Somayeh Rashvand

Somayeh Rashvand is an art historian, craftswoman, and interdisciplinary scholar currently pursuing her doctoral studies in Art History at Concordia University. Her research is broadly concerned with art, aesthetics, planetary crises, and questions of social and ecological justice. She is 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. Her work draws on decolonial and anti-extractive methodologies rooted in ancestral and Indigenous practices of listening, sensing, and storytelling—approaches through which she thinks with, listens to, and imagines alongside artists and their aesthetic practices. Before beginning her PhD at Concordia, she was a university lecturer in Iran for more than a decade, where she taught a wide range of courses on theories and methods in art history. Her writing has been published in Art Journal and PUBLIC, among others.