Shadi Majlessi
Shadi Majlessi is a Toronto-based painter whose work braids together modern life with the quiet power of Qajar women. Trained in clinical psychology, she paints from a place of close listening - to emotion, memory, and the ways people carry their stories in their bodies.
For years, she moved between watercolor and oil across different mediums, but things shifted after she became a mother and immigrated three times. Those in-between years pulled her back toward making with her hands in a new way. She taught herself to bake, opened a small home-based bakery, and began decorating cakes with a recurring figure: Qajar women, reimagined contemporary settings.
That character now anchors her paintings. Shadi’s work folds history, nostalgia, and contemporary culture into the same frame, inviting viewers into a world where tradition sits comfortably beside the present day. Her paintings celebrate resilience, femininity, and the particular kind of joy that comes from building a life and art practice along an unconventional path.
