Gelareh Khoie is an Iranian-born artist, scholar, educator, writer, DJ, and cultural entrepreneur whose career spans visual art, independent cultural production, depth psychology, and higher education. She is the founder of Kosmos Institute, an adjunct professor in the Depth Psychology and Creativity program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her work is informed by more than three decades of experience across creative practice, institution-building, scholarship, and education.

Khoie received her BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and began her professional life as a visual artist. After moving to Honolulu in the mid-1990s, she became active in the city’s independent art community, exhibiting her work while developing increasingly collaborative forms of cultural production. In the late 1990s she founded the artist collective Special Prescription and created Velvet: Art + Music, a series that brought visual artists and Honolulu’s emerging dance-music community into the same environment. Those experiments eventually led to Hawaii’s Quiet Storm, the intimate Chinatown discothèque she opened in her painting studio in 2001.

In 2004, Khoie founded thirtyninehotel at 39 North Hotel Street in Honolulu’s Chinatown. Over the next decade, it developed into one of the city’s most influential independent cultural spaces, combining a contemporary art gallery with performance, music, education, hospitality, and nightlife. Its opening preceded a rapid expansion of cultural activity along Hotel Street; within its first year, new venues had opened on either side, and the surrounding blocks soon filled with galleries, restaurants, bars, and other creative businesses. thirtyninehotel became closely identified with the emergence of Chinatown as a center of Honolulu’s contemporary cultural life.

Khoie conceived the venue as an interdisciplinary art and music space. It presented monthly exhibitions, site-specific installations, artist residencies, performance art, poetry, lectures, jazz, film, and experimental programming alongside an internationally regarded dance-music program. She worked with curator Trisha Lagaso Goldberg to establish the 39 Chambers Artists Residency Program, bringing visiting artists to Honolulu to create ambitious installations specifically for the space. Its musical programming brought figures including DJ Harvey, François Kevorkian, Nicky Siano, James Murphy, and Bonobo to Honolulu. Khoie brought Italian cosmic-disco pioneer Daniele Baldelli to the United States for what became his first American performance.

thirtyninehotel also became renowned for its sound system, which Khoie conceived as a hybrid of the systems and philosophies of David Mancuso’s Loft and the Paradise Garage. Its evolution began when a longtime Loft regular entrusted the venue with four Klipschorns and two MLIIs that had been used at Mancuso’s Prince Street Loft. Four additional Klipschorns followed, allowing Khoie to construct four two-speaker towers in the corners of the room. She subsequently worked with legendary sound designer Gary Stewart on Bertha bass cabinets, tweeter arrays, amplification, and EQ, and brought Isonoe’s Justin Greenslade to Honolulu to further develop the system and modify its decks and mixer. The resulting system became legendary in underground dance-music circles and gave physical form to Khoie’s growing interest in the transformative and psychospiritual dimensions of sound and aural vibration—an inquiry she would later carry into her doctoral work.

The ten years Khoie spent building and directing thirtyninehotel were formative to her subsequent work. The project placed artistic practice inside the larger questions of cultural leadership, community, education, and institution-building, while her immersion in underground music generated a sustained intellectual interest in sound, ritual, and the psychology of collective experience.

Khoie later pursued graduate study at Pacifica Graduate Institute, completing two master’s degrees and a doctorate. She holds an MA in Depth Psychology and Creativity with an emphasis in the Arts and Humanities, an MA in Jungian and Archetypal Studies, and a PhD in Depth Psychology with a specialization in Jungian Psychology and Archetypal Studies. Her scholarship has focused on Jungian and archetypal psychology, mythology, dreams, alchemy, creativity, and the psychological dimensions of sound and artistic experience. Her doctoral research grew in part from questions first encountered during her years in music and cultural production.

She subsequently joined the faculty of Pacifica, where she teaches in the Depth Psychology and Creativity program. Her writing and scholarship have appeared in publications devoted to Jungian studies, depth psychology, literature, and the arts, and her visual work has been published in the Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies.

Khoie is also the founder of Kosmos Institute, an independent educational institution devoted to rigorous interdisciplinary study across depth psychology, mythology, philosophy, esoteric traditions, and the arts. Kosmos grew from a longstanding interest in forms of education capable of sustaining serious intellectual inquiry across disciplinary boundaries, and extends Khoie’s earlier work as an artist and cultural founder into the field of education.

She lives in Stratford-upon-Avon with her dog, where she is immersed in the ongoing study of Shakespeare’s work.