Scheherazade
Okilani
Nastasya
Goertzel

Sculptor, Filmmaker, Designer, and Geographer.


Scheherazade likes her sculptures to be pleasant to be around, not only visually, but to evoke an inviting sense of contentment and amusement; in the same way that laughter is contagious.

Raised primarily in the DC metropolitan area, Scheherazade Okilani Nastasya Goertzel has always had a fascination with art and mud, and developed a particular fascination with clay sculpture by the age of five. She has always enjoyed the ability to mold ideas and perceptions into reality, and has always been inspired by the art around her, such as from her mother, a Zen oil painter (aranya.org), and her father a scientist and musician with an approach rooted in curiosity and free expression. Zen art is simply art as meditation, just painting without thought or planning, and it can be done with or without object. Scheherazade creates from no-mind, often resulting in whimsical sculptures often representing meditative perspectives. Her work is often focused on depictions of feelings, and she believes artwork can create a captivating emotional energy similarly to how people can be captivating.

Goertzel has always also had a passion for travel and exploring different cultures and thought paradigms. At 15, she studied abroad in Osaka, Japan for her junior year of high school, and at 16 she attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock where she attended multiple ceramics and video production courses. For her junior year of college she studied abroad in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and in her senior year wrote a bachelor’s thesis on the ecological impact of church forests in Ethiopia to support her degree in Critical Geography, Political Ecology, & Globalization. Her primary activities outside of school also often pertained to art, nature, and meditation. Following her degree, she has lived back and forth between Addis Ababa and various US cities. She has been sculpting, video editing, studying GIS & habitat restoration, and working on the forefront of using open source AI as an animation tool rather than as an animation.

During this period and throughout her entire life, she has been an avid budget traveler, and has had the opportunity to visit many different landscapes around the world, meditating upon, sketching, sculpting, and painting her impressions of the world and its many plant, human, animal, ethereal, and other inhabitants. Spirituality and meditation are a major part of her artwork; the interconnection of all life, and the experience of what it is to live as an individual entity. In recent years she has developed an increased interest in representing the interconnectedness of all things.