Artspeak

• Aileen Bahmanipour

  Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist. She is currently living and working on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, known as Vancouver, and in Bella Coola Valley, the traditional territory of Nuxalk people. She has received her BFA in Painting from the Tehran University of Art and her MFA in Visual arts from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and is currently a member of the Continuing Studies faculty at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. 

• Azadeh Hussaini

  Azadeh Hussaini is a Chicago-based  Iranian-American visual artist. She was born in the U.S. and moved to Iran as a child, where she spent her formative years. She subsequently returned to the U.S. to obtain a master’s in Fine Arts. Her work embodies her emotional responses to her own experiences, while concurrently exploring the basic primordial desires within the human condition. Hussaini aspires to discover commonalities among us while providing forums for social discussion and assertiveness. Her art has been displayed in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally. She is also an educator, a co-founder of Didaar Art Collective, a Chicago-based Iranian Artists community, curator and board member at Theatre-Y, a Chicago-based theatre company, and the Art Gallery Advisory Board at Lewis University. 

• Sholeh Mahlouji

  Sholeh Mahlouji is an artist and art educator based in Vancouver. Inspired by Persian art and culture, she explores working with motifs and symbols lingering in a generative pedagogical space for meaning-making and sense-making. Holding her BA in Visual Communication, and MA in illustration, Sholeh received her master’s degree in Art Education from the University of British Columbia. She has collaborated with diverse cultural and educational organizations such as the Children’s Book Council of Iran and the Ministry of Education. Following her passion, Mahlouji documents cultural elements in tiles, textiles, paintings, calligraphy, weaving, and architecture while traveling in Iran. 

• Marzieh Mosavarzadeh

  Marzieh Mosavarzadeh arts-based educational research explores the entangled relationship between the practice of walking, writing, and image-making and how together they enable potentialities for artful, reciprocal, and pedagogical ways of Making-Place. Marzieh Holds her MFA and BFA degrees in visual arts. Marzieh is grateful to live and work on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.

• Yasaman Moussavi

  Yasaman Moussavi is a visual artist and educator. She holds a MFA in visual art from Texas Tech University, USA. In her art practice research, she explores the socio-cultural in-betweenness as a capacity and disposition to participate in the process of meaning-making and learning across cultures and languages. Moussavi examines the ways in which art-making intervenes the established social relations in order to recover the embodied act of mapping and placemaking as a constituent to build social bonding. Her works have been displayed in many national and international solo and group exhibitions.

• Elmira Sarreshtehdari

  Elmira Sarreshtehdari is an artist, art researcher, and instructor based in Canada. She is interested in the audiences’ encounter with dis-placed art and inquires how this aesthetic interaction could provide a proliferating space for further communication and meaning-making between multiple cultures, bodies, mediums, traditions, places, assumptions, and such. Sarreshtehdari works with a variety of art materials and mediums such as drawing, participatory installation art, sound, and video performance.