Ghazel

Founder & Program Lead

Born in Iran, raised in the Netherlands, and based in Montreal, Ghazel is an artist and cultural practitioner working across public programming, education, and contemporary art.

Her work is shaped by a Dutch art-school tradition that prioritizes inquiry, material thinking, and experimentation over instruction or fixed outcomes.

Ghazel holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and an MFA from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, institutions known for their emphasis on critical practice, open inquiry, and working through questions rather than conclusions.

This background informs her approach to public programs as sites of thinking, testing, and collective attention rather than interpretation or delivery.

Through Studium Publiek, Ghazel develops programs in collaboration with museums, galleries, schools, and cultural institutions. These programs operate alongside exhibitions, collections, or broader institutional questions, using them as working material rather than content to be explained.

Visual work, conversation, writing, and reflection are integrated as tools for thinking and ways of paying attention, articulating experience, and allowing ideas to unfold in relation to context.

Rather than guiding participants toward shared conclusions, Ghazel’s programs create structured conditions for divergence: spaces where multiple readings, responses, and approaches can exist in parallel. Her role is attentive and responsive, offering prompts, questions, and frameworks that support decision-making without prescribing outcomes.

Having worked across Amsterdam, Berlin, Vancouver, and Montreal, Ghazel brings an international and cross-cultural perspective to her collaborations.

Her practice is grounded in the belief that public programs can function as meaningful extensions of institutional life, places where audiences are invited not only to engage with art, but to think alongside it.