UBC Okanagan MFA student awarded 2022 Audain Foundation Travel Award

Nasim Pirhadi Audain Award

Nasim Pirhadi pictured here with the award

Nasim Pirhadi, a second year Masters of Fine Arts student, was recently awarded the Audain Foundation Travel Award. The Audain Foundation supports the visual arts in British Columbia, offering awards to arts organizations, galleries and to individual artists.

Nasim was nominated by faculty members in the Visual Arts program at UBC Okanagan, noting that she is both an outstanding artist and scholar.

Nasim intends to travel to New York City in the spring 2023 to explore the history and practice of feminist art.  The concept of her artwork is constant fear, lack of independence and legal protection, and some of the toughest challenges facing Iranian women.

“I create a fragile network to represent women’s status in its vulnerability and fearfulness, “says Nasim.

While in New York, she will visit the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, a center within the Brooklyn Museum focuses exclusively on explicitly feminist art. This trip provides her with a great opportunity to meet Dr. Globarg Bashi, an Iranian-Swedish feminist who graduated from Columbia University, and now lives and works in New York.

The Audain Foundation Travel Award was established in 2019 for BFA or MFA students at five major institutions in the province, University of British Columbia Okanagan, University of British Columbia Vancouver, Emily Carr University or Art and Design, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria.

The award is for $7500 to one student per university to allow them to travel to destinations of their choice to view artworks and projects that will foster their practice and research.