Hadieh Shafie's practice is a process-driven contemplation that uses ink, paint and paper as material for works that abstract text into form, evoking different optical perspectives. Her reliefs comprise circular or cone-shaped scrolls inscribed with Farsi poetry and her own writing in acts of concealment, fragmentation and distortion. Performing the gesture of masking language through repetitive movement, Shafie’s work defies clean categorizations, situating itself between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional plane and generating diverse fields of vision. Her visual language, a form of mark-making, is multi-layered and arises from a profound understanding of words as an energetic charge, color as emotion, and repetition as a kind of spiritual practice.

Shafie's work has been acquired by several institutional collections including The British Museum; Brooklyn Museum; The Columbus Museum; The Dubai Collection; The Farjam Collection; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Princeton University Art Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sheldon Museum of Art; and The Victoria and Albert Museum. Shafie holds an MFA in imaging and digital arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She was awarded the Delfina residency (2025), nominated for the Anonymous Was A Woman Prize in 2017, and shortlisted for the Jameel Prize in 2011. She was an awardee of the 2012 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. She is the recipient of grants from the Franz and Virginia Bader Fund (2011), the Mary Sawyers Baker Award from the William G. Baker Jr. Memorial Fund (2009), and the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant (2008).

Shafie's work is in the following public collections: The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Victoria and Albert Museum; Princeton Museum of Art, The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Winter Park, FL; Art in Embassies, Public Collection Dubai, UAE; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); The British Museum and The Brooklyn Museum of Art,