Artists of Utah and 15 Bytes are pleased to announce that Sheila Nadimi has been selected as the winner of the 2025 15 Bytes Book Award in Art Book for Eagle Village: A Deep Mapping of Fallow Architecture.

As our jurors noted: “Eagle Village is a profound photographic and archival meditation on one of Utah’s most historically layered sites—the former Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City. Over more than twenty years, Nadimi documented the campus during its long period of abandonment, revealing architecture that is at once monumental, wounded, and charged with cultural memory. What began as an inquiry into the geometry and austerity of disused buildings developed into a sustained act of witnessing, honoring the lives, creativity, and histories of the Native students who once inhabited these spaces.

Working with a manual medium-format camera, Nadimi captured both the sweeping exteriors of the campus and the intimate interiors where student-made murals and traces of daily life remained. Her compositions—quiet corridors, weathered facades, and vibrant fragments of Indigenous artwork—form a visual “deep map” that layers architectural study with historical and cultural reflection. The resulting book preserves a landscape in transition and invites readers to consider how buildings carry the imprint of lived experience long after their original purpose has passed.

Eagle Village stands as both an artistic achievement and an essential act of cultural preservation, foregrounding the complex afterlife of a site where national policy, personal stories, and the landscape of the American West intersect. Through her patient, deeply attentive work, Nadimi expands our understanding of place, memory, and the resilience of communities whose histories have too often been diminished or overlooked.”

We congratulate Sheila Nadimi on this outstanding accomplishment and celebrate her contribution to the arts and cultural record of Utah and the region.

15 Bytes

UTAH’S ART MAGAZINE SINCE 2001, 15 Bytes is published by Artists of Utah, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.