Adili was born in Virginia, and moved to Iran when she was four. She left Iran to pursue higher education in the U.S. 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 Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation for the Arts, Soltanstall Foundation, PS122, BRIC Media Arts Residency in Brooklyn, and Lower East Side Printshop.

Some of the venues where Adili has shown her work in New York include: the International Print Center, Collette Blanchard Gallery, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Lower East Side Printshop. In 2009 she received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books, in addition to the Urban Artist Initiative grant. Golnar is currently based in Brooklyn. 

Art is my key to understanding the current underlying my identity and the world through fragments and abstraction. In doing so, I derive much of my inspiration from my own life. As an Iranian growing up in post-1979 Tehran, I have experienced separation, uprooting, and longing in its different manifestations. In my art I am compelled to decode the ways in which these events have marked me through Persian poetry, craft, and the body. I work in different mediums and my process involves deconstructing and reconstructing an image or object through obsessive folding, mixing and material manipulation of fragments. Some of my inspiration stems from Persian poetry and biographical text investigating a landscape of longing and loss. In the photographic-based works the photo paper is made tactile through repetitive cutting, weaving and sewing. This craft-intensive way of making mimics a digital process, which creates a fascinating juxtaposition in exploring new distortions.