Shany M Cohen

Shany M Cohen is a New York born textile artist and designer, a third-generation immigrant of Iraqi and Moroccan heritage whose practice exists at the intersection of cultural memory and material exploration. She works exclusively with natural fibers and materials, focused on a soil to soil approach, using materials that come from earth and return to earth with minimal impact. She utilizes knitting, felting, and fabric manipulation techniques to explore belonging, displacement, and ancestral memory alongside personal narratives of adaptation. Cohen examines themes of nomadism and the search for home, and the repetition of these cycles across generations. Merging woven and knit textiles on her knitting machine, she creates imagined heirlooms through meditative repetition. These textile sculptures carry the essence of place and cultural memory, functioning as both tactile narratives and contemporary art objects. Natural surroundings inform Cohen's material choices and processes. She honors traditional craft methods while allowing the surroundings to shape her work, seeking opportunities to engage with local landscapes and craft communities. This dialogue between her multicultural heritage and new environmental contexts drives her artistic inquiry, developing a visual language that speaks to cultural multiplicity, the simultaneous belonging and not-belonging, creating works that bridge worlds while honoring ancestral knowledge.