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Reyhan Yazdani is an interdisciplinary artist/ designer currently living and working in Vancouver. Her creative practice revolves around themes of embodied knowledge, language, displacement, and nomadic identities among others. Reyhan explores notions of de-centering practices, pluralistic understandings, untranslatability, loss and longing through material inquiry, installation, objects, social practice, and poetry.

She received a Master of Architecture from the University of Tehran in 2017 and an MFA from È«Ãñ²ÊƱ in 2019 where she currently teaches. She exhibited her works at galleries such as Seymour Art Gallery (2020) and Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2019) and has been working as an Artist in Residence at Access Gallery (2021), Shadbolt Art Centre (2021) and Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (2022).

Photo Credit: Perrin Grauer

Decolonization is a continuous work and practice that I approach through the lens of language. Through visual poetry in Farsi, writing, text-based objects in ceramics, and installation I explore a nuanced diverse understanding of language. In my research and artistic practice, I reflect on language as not only a tool for communication but a space of refuge.

This project builds on previous initiatives at È«Ãñ²ÊƱAD to bring multilingualism into the classroom, including the work of Juliane Okot-Bitek, one of the outgoing inaugural Teaching Fellows. My project seeks ways to bring more visibility and attention to non-Latin languages in our classrooms and on campus. It is critical for us, as faculty members, to recognize and acknowledge the power of Western dominant languages in continuing the oppression, colonization and marginalization of the non-Latin speakers who are most often from BIPoC communities.

Joe O’Brien’s practice sits at the crossroads of visual art and critical writing, theory and research, community and teaching. Their work spans these varied fields, encompassing installations, conversations, research, writing, interactions, and events. For O’Brien, central to his work across these various modalities and disciplines are questions about the relationships between hope, uncertainty, (im)possibility and action. What does it look like to understand and embrace uncertainty as necessary for hope? How can a more critical understanding of impossibility open up new space for action?

O’Brien received his MFA in 2016 from È«Ãñ²ÊƱ after completing a BFA with a concentration in philosophy at Illinois Wesleyan University in 2014. They have exhibited, published, and organized events nationally and internationally. He currently lives on the unceded land of the the xÊ·məθkÊ·É™yÌ“É™m (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and sÉ™lÌ“ilwÌ“É™taʔɬ(Tsleil-Waututh) peoples in so-called Vancouver, where he is an instructor at Emily Carr.

What We Need To Be Here: Access Needs, Students, and Faculty in Seminar-Style Classes

What We Need to Be Here looks at how the talents, skills, and needs of everyone in a class can be understood as the place from which teaching and learning begins. This project is rooted in building relationships and trust, and understands that access needs are universal in the sense that everyone has them - but specific in that everyone’s are different. Rather than fitting people into pre-determined structures, What We Need To Be Here seeks to research, imagine, and collectively create approaches to classrooms as spaces where the talents, skills, and needs of the people in them can be the premise from which frameworks and practices are drawn.