The Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf (CCSD)
The Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf (CCSD), a registered non-profit organization since 1973, recognized as one of Canada’s national arts service organizations, has received numerous awards for its Deaf arts productions.
One of our core mandates is to feature and foster high quality Deaf visual and performing artists’ work to significantly increased audiences, with increased numbers of artist works, increased and strengthened partnerships to build and solidify capacity and our place in the arts ecosystem. Our new headquarter is now the Deaf Culture Retreat Centre, a 4-acre retreat venue in Grande-Digue, New Brunswick, also a home of the Deaf Arts Academy, a training for the next generation of professional Deaf visual and performing artists.
Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf’s DEAF CULTURE CENTRE is thrilled to present an exhibition at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair showcasing Deaf View/Image Art (De’VIA) and Deaf artists. This exhibition aims to showcase De’VIA, which specifically reflects the Deaf experience and to feature Deaf art, which encompasses a broader range of themes and subjects created by Deaf artists.
What is De’VIA?
De’VIA is a visual art genre created by artists who explore their Deaf experience on a personal, cultural, or physical level. It employs formal art elements that include:
- Intense and contrasting colours
- Contrasting textures and values that highlight aspects of Deaf life
- Emphasis on eyes, mouths, ears, and hands
- Motifs, metaphors, and insights reflecting Deaf perspectives
Visit the artists at Booth 550 at Nathan Phillips Square July 10-12!
Mixed media: acrylic paint, markers, and coloured
pencils on round canvas.
Curator
Maryam Hafizirad
Maryam Hafizirad is an international award-winning Deaf Canadian Persian painter and sculptor. She is a freelance visual artist, art curator, teacher, mentor, and advocate for Deaf artists. A graduate of Isfahan University of Fine Arts (2002), her exhibitions have been featured in Iran, China, Germany, Malaysia, India, Canada, and the United States.
Her paintings and sculptures have been shown in both solo and group exhibitions worldwide, and she has received numerous grants and awards for her visual art. In 2022, she was invited to collaborate with the University of Toronto on the Sustainable pARTnerships project, creating an animated video based on her artwork. This collaboration has been extended through 2024.
Since 2022, Maryam has been working as a Curator for Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf (CCSD)’s award winning DEAF CULTURE CENTRE. Maryam is recognized as among the first Deaf Canadian art curators.
Instagram: @m.hafizirad
Participating Artists
Samira Savadkoohi
Samira is a Deaf visual and multidisciplinary artist with a background in environmental design. Her work explores identity, language, accessibility, and resilience. Growing up without access to sign language deeply shaped her understanding of communication and belonging. Later discovering American Sign Language transformed her sense of self and influenced her artistic direction.
She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and a Master’s degree in Environmental Design. Her graduate research focused on adapting urban spaces to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. This foundation continues to inform her artistic practice.
Through painting, drawing, and mixed media, Samira creates De’VIA-inspired works that reflect language deprivation, growth, and empowerment. Using hands, roots, and organic forms as recurring symbols, she expresses the journey from silence to identity. Her work celebrates Deaf culture and builds bridges between Deaf and hearing communities through powerful visual storytelling.
Viktoriya Rudenko
Viktoriya is a Deaf artist living in Ottawa, Ontario. From the age of four, she grew up surrounded by the art world in Russia. She trained as a classical artist, specializing in watercolour, and receiving recognition and awards for her work. From ages seven to sixteen, she attended a formal art school where she studied with professional artists and art experts and was the only Deaf student among her hearing colleagues.
With a diploma in Art Design and degrees in Interior Design and Publishing & Editing, building a career connected to the arts was important to Viktoriya.. She also worked as a graphic designer with many clients and participated in exhibitions in Russia and Ukraine.
In 2009, she moved to Canada and focused on learning English to build a new life. In 2014, she returned to painting and rediscovered her passion for art. Over the past fifteen years, she has become more involved in the Deaf community and explored different visual art mediums, including watercolour, glass blowing and glass fusing.
She is proud to be part of the Deaf View/Image Art (De’VIA) cohort of the national Deaf Arts Academy.
Emily Akerman
Emily Akerman is a Deaf artist living and working in Toronto. Her practice moves across painting, illustration, and creative writing, shaped by lived experiences of deafness, identity, and belonging. Studying at OCAD University and working in the Risograph Studio, she translates everyday moments of silence, miscommunication, and advocacy into vivid, expressive forms.
Working under the name Poofy, she embraces play as a way to hold complexity and tenderness. Rooted in the De’VIA movement, her work honours Deaf histories while carving space for new narratives. Projects such as Eye Get Misinformed and Dear Hearing People, a hand-printed risograph zine, invite empathy through humour, intimacy, and care.
Rae RezWell
Rae RezWell (she/her) is a Deaf Dominican-Canadian Mixed Media Photographer who expresses her intersectionality in her artwork as a voice. Rae holds a BFA, a Major in Photography from NSCAD University and Creative Photography Diploma from Humber College. Rae focused on digital photography and traditional photography like cyanotype, lumen prints and other alternative processes. She does a variety of skills other than photography like painting, videography, graphic design, printmaking, sculpture, new media, and more. However, Rae includes merging with other art materials and/or techniques like acrylic paints, graphite pencils, video, 3D printing, papermaking, and more.
