10/08/2026
Artist in Residence - Kaneez Zehra Hassan
Kaneez Zehra Hassan is a Pakistani American ceramic artist based in northern Utah whose work explores memory, migration, cultural inheritance, and belonging through hand-built ceramic sculptures. Drawing from archaeology, vernacular architecture, textiles, and devotional traditions, she creates vessels and sculptural forms that examine how material surfaces can preserve histories of place, identity, and lived experience.
Hassan holds a Master's degree in Archaeology from the University of Kent, UK, where she specialized in Cultural Heritage Preservation, and a Master's degree in Communication from Johns Hopkins University. Her interdisciplinary background informs a research-driven studio practice that approaches clay as both material and archive. Through layered surfaces, visible seams, stitching, embedded text, and intentionally retained imperfections, her work investigates the ways memory accumulates through making, repair, and time.
Working primarily in stoneware, Hassan has developed a visual language influenced by South Asian material culture, Sufi philosophy, wabi-sabi aesthetic, and everyday acts of care and labor. Her sculptures hold the tension between what is revealed and what remains embedded beneath the surface, between legibility and concealment, presence and trace.
Her work has been exhibited nationally, including the NCECA Annual Exhibition, the Sears Invitational Art Show, the Utah Arts & Museums Statewide Annual, and Merge(d), presented by The Color Network. One of her works received Honorable Mention for Artistic Merit at the Bountiful Davis Art Center Emerging Artist Annual Exhibition.
Hassan approaches clay not simply as a medium for making objects, but as a repository of memory—one capable of holding cultural knowledge, preserving material histories, and bearing witness to the traces people leave behind.
