Andrea Shaker is an Arab American artist living on Dakhóta and Anishinaabe lands in Mni Sóta Makoce. Shaker’s work is interdisciplinary, spanning photography, moving image, experimental film, artist book, letterpress, installation and writing. Through image and word, she explores the spaces between and within home & homeland and migration & diaspora. Her work addresses how these spaces, and the movement of the body in these spaces, are imagined and experienced through the physiology of intergenerational memory.
At the core of her practice is the relationship between text and image and how the relationship between the two mirror themes of home & homeland and migration & diaspora. Central to her practice is how images of domestic spaces, both with and without the body, speak to migrations, diasporas, assimilations and erasures. She approaches this work with a quiet urgency; her artistic process moves between reflection, collaboration and community engagement, whether that be the process of writing, teaching or leading a workshop, or collaborating with others to create still and moving images about home, displacement and diaspora.
Andrea Shaker’s photographic and installation work has appeared in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. Shaker's films have screened at the Walker Art Center, Mizna’s Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, and Altered Aesthetics Film Festival (Southern Theater, Minneapolis). She co-directed a dance performance (1001 Arab Futures, June 2021, Winona, Minnesota). Her written and image based work has appeared in Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America (on silence, 2018 and (re)assembling bayt, 2024) and her written and photographic essay home. not home. (bayt. laysa bayt.) is included in the publication Home/land: Women, Citizenship, and Photographies (Liverpool University Press, 2016).
Shaker’s artists books have been exhibited at Minnesota Center for the Book Arts (MCBA), San Francisco Center for the Book (SFCB) and the Boston Athenaeum in including the following group exhibitions: Poetry is Not A Luxury at MCBA (2022), Mourning and Melancholy: Artists’ Books from the Arab World and Its Diaspora (SFCB, 2025), For/Ward (MCBA, 2024), and Who is America at 250? Artists’ Books on the State of Democracy (SFCB, Boston Athenaeum, MCBA, 2026). Her unique artist’s book performing bayt (fragments) has been acquired by Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library (2026). Shaker spent two months as the artist in residence at the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, 2025) working on her series of artist books entitled (re)claiming and (re)constructing my mother tongue, a public art project which she intends to launch in Dearborn/Detroit in 2027.
https://www.andreashaker.com/
