Hangama Amiri

Hangama Amiri is an Afghan-Canadian feminist artist, who works in painting and video. Amiri's work has been exhibited in Canada in cities including Halifax, Vancouver,

As a high school student in Tajikistan, Amiri submitted an early painting, “Twin Buddhas”, to a competition held by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), winning a first prize. The painting dealt with the reconstruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001. The prize enabled Amiri to attend Olimov College of Art in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. She received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Olimov College in 2005. A visit to Afghanistan in 2010 inspired her series of paintings "The Wind-Up Dolls of Kabul". In 2017, Amiri was an Artist-in-Residence at the Lunenburg School of the Arts in Nova Scotia.

As of fall 2018, she entered the master's program at the Yale School of Art as a Fulbright Fellow. Many of her pieces deal with the treatment of women in Afghanistan, in particular the infringements of their human rights. Her series “Memory Diary”, small paintings on wood, explores childhood memories of Afghanistan.

More recently, she has completed two landscape projects. The first group of works, At the Edge of the Shore was exhibited in 2013 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2017, Amiri completed a second residency there, again focusing on landscapes.