Student profile
Share:
Somayeh Rashvand
I am an art historian, craftswoman and interdisciplinary scholar currently pursuing my doctoral studies in Art History at Concordia University. My research is broadly concerned with art, aesthetics, planetary crises, and questions of social and ecological justice. I am especially interested in the ways in which the aesthetic realm becomes a site of queer, defiant, and insurgent knowledge production, sensibility, and speculative world-making to encounter the dystopian moment marked by imperial wars, resource extraction, climate change, and ecological destruction. My work draws on decolonial and anti-extractive methodologies rooted in ancestral and Indigenous practices of listening, sensing, and storytelling—approaches through which I think with, listen to, and imagine alongside artists and their aesthetic practices. Before beginning my PhD at Concordia, I was a university lecturer in Iran for more than a decade, where I taught a wide range of courses on theories and methods in art history.
Thesis Title: TBD
Supervisor: Dr. Balbir K. Singh
Research Interests:
- Decolonial Art History
- Art and Climate Justice
- Feminist & Queer Theory of Colour Critique
- Contemporary Art
- Visual & Im/Material Cultures of West Asia
- Indigenous Methodologies
Teaching Assistantships:
- ARTH 201 and 202- Perspectives of Art History, 2025-2026.
- ARTH 354 Studies in Interdisciplinarity in the Visual Arts, Summer 2025.
- ARTH 201 and 202 Perspectives of Art History, 2024-2025.
Research Assistantships:
- Dark Opacities Lab, Dr. Balbir K. Singh, 2025- Present.
Guest Lecturer:
- Department of Art History, Concordia University, Summer 2025. "Pilgrimage Beyond Earth: Displacement, Speculation, and Futurity in Contemporary Art of West Asia."
Conferences
- “Ornament is Not Innocent”, Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), Session Chair, York University, Toronto, October 2025.
- “Memory Work through Abstraction in Diasporic Iranian Visual Art”, UAAC Annual Conference, York University, Toronto, October 2025.
- “Relinking Myth & Memory: Multimedia Art Strategies as Alternative Knowledge Production.” Canadian Sociological Association Annual Conference, Toronto, June 2025.
- “Precarious Smiles: Invisible Labour of Diasporic Craftswomen in Contemporary Art Production in Canada.” Canadian Sociological Association Annual Conference, Toronto, June 2025.
- “Precarious Smiles: Invisible Labour of Diasporic Craftswomen in Contemporary Art Production in Canada.” Visual Arts, Narrative, and Social Class Conference, Turku, Finland, April 2025.
- “Distant Mourning, Queer Care: Po. B. K. Lomami’s Affective Journey Through Performance.” AGIC 2025, Concordia University, Montreal, April 2025.
Publications:
- Rashvand, Somayeh. “Language as a Surrogate for Home: The Material Afterlife of Persian Script in Diasporic Iranian Art.” Public: Art/Culture/Ideas 72, (In Press, November 2025).
- Rashvand, Somayeh. Book Review of Salar Mameni’s Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023), Solicited by Art Journal, (In Press, December 2025).