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Nooshin Hakim Javadi Appointed to Stamps Faculty

June 20, 2024

Artist, writer, and activist Nooshin Hakim Javadi will join the Stamps School as an Assistant Professor in 2025. Hakim is looking forward to becoming part of the faculty at the top-ranked art and design school.

“The Stamps School is known for interdisciplinary practice,” said Hakim. “Stamps is the pioneer of interdisciplinary art, design, and theory and has the reputation for working beyond the borders of majors, being able to work collaboratively, and really amazing research institutions. I’m proud to become part of Stamps and the greater University of Michigan community.”

Hakim received her BFA in Sculpture from Tehran University and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Minnesota with a minor in Projection Design. She comes to Stamps from her role as an Assistant Professor of Studio Art and area head of Sculpture at Notre Dame University. In her creative practice and research endeavors, Hakim explores themes of feminism, social and environmental justice, and the politics of resistance and draws from the ​“material culture of conflict.”

“My work exists in the periphery of social justice and art,” said Hakim. ​“I am very interested in carbon democracy, the fight for freedom for democracy and gender equality, the geopolitics of the oil industry, and how it has defined the contemporary history of Iran and other countries. I feel that my work is about unfolding those layers.”
Nooshin Hakim Javadi Soil Testing

For the last year and a half, Hakim has collaborated with partners and community members to study the intersectionality of race and environmental racism in marginalized neighborhoods around the Great Lakes Region and the impact of the oil industry. The creative works that resulted from this project, entitled Fossilized Past, were exhibited in the Weisman Museum of Art and will be exhibited in Santiago, Chile, in 2025, along with artists Rodrigo Cadiz and Stamps Assistant Professor Pedram Baldari.

Copy of origin in fraction

Hakim’s work is heavily influenced by āina-kāri, a traditional geometric mirror craft that originated from the need to repair broken mirrors. An example is her interdisciplinary piece Origin in Fraction, which combines āina-kāri, photography, and calligraphy.

Hakim Javadi Nooshin 2 Detail reflection

“I have profound respect for traditional craftsmanship despite often being undervalued. I appreciate its slower, deliberate processes that resist the constant pressures of speed and time,” said Hakim. “I’m really interested in the connection between Iranian philosophers and the representation of those in craft. I still have a strong bond with their traditional craft and how it has been passed down through the generations. It embodies a philosophy of what it means to see yourself within the community and the world.”

In 2023, Nooshin was a Guest Artist in Residence at the Texas Sculpture Symposium at Texas Tech University. She has also received several grants and national and international awards, including the Emerging Artist Jerome Fellowship and Target Studio for Creative Collaboration Fellow at the Weisman Art Museum. 

Her various interdisciplinary works and performances have been exhibited across the country and internationally at places such as the Museum fur Neue Kunst in Freiburg, Germany; Parks Exhibition Center in Idyllwild, California; Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus, Germany; Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design; Plains Art Museum; South Dakota Art Museum; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She will have a new solo exhibition opening in 2024 at the Helikon Art Center in Turkey. 

With her deep knowledge and experience of growing up in Iran, Hakim’s current focus is creating an archive of women’s oral history related to the Iranian feminist movement. ​“Collecting the stories of women that were politically or socially active around the periphery of my country, I think those stories are important to be archived and heard,” said Hakim.

Prior to her start at the Stamps School, Hakim will hold the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellowship through Brown University during the Fall 2024 semester and begin her appointment at Stamps in the 2025 Winter semester.