Hesam Salehbeig is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago whose practice spans performance, moving image, sound, installation, and participatory projects. Drawing from Iranian traditions of mysticism, philosophy, and ritual, their work investigates performance as a technology of transformation, capable of reshaping perception, embodiment, and collective experience.

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Working across immersive, durational, and socially engaged forms, Salehbeig explores themes of migration, memory, spirituality, queerness, and self-authorship. Their projects often create conditions for contemplation and encounter, inviting audiences to engage with questions of presence, transcendence, and the limits of language. Through performance, film, sound, and communal practices, they examine how bodies carry histories, beliefs, and possibilities for becoming.

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Salehbeig received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they were awarded the New Artists Society Merit Scholarship and the Student Leadership Award. Their work has been presented in the United States and internationally.

 

Across their artistic practice, research, and facilitation, Salehbeig is interested in cultivating spaces where aesthetic experience functions not merely as representation, but as a lived process of inquiry, connection, and transformation.