Nahed currently serves as Ontario Arts Council's new Visual Arts Officer.
Nahed has over 15 years of experience as an artist, curator, and arts manager, working in community-based festivals (Mayworks Festival), artist-run centres (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), and public art museums (Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Gardiner Museum, and Royal Ontario Museum). She is recognized for connecting socially engaged BIPOC artists and communities with arts spaces of different scales. She has a strong record of designing inclusive and accessible programs that advance community collaborations, arts education, and artistic practice from an equity-informed perspective and anti-racist framework. Her independent curatorial practice centers work by visual, media, and community-based artists whose work respond to contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental issues from racialized and gendered perspectives.
Museums and Public Art Galleries
From 2022-2024, Nahed worked at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), where she served as Senior Manager of Gallery Engagement in the Learning and Public Programs department. She lead a team of 20-40 facilitators who engaged audiences of all ages with hands-on and inquiry-based interactions. The Gallery Engagement team programmed March Break, holiday, and summer activations which engaged 4-7k daily visitors. Nahed was also an active member of a team that inaugurated WonderWorks gallery in July 2023. The newly reimagined kids gallery is designed to function as play-based learning space that forwards 21st Century learning.
From 2019-2022, Nahed worked at the Gardiner Museum where she held the role of Curator of Programs and Education and served as an active member of the museum's Senior Manager team. Working at the Gardiner Museum during the pandemic, Nahed lead the museum's free, accessible, and at-times online community programs. She coordinated the museum's Community Arts Space, an incubator for arts-based community projects that build community through clay making. Nahed curated community-based exhibitions including Fragments and Fictions (Z*otz Collective) and Forever Bird-Botanicals (David Salazar, Workman Arts). Other meaning partnerships she coordinated including Knowing Histories, Building Futures (Nia Centre) and Community is Essential (Turtle House Art/Play Centre, FCJ Refugee Centre). She lead the Gardiner's 2021 summer initiative, Gardiner Goes Outside which welcomed audience's of all ages to work with clay outdoors in a safe and social environment during the pandemic.
From 2017-2019, Nahed worked at at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA-Toronto) as Constituent Curator: Communities and Engagement. In this role she designed and developed the museum's Art In Use space. In this space, she commissioned projects by Hiba Ali & Justin Langlois, Adrian Blackwell, and Ange Loft. Nahed also organized Basma Alsharif's solo exhibition and programmed a series of off-site performance lectures titled The Art of Propagation.
Artist-Run Centres
Prior to working in museums, Nahed worked as Artistic Director at the South Asian Visual Art Centre and Director at Mayworks Festival Toronto.
Service
Awards
Nahed was awarded Ontario Museum Association's Promising Leadership Award in 2022, and was selected as a Fellow in the 2020 Cohort of Toronto Arts Council's Leaders Lab.