Shaan Ken Rao (b. 1995, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, painting, image transfer, and collage to examine lived experience from the inside out. Working from autobiography without reducing to confession, he constructs images that sit in the difficult terrain between breakdown and reconstitution, probing what persists in a self after it has been taken apart, and what it means that it does. His work is less interested in resolution than in aftermath: the slow, nonlinear process of becoming legible to oneself again.
Rao received a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design and is currently completing an MFA in Integrated Practices at Pratt Institute. He has held solo exhibitions at All Street Gallery, New York, and his work has been included in group exhibitions and screenings at Millennium Film Foundation, Brooklyn, and Le Petit Village, New York. He has been featured in Atwood Magazine and Warmly Zine, and was included in Atwood Magazine's 50 Artists to Watch in 2025. Rao is also the co-founder, creative director, and frontman of band DINHO DINHO, which has played at classic NYC venues like Mercury Lounge, Bowery Electric, Nublu 151, Nicki’s Unisex, Berlin NYC, etc.
Shaan Ken Rao currently lives and works in New York.