An Advocate for the Arts

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Verjee attended boarding school in England, where she engaged with various types of art including choral works, opera, theatre, music and visual arts and crafts. In the early 1970s,  Verjee moved to Vancouver, where she pursued a business and economics degree at Simon Fraser University at an exciting time for culture and technology. The advent of the Sony Portapak, a portable video camera which entered the market in 1967, had made shooting film more affordable and accessible. Diverse artists, including Verjee, seized the medium to tell their stories. 

In 1977, Verjee acted in a play at the Matsqui Federal Penitentiary in Abbotsford, B.C. Led by Institutional Theatre Productions in partnership with the University of Victoria, the play was part of an initiative helping inmates earn degrees. Every week, Verjee went to the prison to rehearse. Ron Sauvé, one of the inmates performing with her, earned a B.A. during his sentence and after being released in the late 1980s, went on to become the artistic director of Institutional Theatre Productions. He took the company into the mainstream to rehabilitate other inmates and ex-inmates through theatre, recalls Verjee. 

 “Art has a huge power to make us think, and question the world we live in, and to take action and to find our agency,” says Verjee, reflecting on the experience in her Governor General’s Award portrait video.

In the decades since, Verjee has continued to weave politics into her career and pushed for racial equity in Canada’s cultural spaces. In the 1990s, she led Western Front, a centre for contemporary art and music in Vancouver, and played an instrumental role in the creation of the British Columbia Arts Council. She later moved to Ontario, where she worked on early digital arts initiatives at the Department of Canadian Heritage and Canada Council for the Arts. She also set up the City of Mississauga’s Culture Division and created its first Culture Master Plan.  

Since 9/11, Verjee has explored her Muslim identity and the challenges of Islamophobia through her work. She has also highlighted ways the arts can counter extremism. In 2014, she brought the issue to the federal government’s Cross-Cultural Roundtable on Security to engage Canadians on national security matters. In her writing, she has argued that cultural events, such as the Muslim Festival of Mississauga, can contest and counter negative narratives and Western stereotypes about Muslim Canadians’ identities. 

Today, Verjee, who is currently the executive director of the Galeries Ontario/Galleries Ontario, continues to advocate for the status of the artist. In July, she co-authored an open letter calling on the federal government to implement a permanent basic income. The letter emphasized how the pandemic had highlighted the economic precarity of workers in cultural sectors. 

Verjee is not one to shy away from spotlighting a crisis. “[Art is] about ideas. It’s about taking people to the next level—to that next possibility,” she says.