Shaad Shopnil is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, video, installation, sculpture, ceramics, and photography. She earned her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Painting in 2025 and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 2020.
She was inducted into the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society in 2017 while attending Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. Her journey as an artist began at the age of five, when her mother enrolled her in an art academy in Bangladesh. She studied there for eight years, laying the foundation for her lifelong commitment to visual storytelling.
Shaad’s work is known for its vivid use of color, tactile surfaces, and intuitive, emotionally driven approach. Her practice often blurs the line between abstraction and representation, drawing on memory, imagination, and personal experience. She explores layered themes of cross-cultural identity, history, womanhood, and the feeling of existing in-between worlds. Much of her work honors the overlooked creative labor of women—drawing from traditional art forms, domestic rituals, and everyday acts of making. Shaad finds deep inspiration in nature, where she spends much of her time. The shifting seasons, changing skies, and quiet rhythms of the earth shape both the mood and palette of her work. She often draws her colors directly from the natural world—muddy earth tones, soft leaf greens, sky blues, and sun-warmed reds—infusing her paintings with a sense of place and passage. Through her art, she celebrates the storytelling power of women’s hands and the natural world, weaving together sensory, cultural, and emotional narratives that speak to both individual and collective experience.
