Gonar Adili was born in Virginia, and moved to Iran when she was four. She left Iran to pursue higher education in the US. She holds a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Michigan, where she received the Thesis Award and was the recipient of the Booth Traveling Fellowship to Tehran, in 2006.
She has attended residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation for the Arts in Bellagio, Italy, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation for the Arts, and Lower East Side Printshop among others.
Some of the venues Adili has shown her work include, Scope Miami Art Fair, the International Print Center, Collette Blanchard Gallery, Waterhouse and Daad in New York, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lower East Side Printshop. Some of the grants she has received include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books, Puffin Foundation Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, and New York and the Urban Artist Initiative grant.
Adili is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.