Grant Recipient

“the suspect is my son #3,” 2018, digitized embroidery on felt, 18 × 18 × 0.75 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Sabba Elahi

Teaching Artist Cohort

,

2026

Sabba S. Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who grew up in a Pakistani household predominantly in Northeast Ohio. She works primarily in embroidery/stitch, drawing, and print media. Elahi’s art is informed by the myriad of intergenerational South Asian diasporic and Muslim American experiences, and her resulting imagery, materials, and techniques often take inspiration from familial objects and textiles, direct observation of everyday life, and art from heritage craft traditions within South Asia.

Elahi considers her creative practice a kind of slow activism that calls for engagement with the handmade, slow looking, and the accumulation of labor, repetition, and dialogue. Ultimately, Elahi grapples with themes woven within her bicultural experience—presence/absence, belonging/nationalism, and resistance to erasure/collective memory.

For the past decade, her artwork reflects on our surveillance state, the racialization and the dehumanization of brown and Muslim bodies, and how U.S.–led warfare impacts us all.

Elahi received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her exhibitions include Heritage Museum of Asian Art, Prizm Miami Art Fair, Abrons Art Center (New York), and Cromwell Place (UK). She is the recipient of artist residencies at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Artists Coalition, and Ragdale, and was a finalist for the Mother Art Prize in 2020.

She teaches in the Philosophy and Humanities Department at Oakton Community College and conducts community stitch circles across Chicagoland. She is passionate about creating equitable peer-led learning spaces and knowledge building across handmade traditions.