Raha Atashpa
Continuing Studies Instructor, Visual Arts
Education:
PhD Candidate, UBC
MFA
BFA
Bio
Raha Atashpa is a visual artist, educator and interdisciplinary scholar working across drawing, painting, sculpture and installation. Her art-based research investigates themes like time, memory, material trace and presence, and has been exhibited in Canada and Iran. Raha is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC, where her art-led research explores the role of aesthetic experience, creativity and embodies making in inclusive pedagogy and visual culture.
Websites:
Research Interests
Raha’s practice moves between drawing, painting, sculpture, text and installation. She’s interested in the felt sense of time, the instability of memory, and the poetics of absence, particularly how these conditions emerge through material and embodied processes. Feminist ethics, affect theory and diasporic experience shape the way she thinks about form, gesture, and responsibility in image-making.
Raha sees the classroom as a space of collective inquiry, where close looking, material play and critical dialogue can intersect. Whether teaching drawing or guiding reflective practice, she encourages students to work with care, curiosity, and openness.