and the unseen.