Zainub Verjee


Zainub Verjee is a video artist, curator, writer, arts administrator and public intellectual.
Her work has been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale. She was Film Distribution Manager at the Women in Focus Society, Vancouver. She was involved with the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. In 1989 Verjee cofounded In Visible Colours with Lorraine Chan of the National Film Board, an international film and video festival and symposium featuring the work of women of colour. Following the success of In Visible Colours, she was invited by the Jeanne Sauvé Youth Foundation to lead a workshop on International Forum 1992: globalization and nationalism at the first International Conference for Young Leaders, Montreal.
In the 1990s, she worked for a decade as the Executive Director of the Western Front Society in Vancouver.
As a writer and critic she has been very prolific. She was the guest editor of a special double issue of the Capilano Review, the first to be entirely devoted to women, featuring thirty-seven British Columbia women writers and visual artists, all working within the theme of struggle, local and global.
She has been active as an arts administrator in the field of cultural policy and cultural diplomacy for over 30 years. Her decades of work in the sector has led to appointments on boards, steering committees and invitations to speak on the national and international fora. In addition to holding positions at Women in Focus, Citizen’s Forum on Canada’s Future -The Spicer Commission, Canada Council for the Arts, Department of Canadian Heritage etc.,she was engaged by Gordon Campbell, Canadian diplomat and the 35th Mayor of Vancouver on his landmark Vancouver Arts Initiative, and among many appointments to Boards, she is proud of her work at the B.C. Arts Board that led to the formation of the B.C. Arts Council. In 2017 she was appointed as the Director of the International Art Gallery at the Jubilee International Arts Festival in Lisbon.
Appointed in 2015, Zainub is currently the Executive Director of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries.
Born in Nairobi in 1956, Zainub is a fourth generation Kenyan. She moved to Canada in the 1970s to study economics at Simon Fraser University. Verjee family is known for its philanthropy around the world.

Career

Selected exhibitions

In 1993 Verjee presented Ecoute s'il pleut , a French/English video poem to allow the viewer to experience the fullness of silence.