Simeen is an interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Portland with ties to New Delhi, India. Her work explores the role of art and collective memory in how minoritized communities navigate violence and imagine alternative modes of existence and belonging in public spaces. She seeks to make visible the boundaries and limitations imposed by oppressive systems, challenging these structures through acts of rest, sleep, and song in public spaces, offering a means of collective healing and reclaiming space for personal and collective liberation.
Simeen grew up in post-liberalization India, a time that dramatically changed the landscape of urban cities and neighborhoods. While this period presented a sense of freedom, particularly for young women, the stratification across class, caste, and religion created tensions that manifested in the everyday lives of women in many ways. Her creative work has been an attempt to grapple with these tensions, responding from a personal perspective to comment on the larger political context around her. Her work attempts to initiate conversations that can facilitate new possibilities of being, becoming and belonging in a time of repression. Her work intersects at both personal and political junctures; it is, at large, an attempt to represent lived experience of systemic oppression and collective healing in/of community. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Applied Art from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Currently based in Portland, Oregon, she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) as a candidate in the Art+Social Practice program at Portland State University.
Simeen has shown her work and taught workshops in New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle and Eindhoven, Netherlands and has been featured in several notable exhibitions, including Public Domain (2025), Social Practice Assembly in Portland, OR (2024), and the Kochi Biennale (2020 and 2022 edition). She has also received the Arctivists Grant from the Human Rights Defenders Hub (2020). Simeen currently serves as an Educator in the Portland Art Museum, and as Director of the Social Practice Art Club in Portland State. She has experience in museum education and public engagement through internships at a range of institutions, including the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Amarnath Sehgal Collection and the Partition Museum in New Delhi.
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