Emma Sher
b. 1998

B.A. UCLA 2021
Based in Los Angeles, CA
From Oak Park, IL

Portraits by Gavin Aleshire

Emma Sher (b. 1998, Chicago, IL) is a Los Angeles–based ceramicist and received her BA in World Arts & Cultures from UCLA in 2021.

Her work is driven by a curiosity about the human desire to make sense of the world around us through spirituality, play, and alternate ways of knowing. Working with ceramics alongside light and glass, her practice is shaped by early experiences of building fairy houses in the woods: kneeling in dirt, scanning moss at eye level, arranging fragments into temporary worlds. These gestures – attentive, imaginative, devotional – continue to surface in her work. The mysticism of engaging in childlike ways of seeing into adulthood influences her ceramic and sculptural practice.