Shani Zhang

Shani is an artist and illustrator living in San Francisco. She believes the most important thing she can do right now is draw and write about the lives occurring all around her—the man serving soup beside an art gallery, the mail carrier climbing San Francisco’s tallest hill, the street musician outside the city’s oldest café.
Over the past three years, she’s worked as a live event painter, capturing weddings, Kamayan dinners, Eid celebrations, and town halls. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and she currently runs a substack called Skin Contact.
Before building a business, Shani spent a decade keeping illustrated journals: writing about what astonished her and drawing things that are interesting and strange. Her work has always gravitated toward shared spaces, families, and public goods: witnessing the quiet lives of people who wash dishes while others dream. She wants to see what happens when her art is untethered from profit and reconnected to its original magic.