Shiva Ahmadi’s artistic practice embraces drawing and painting, particularly a rare expertise in watercolor, across 2D and 3D media and moving images. Her work explores contemporary conundrums between the historically refined aesthetics and cultural conceits of the Middle East with the violence, corruption, and uncertainties wrought not only upon local societies but the whole world by malicious, global potentates. She works with vibrant figures transposed from Iranian and Indian book-painting, as well as pleasing patterns, to create sometimes sly and often manifest themes of brutishness and mindless self-regard within abstracted land and cityscapes.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, Asia Society Museum, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, the Farjam Collection, Dubai, and the TDIC Corporate Collection, Abu Dhabi. In 2016 she was awarded the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. A new monograph of her work was published by Skira in Spring 2017. Haines Gallery in San Francisco represents her work.