Kimia Shahi

Kimia Shahi is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California. She teaches, researches, and writes about the art and visual culture of the modern United States with a focus on trans/oceanic and multidisciplinary perspectives. She is particularly interested in the intersections of image-making and knowledge production in relation to histories of geography, empire, and environment. Her work explores these entanglements across diverse historical media and technologies of visualization—from landscape paintings to drawings, maps, scientific illustrations, navigational guides, and image databases, among other examples. 

Shahi’s first book project, Uncertain Contours: Seeing Beyond Seascape in Nineteenth-Century America, expands beyond traditional accounts of seascape painting to examine how diverse encounters with coastal environments catalyzed new relations between seeing and knowing during a period of imperial expansion and widening oceanic presence. A second book-in-progress, Information About this Land: Project Documerica and the Environmental Image, examines the roles of new technologies of image-making and information management in the production and afterlife of Project Documerica, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s initiative to photographically document the state of the American environment in the early 1970s. 

Shahi’s scholarship has appeared in journals American Art, The New England Quarterly, and Art Papers, and she has contributed essays to notable publications including the award-winning Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment. Topics explored include the work of twentieth-century Hawai’ian landscape painter, Reuben Tam, the materiality of Gilded Age watercolor, U.S.-Chinese export art, and the art and ecology of salt marshes. Forthcoming publications and works-in-progress include an essay on visualizing sea-level, an article on Documerica as an information system, and a co-edited special journal issue about picturing non-visible environments.

Before arriving at USC, Shahi was the Kernan Brothers Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. She has received additional support for her research from The Huntington Library, The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. 

• Ph.D. Art History, Princeton University, 2021
• M.A. Art History, Princeton University, 2016
• M.A. Art History, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2012
• A.B. Art History, with a minor in Studio Art, Dartmouth College, 2009