Sahira Q
Said (Sahira Q) Jiddawy is a multidisciplinary artist. Her main focuses are digital illustrations and performance art, but she has played around with all mediums of art. She identifies as transfeminine, non-binary, and queer. She is black and emigrated to Canada from Tanzania.
A lot of her art is centred around the intersections of being queer and black. Her older pieces focused a lot on male bodies and MSM sex, with the use of crayons and markers on paper. Her current pieces have been digital portraits of black women/femmes that she admires, and she hopes that her future pieces will explore differing body types and travel further into studying black femmes and the different ways we show love, are loved and exist in relationships. She wants to explore this with acrylic paint on canvas. She is also a performance artist through the medium of drag and uses this to shine a light on certain issues that matter to her (i.e. like the hyper sexualization of youthfulness or black lives matter).
Outside of art, she is often found playing video games, watching cartoons with her partner, or dancing up a storm in her kitchen. She is an activist in her community and is one of the founding members of the current chapter of BLM Nogojiwanong. She is a freelance graphic designer and currently works part-time for LGBT YouthLine, a peer-to-peer queer youth support line. She has secured and successfully completed contracts with Trans Youth Can!, PARN (Peterborough Aids Resource Network), and the HKLN Drug Strategy, just to name a few.