Shahira Hammad

Shahira Hammad is a New York-based architect, olfactory artist, and exhibition designer. She creates embodied encounters with ecological and cultural histories embedded in our environments, still present, still active, made imperceptible by layers of modern intervention.

Trained in architecture and exhibition design, she approaches space as a living field shaped by the entanglement of ecological systems, cultural histories, and infrastructure across time. Scent functions in her work as a visceral spatial mediator, holding memory, emotion, and the material life of a place in constant dialogue. The encounter it stages is simultaneously personal and collective, felt individually but inhabiting shared space.

Her projects range from portable atmospheres to site-responsive installations and large-scale museum exhibitions. Each unfolds through direct engagement with the site, combining ecological, historical, and material research with foraging, olfactory composition, and fabrication. She brings this same process to commissioned collaborations, shaping sensory, spatial, and narrative experiences across institutional and public contexts.

Her work has been presented internationally, including at Olfactory Art Keller, Outsider Art Fair New York, Plexus Projects, Künstlerhaus Vienna, Brown University, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. She is a Year 12 Creative Science member at NEW INC.