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.