Diyan Achjadi

Diyan Achjadi (they/she) is a Professor in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, where they currently serve as Interim Vice-President Academic. Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, Achjadi's formative years were spent moving between multiple educational, political, and cultural systems, which deeply informs their artistic practice.

Their work examines historical prints and surface ornamentation, tracing narratives of cross-cultural imaginings, influences and contaminations. Through drawing, printmaking, and animation, Achjadi uses modes of fiction and storytelling to explore interrelated and conflicting histories of place and visual culture. Their research interests include drawing, narrative, paper, popular culture, print media, printed matter, and printmaking.

Achjadi's artistic output reveals consistent themes across their body of work, particularly examining how surface ornamentation and illustrated printed matter function as archives documenting the circulation of ideas in visual form. Their projects often explore the ways that places can be simultaneously familiar and foreign, collapsing images from different cultural contexts to create new visual narratives.

Awarded the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation in 2021, Achjadi has exhibited widely at galleries and film festivals across Canada and internationally. Recent exhibitions include 'Stories for Futures, Real and Imagined' (2024), 'Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network' (2024), and 'Between Line and Thread: Connecting the Asian American Arts Centre Collection' (2023).

• VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation (2021)

Achjadi has completed numerous significant public art projects including 'Hush' (2021), 'NonSerie (In Commute)' (2019), and 'Coming Soon!' (2020). They have been artist-in-residence at Malaspina Printmakers (Vancouver), Fanoon: Centre for Print Research (Doha), and the Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium). Their educational background includes a BFA from the Cooper Union (New York) and an MFA from Concordia University (Montreal).