Zelikha Zohra Shoja is a U.S.-based Afghan artist, researcher, and غمخوار / gham-khoor*  living and working on unceded Onondaga land (Syracuse, New York). Her work is engaged in geopoetics, ecologies of interdependence, and the transmission of memory. With an academic background in migration and diaspora, she works with moving image, ephemeral fabric photobooks, and gestural studies to explore how collective experiences can be transferred, mirrored, and felt by others.

Her films and art have participated in international and national microcinemas, film festivals, and institutions including Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille), Goethe-Institut (Almaty and Tashkent), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna; upcoming), Millennium Film Workshop (New York), National Art Gallery — The Palace (Sofia), New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles), Rhizome DC (Washington, D.C.), silent green Kulturquartier (Berlin), VIFF Centre (Toronto), among others.

Most recently, Zelikha is a recipient of the 2024-25 Fulbright U.S. Student Award pursuing creative research in Tajikistan and Türkiye.

*غمخوار / gham-khoor means “grief eater” in Persian

Artist’s website: zelikhashoja.com

About The Rehearsal: In Search of Bluer Tongues (working title)

Shoja received the 2026 UVP Regional Commission for her proposal “The Rehearsal: In Search of Bluer Tongues” (working title). Shoja’s project is inspired by scenes of a domestic life that she lost access to when it became impossible for her to travel to her maternal grandmother’s home in Kabul, Afghanistan. The working title references a personal memory: a grandmother and granddaughter playfully stick out their tongues at one another, stained blue with candy. Shoja will work with non-actors from resettled communities in Syracuse, the project will be an act of remembrance to archive places that we are slowly losing access to but which we watch from afar daily via the mediation of social media and WhatsApp – a feeling and position those in diaspora mutually understand.