Shasti O’Leary Soudant is a New York City–born artist, sculptor, designer, and writer based in Buffalo, New York. Her practice centers on large-scale public and institutional installations that examine how color, geometry, and modular systems shape human experience within shared space. Her work engages both structural logic and lived emotion, translating complex social and architectural systems into vivid, embodied form.
Her commissioned works include Do Not Mistake Our Softness for Weakness at the Burchfield Penney Art Center; De Nobis Abundans at the University of Nebraska Medical Center; Kaleidoscope Grove for the City of Erie, Pennsylvania; and LIFESIGNS for the City of Buffalo; Additional projects include installations for Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Jacobs Medical School and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority (NFTA), the City of Jacksonville, Florida, and Savarino Companies’ 500 Seneca development.
Soudant’s public art practice began with Performance Anxiety: Halflife, produced for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto in 2014, a participatory work involving 100 performers and thousands of participants. The project established enduring elements of her practice: electric color, repetition, self-imposed structure, and the transformation of intimate encounters into collective spatial experience.
She received her BFA in Sculpture and Photography from Purchase College and her MFA in Visual Studies from the University at Buffalo. She is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at Buffalo State University, where she teaches professional practice and creative sustainability.
Over the last thirty years, she she has designed and illustrated over two thousand book covers for every major publishing house, working with authors including Stephen King, James Patterson, Danielle Steel, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, Sandra Brown, Patricia Cornwell, Dan Brown, Walter Mosley, and Gore Vidal.