OCAD University’s RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers is excited to announce Yana Rzayeva as the recipient of the 2026 DesignTO Exhibition Stantec Window Gallery Career Launchers! Her work will be on display at Stantec Window Gallery from December 20, 2025 - March 18, 2026 as part of the 2026 DesignTO.
Yana Rzayeva is an Azerbaijani Canadian interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans textiles, painting, and installation. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design from OCAD University. Her practice explores diasporic identity, cultural hybridity, and ancestral knowledge. Drawing from her personal diasporic experience and traditional Azerbaijani craft practices, she weaves together inherited memory with contemporary concerns around displacement, fragmentation, and belonging. Her work is grounded in sustainable materials and techniques passed down through generations. Each piece is a site of layered meaning—where memory, rupture, and resilience are entangled. Weaving, for Yana, is both a literal and metaphorical act of repair: a way to process inherited histories while reimagining connections between place, identity, and time. Through materiality and repetition, she challenges distinctions between art and craft, seeking to honor ancestral knowledge while responding to the cultural dislocation that marks the diasporic experience.
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