Raheleh Filsoofi

Assistant Professor of Art
Secondary appointment, Blair School of Music

Raheleh Filsoofi is an Assistant Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University, with a secondary appointment at the Blair School of Music. A collector of soil and sound, she is an itinerant artist and community advocate whose work moves across clay, sound, and performance.

Her practice traces movement, migration, and the social conditions that shape belonging. Working with site-specific clay and field recordings, she creates multimedia installations, performances, and dust-based texts that treat earth as both material and archive. Rather than illustrating politics, her work engages it through the body, through sound, and through the residue of place.

Filsoofi has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, including at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (2026), the Frist Art Museum (2026), Telfair Museums (2025), the Gibbes Museum of Art (2024), Untitled Art (2024), and Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023). She curated the inaugural Clay Performance program at National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) in 2026, establishing performance as a central mode within the field.

She is the recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship (2026), the NCECA Innovator Award (2025), the National Endowment for the Arts Art Projects Grant (2025), the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2023), the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art (2022), and the Southern Prize Tennessee State Fellowship (2021). She received her MFA from Florida Atlantic University and her BFA in Ceramics from Al-Zahra University.