Mariam Stephan
Plenary Speaker
MARIAM STEPHAN, Associate Professor Art - Painting Stephan’s work explores the seemingly disparate themes of infinity and interconnectedness using the motif and metaphor of landscape: landscapes as bodies, as homes, and as vessels. Her work has appeared in solo and group shows in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Cairo, Egypt. Her work is included in the Pierogi Flat files in Brooklyn, as well as in the permanent collection of the Mobile Museum of Art. She received a 2010-11 Fulbright Scholars Award to Egypt for a project entitled Painting Bridging Time: The Egyptian Fayum Mummy Portraits. Stephan joined the faculty at UNCG in 2004.
http://www.mariamstephan.com/about.html
Mariam Aziza Stephan (b.1972) is a first generation Afghan- German American painter making works about aftermaths. Landscape as a battered casualty memorializing the ground around us as reminders of our collective loss. Sir Simon Schama argued that landscapes are culture before they are nature. Landscapes reflect what we value or squander; the places she constructs explore this state of psychological, political, and environmental upheaval. They do not represent a single place rather an aggregate of sites of upheaval, destruction, no-go zones and those moving in that direction. The sense of loss, polarization, and fracturing that she constructs in these images is meant to simultaneously reflect upon and memorialize the time we live in and recognize our shared accountability to the land and those around us. She has received awards including the 2018 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a 2010-11 Fulbright Scholar to Egypt, and currently serves as Professor in Painting at UNC Greensboro. She lives in Greensboro, NC.