Shasti E. O'Leary-Soudant, M.F.A.

https://shastiolearysoudant.com

Shasti O’Leary Soudant is a New York City–born artist, designer, and writer based in Buffalo, New York. Her work operates across public art, publishing, and education, with a focus on how visual systems shape human experience.

As a public artist, she creates large-scale, site-specific installations for civic, healthcare, and institutional environments. Her work has been commissioned by cities, museums, universities, and transit systems across the United States, and is held in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Museum, the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the City of Jacksonville, Florida, and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, among others. Current projects include a major public artwork for the new Buffalo Bills Highmark Stadium, and an extensive multi-sculpture installation for the City of Buffalo that will install in 2028.

In parallel with her public work, Soudant has worked on over two thousand books covers and designed a dozen #1 New York Times bestsellers, for such high-profile authors as Stephen King, Rebecca Yarros, James Patterson, Danielle Steel, John Grisham and Nora Roberts. Her commercial practice informs her approach to visual communication, audience, and narrative clarity.

She is also an active writer of art criticism and essays, and contributes regularly to Sculpture Magazine and other publications. Her writing reflects a sustained engagement with contemporary sculpture and design and informs both her studio practice and her teaching.

She has taught for over 17 years and is currently an Assistant Professor of Design and Professional Practice at Buffalo State University. Her teaching focuses on creative entrepreneurship, systems thinking, and the practical realities of sustaining a career in the arts. She is particularly interested in helping students understand how design operates within economic, technological, and institutional systems.

Soudant’s recent work also engages the role of emerging technologies in creative practice. In 2023, she received a NYSCA grant to create Burden of Conquest, a large-scale interactive Augmented Reality installation for the Rockwell Museum (a Smithsonian Affiliate) in Corning, NY, and was recently awarded an Empire AI fellowship in Artificial Intelligence for higher education, where she will help develop strategies for integrating AI into design pedagogy in ways that support, rather than replace, human creativity.

Across all areas of her practice, she is committed to bridging disciplines that connect art, design, and real-world applications in ways that are both conceptually rigorous and materially grounded.