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Zainub Verjee - trailblazer for her generation

A trailblazer for her generation, Zainub Verjee is an accomplished artist, writer, critic, cultural bureaucrat, cultural diplomat and public intellectual. 

Published December 6, 2020
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A trailblazer for her generation, Zainub Verjee is an accomplished artist, writer, critic, cultural bureaucrat, cultural diplomat and public intellectual. She is an advocate of art literacy in the global Ismaili Jamat and served as the Director of the International Art Gallery at the Diamond Jubilee Arts Festival in Lisbon.

Zainub arrived in Canada in the early 1970s and studied at Simon Fraser University. In the two decades that followed, Zainub played a central role in making the case for racial equity a key issue for cultural development in Canada. She furthered the cause through her work with the International Network for Cultural Diversity including promulgating the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted in 2005.

Zainub has been embedded in the early years of Vancouver’s photo-conceptualism movement as well as the history of women’s labour in British Columbia. In 1989, she co-founded and co-directed InVisible Colours, a widely recognized international film and video festival highlighting women of colour and third world women’s film, for which she received the 1992 National Film Board Fellowship. In 1993, her work on the British Columbia Arts Board led to the formation of British Columbia Arts Council and she was a Vancouver Moderator of the Spicer Commission – The Citizen's Forum on Canada's Future.

Her practice as an artist is multidisciplinary and she is the only Ismaili contemporary artist whose artworks have been shown at the Venice Biennale and Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has also exhibited in other parts of Canada and the US, as well as in France, Mexico, and India. In addition to residing in private and public collections (Vancouver Art Gallery), her work is currently being exhibited at the Art Gallery of Alberta and Embassy Cultural House in London, Ontario.

A passionate and persuasive champion of art and its central role in society, Zainub was honoured with the 2020 Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts.

Check out ZainubVerjee.com

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