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Diyan Achjadi

Vice-President Academic + Provost

Bio

Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, Diyan Achjadi’s formative years were spent moving between educational, political and cultural systems. Diyan has been an educator at the Cooper Union, Concordia University and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. They were promoted to full professorship in the Audain Faculty of Art in 2020. At ECU, they have served on Senate and on the Academic Affairs, Academic Planning + Priorities and the Strategic Enrollment Management Committees. They have supported Admissions + Recruitment through work on the Direct Entry Committee, the Faculty Admissions Team and at events. Diyan was president of the Board of Directors at grunt gallery, vice-chair of the City of Vancouver Public Art Committee and has worked as a mentor in the Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design BIPoC Academic Leadership Institute. They are currently a member of the Advisory Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Policy for the Tri-agency Institutional Programs Secretariat, which is responsible for the day-to-day administration of the SSHRC Research Support Fund. Diyan has also been actively involved in developing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion policy and practice at ECU.

Research Interests

As an artist, Diyan has exhibited widely, and their work is included in public collections across Canada and the US. Through drawing, printmaking and animation, they use modes of fiction and storytelling to examine interrelated and conflicting histories of place. Their work explores the ways that surface ornamentation and illustrated printed matter can function as archives documenting the circulation of ideas in visual form. Recent exhibitions include Enfoldings (2025), Stories for Futures, Real and Imagined (2024), Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network (2024), Between Line and Thread: Connecting the Asian American Arts Centre Collection (2023), Carried Through the Water (2022), Hush (2021), and Whose Stories? (2021). They received the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation in 2021 and were inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2023.