Shaye Thiel

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Shaye Thiel (she/her) is a London-based American-Canadian artist working across sound, performance, and perceptual systems. Trained first as an oil painter, she makes through layers—glaze, erasure, accumulation—allowing work to surface slowly through attention and revision. This painterly discipline shapes her sonic practice: composition as sediment, listening as texture, time as a material that can be stretched, scored, and held.

Working in collaboration with neuroscientists, she investigates the thresholds of sound, memory, and “sensehacking,” grounded in her lived experience of being hard of hearing and wearing hearing aids. Her practice treats listening not as passive reception but as an active, embodied exchange between body, machine, and site.

Alongside her artistic work, Thiel has held senior strategic and editorial roles at Netflix, serving as a trusted partner to studio leadership and as Chief of Staff to the Chief Information Security Officer. There, she led high-level communications, shaped internal systems, and operated at the intersection of technology, narrative, and organizational design. This fluency with complex infrastructures informs her artistic inquiry: she approaches institutions, technologies, and perceptual systems alike as architectures that can be re-authored.

Through performative installations, she shifts the public from observer to observed, exposing perception as relational, unstable, and political. She explores Quantum Listening—a practice of attending that understands sound as entangled and co-created. For Thiel, art is not a commodity but a charged field of connection: where silence hums, technology breathes, and listening becomes a shared act of becoming.

@shayethiel
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Education

Master of Arts || Digital Direction || Royal College of Art

Bachelor of Arts || 2-D Studio Art || The University of Arizona

Artist in Residence

GlogauAIR, Berlin || 2024

School of Visual Arts, New York City || 2023

Berlin Art Institute || 2022

Contemporary Art Summer School, Royal College of Art || 2022

Publication(s)

“Who Owns the Truth?”, Ars Electronika || 2023

“Pluralist, Stories of In-Between”, Royal College of Art || 2023

Academic Teaching

GlogauAIR, Berlin || Guest Artist || 2024

Shanghai Tech University, China || Guest Artist Lecturer || 2024

Selected Exhibitions

2025

“Observation Station”, Feel the Sound, Barbican Centre, London, UK

2024

“Ex Nihilo”, New Designers 2024, London, UK

“Roaming Silence”, Ircam Forum, Paris, FR

2023

“Fragments”, School of Visual Arts, New York City, NY

“Gateway to Reality”, Cromwell Place, London, UK

“Ex Nihilo”, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

“Intertwine”, Royal College of Art, London, UK

“Nomophobia”, Royal College of Art, London, UK

2022

“What a Waste?”, The Koppel Project Hive, London, UK

“The Other Art Fair London”, Old Truman Brewery, London, UK

2021

“The Other Art Fair London”, Old Truman Brewery, London, UK

“Vogue II”, Boomer Gallery, London, UK

“Revolution: Art & Change”, The Holy Art, London, UK

“Every Woman Biennial”, Copeland Gallery, London, UK

“Blast”, The Holy Art, Virtual, London, UK

2018

“Body”, M-51, New York, NY

“Fantasy in Color”, Jefferson Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

"Culture", Yara Fine Art Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

"Soirée", Toby, New York City, NY

"Summer Saloon", Art Share L.A., Los Angeles, CA

"Annual Exhibition", Joseph Gross Gallery, Tucson, AZ

"Bunker Annual", Bunker, Reseda, CA

2017

"Bunker Annual", Bunker, Reseda, CA

"Define Femme", Open Mind Art Space, Los Angeles, CA

Organized & Curated by Shaye Thiel

2016

Joseph Gross Gallery, Tucson, AZ

"Painter's Place", University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

"Dia De Los Muertos Exhibition", California State University, Northridge, CA

West Gallery, Northridge, CA

2015

Todd Walker Gallery, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

2014

Joseph Gross Gallery, Tucson, AZ

Voice-Over

Optima: A Structural Transmission of Coherence, Consciousness, and Advanced Reality || 2025

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