Sama Mirshahvalad is an Iranian-German self-taught sculptor based in Berlin. She was born in 1991 and spent the first 26 years of her life in Tehran, Iran. Following the path laid out before her, she earned a degree in industrial engineering. Her search for freedom led her to Berlin, where she completed a master's in Innovation Management, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainability at TU Berlin. After working in the startup scene and business for more than 8 years, she began to feel an emptiness within her. The further she advanced, the more distant she felt from herself. After years of working within systems that dulled her spirit, and enduring the slow burn of exhaustion, she pulled the trigger and resigned from her corporate safe job and hit the unknown.

Facing a tremendous amount of uncertainty over 2 years, her most authentic self started to emerge. She began to notice a pull towards creating art.

It was during a ten-day Vipassana meditation retreat that everything shifted. In the stillness, she encountered the truth she had long buried: vision after vision of installations and sculptures all expressing her inner knowing. She thought to herself, if not myself, then who is going to bring these visions into reality?

She realized she had always been an artist. The sculptor within her—her golden shadow—rose to the surface. For the first time, she felt she belonged. She didn’t stand beside the sculpture; she was the sculpture.

Since that transformational journey, Sama has devoted herself to the language of form, material, and creative process. Through sculpture, she weaves fragments of emotion and memory into tangible presence. Each piece reveals her inner landscape to her—an attempt to understand the invisible, to shift its energy into something tangible, and to translate her inner landscapes into something the hands can hold.

Sama is one of the founding members of DARD-E-DELAN collective.