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LAIWAN is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in apartheid Rhodesia. Her art training began at the Emily Carr College of Art & Design (1983), and she returned to academia to receive an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts (1999). Recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 VIVA Award, 2021 Emily Award from Emily Carr University, recent Canada Council and BC Arts Council Awards, and the 2008 Vancouver Queer Media Artist Award, Laiwan served on numerous arts juries, exhibits regularly, curates projects in Canada, the US, and Zimbabwe, is published in anthologies and journals, and taught for twenty years at the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College (VT/WA, USA). She is based on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations and currently works in the Department of Decolonization, Arts and Culture at the Vancouver Park Board.

Bio Photos: 1986 Helsinki, Nina Skogster; 2014 Vancouver, John Fukushima; 2018 Witness to the Peace Valley / No to Site C Dam, Diane Lake; 2014 Vancouver, Nina Skogster, 2019 Selfie.

Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for invaluable support over the years:

Additional thanks to the Faculty Development Fund, Goddard College: