About

Shari Paladino is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work explores the intersection of nostalgia, self-definition, and belonging through play-based, multimedia installations. Drawing from personal history and cultural narratives, she incorporates sculpture, video, writing, performance and interaction with communities, to investigate the shifting nature of memory, identity, and ambiguous loss.

Her ongoing project Habitas transforms the domestic interior into a hybrid space—a fusion of a kitchen, lab, and a school. The Habitas functions as a set, inspired by late 70’s and 80’s era family sitcoms, and as a backdrop for her script Dark Italian Recipe, which examines how family traditions, storytelling, and visual culture shape how we look, see, and sense ourselves— and our taste.

In Dark Italian Recipe, a semi-autobiographical text and performance piece, Paladino reinterprets familial narratives through a cut up of voices transcribed from of an episode of This American Life with Ira Glass, entitled “Occam’s Razor", which features her brother, mother and father. In the cut up version, some fictional characters are added, including a lotus pod shaped sponge, who voices the eight year old version of herself. Sponge is in the process of sensing and sense making in a world where seeing isn’t believing. Companioned by her imaginary friend Jeezy, who speaks only in gospel quotes, Sponge becomes increasingly suspicious; she discovers the hands she’s been is holding onto in the process, are also full of holes. Dark Italian Recipe is a dark comedy interrogating concepts of authenticity, the white imaginary and cultural preservation.

Shari Paladino has exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Richmond Art Center, among other institutions. She earned a Master of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in Art, Education, and Disability Studies, both from the University of California, Berkeley. She has developed curriculum in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and has taught at UC Berkeley and California College of the Arts.

In Spring of 2020 Shari founded Creative Practice Studio, a full inclusion art studio which uses art making as a scaffolding for social emotional learning. Inspired by her decades long work with neurodiverse learners and their families, as well as her own experiences growing up in a blended, multi-racial family, navigating her own neurodivergence and early childhood trauma, she empowers young learners to cultivate creativity as inner guidance—as a tool for self-expression, emotional regulation, and growth. Her teaching approach emphasizes process over outcome, fostering an environment where every child feels supported to develop a creative practice rooted in curiosity towards themselves and others.

Most recently Shari has returned to working with adults doing grief work. Drawing inspiration from contemporary artists and material improvisation, ‘making’ is used as a modality to bring material language to loss and grief. Her class invites participants through a process of recovery—not to return to a “normal’ state of health, but rather to find alternative processes for memorial.

Shari’s work has been supported by numerous awards and fellowships, including the Eisner Prize for Highest Achievement in Creativity, the Creative Discovery Arts & Design Initiative Grant, as well as residencies including the Jacobs Institute for Art and Design, and as Newbigin Fellow.

For more information email Shari directly: shari@creative-practice.com