Maryam Hafizirad: Storyteller

Maryam Hafizirad is an international award-winning multidisciplinary Deaf Canadian Persian visual artist, working across painting, sculpture and design. She is an art curator, teacher, mentor, and advocate for Deaf artists. A graduate of Isfahan University of Fine Arts (2002), her exhibitions have been featured in Iran, China, Germany, Malaysia, India, Canada, and the United States. Maryam’s Persian classical early works were dark in subject and colour, with women’s faces and bodies forbidden. When she moved to Malaysia and settled in Canada (2011), her work transformed. She began painting using Persian and Deaf View Image Art (De’VIA) metaphors with strong contrasting colours, textures, and incorporating Deaf experience and values. Pomegranates were symbols of hidden love released, fish in water represented sincere human beings in her silent world of pure visual beauty, and birds embodied her newfound freedom as a Deaf woman in this new country. Maryam is Deaf curator for the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf and on faculty of the national Deaf Arts Academy, Deaf Arts Retreat Centre, Grande-Digue, New Brunswick. 

Maryam is currently an MFA student in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University, where she is completing a placement with the Toronto Biennial of Art, supporting TBA’s public and learning programs through De’VIA, Deaf culture, Deaf perspectives, storytelling, and accessibility. Her placement connects to TBA 2026’s theme, Things Fall Apart, exploring how Deaf life carries its own experience of rupture and resistance, and how De’VIA shows what Deaf people build from it. Her work supports Deaf-led learning in museums and galleries, so Deaf people are included not only as visitors, but as presenters, educators, and leaders in shaping the museum experience.