Three curatorial residencies announced for Vancouver Art Gallery
Pantea Haghighi, Makiko Hara, and Nya Lewis join the gallery’s curatorial department immediately and will remain through 2025
From left: Pantea Haghighi, Makiko Hara, and Nya Lewis.
IN AN ANNOUNCEMENT made today (March 21), the Vancouver Art Gallery has welcomed three new Vancouver-based curators in residence. Pantea Haghighi, Makiko Hara, and Nya Lewis join the gallery’s curatorial department immediately and will remain through 2025.
A doctoral student at Simon Fraser University, Haghighi was the guest curator behind 2023’s exhibition of Iranian-born artists in Vancouver, Parviz Tanavoli: Poets, Locks, Cages. With a focus on the development of modernism in mid-century Iran, Haghighi helps strengthen the gallery’s commitment to a variety of cultural backgrounds.
Originally from Tokyo, Hara’s three-decade career in contemporary art has included the role of chief curator at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. The award-winning Hara was responsible for two recent Offsite exhibitions, Pedro Reyes and Lani Maestro, and joins the gallery as a curator of performance events and public art projects.
In 2020, Lewis oversaw the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Where do we go from here? exhibition, and from June to October 2022 she served as interim artistic director of Out On Screen’s Vancouver Queer Film Festival, where she was previously part of the programming team. In addition to her current work as the director of Artspeak gallery and a research assistant at the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, Lewis joins the gallery while continuing research for a major publication dedicated to Black cultural production in British Columbia.
In a media release, CEO and executive director of the Vancouver Art Gallery Anthony Kiendl states: “These important residencies exemplify the Gallery as a site for education, research and thought leadership. We are pleased to welcome Pantea, Makiko, and Nya, whose curiosity and insight will enrich the Gallery in an exciting period of growth and transformation.”
In the same release, deputy director and director of curatorial programs Eva Respini adds: “I am thrilled to welcome three accomplished curators to the Vancouver Art Gallery. Their residencies support one of our core missions—which is to produce knowledge about art and to give platform to the vital knowledge that artists produce. I am looking forward to learning from my new colleagues and widening the scope of exhibitions, programming, and scholarship we offer our audiences.”
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