Zayaan Khan Mentorship Awards recipient

Zayaan Khan works in food justice, land justice, and seed justice as a storyteller and multidisciplinary artist based in South Africa. She expresses these three main themes through various mediums, including lino printing, cyanotype, ceramic sculpture, seed work, sound, video, writing, and more. In the first theme, “Epistemicide”, she explores the recovery and reclamation of ways of knowing, particularly in response to ecocide. The second theme, “AncientFutures”, involves the reinterpretation of culture and tradition in a contemporary context, using deep time as a lens to understand our relationship with financialized systems and our disconnection from the land. The third theme, “Deathlife”, delves into grief, ritual, and memory through deep listening, employing dreaming and deathmaking as tools for exploration. 

Zayaan’s practice is deeply rooted in the local landscapes, drawing inspiration from their rich biodiversity and the enduring relationship between people, the land, and the sea. In addition to her artistic pursuits, Zayaan educates children on food literacy. She co-founded the South African Slow Food Youth Network and is actively involved in developing the Seed Library as part of her PhD program.