Graduate students

Kylie Fineday is a nehiyaw (Plains Cree) artist and curator from Sweetgrass First Nation, a small community in rural Saskatchewan. Fineday completed the BFA-Art Studio program at the University of Lethbridge in 2020 with great distinction, an honours thesis, and the Faculty of Fine Arts Gold Medal, and is now an MFA candidate at the University of Victoria. Fineday’s conceptual practice focuses on themes of personal identity and family history, as well as addressing social and environmental issues and injustices, particularly those affecting Indigenous communities within Canada. Through a queer Plains Cree perspective, Fineday also uses natural materials in temporary installations and performance to exemplify a relationship with the non-human world that is based on reciprocity and kinship. Fineday’s material practice is multidisciplinary, and includes drawing, painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, and textiles such as sewing and beadwork, as well as explorations with materials harvested from the natural world.

Lesley Marshall is an award-winning filmmaker, intermedia artist, and is a GFA candidate / sessional teacher at the University of Victoria. Projection art, films and music by Lesley have toured and screened nationally and internationally. They are the 2023 CMPA Diversity Mentorship Recipient for the CBC/PBS feature Animal Pride and a commissioned animator for CBC’s The Nature of Things. With work engaging with queer politics and crip theory, Lesley investigates experiential design through a responsive practice using performance art, projection and sound. Lesley sings dramatically in the gothic synth duo DIELECTRIC, has a 5 year old kiddo named LJ, and looks back fondly on a former life studying geography and plants in Ottawa. They grew up running around the backstages of opera houses and wish everyday to be eating pizza on the streets of NYC.

Mozhdeh Sajadi is a contemporary Iranian artist whose multimedia approach explores themes such as female identity, freedom, cultural censorship, resistance, and oppression. Using media such as painting, video art, and performance, she creates complex, layered narratives that reflect the lived experiences of women within socio-cultural contexts. In her most recent body of work, Sajadi draws upon the collective memory of dance and communal joy—rooted in Persian cultural traditions—as both a form of resistance and a restorative act. Through this approach, she proposes the preservation and celebration of cultural rituals as a means of countering repression and envisioning emancipatory futures.

Her work has been featured in four solo exhibitions and ten group exhibitions across Iran, Canada, and the United States. Notable international appearances include Collective Punishment at Musa Collective (Boston) and Lost and Found in Tehran at the Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio).

Sajadi is currently pursuing an MFA in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria in Canada. She holds a Master’s degree in Painting from Soore Art University and a Bachelor’s degree in Painting from the University of Science and Culture in Tehran. In addition to her artistic and scholarly pursuits, she has also taught as a university art instructor in Iran, further intertwining creative practice with critical discourse in her educational work.