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How do you keep moving forward when you know you may not see your family again? How do you make art in a time of brutality, of death, of encroaching darkness? How do you rise each morning carrying the ache of absence, the quiet, constant throb of missing the people who are your home? For Negar Nazari, these are not abstract questions. They are the architecture of her daily life. Her husband and her entire family remain in Iran. He was unable to leave because of complications surrounding his departure, and later, the travel restrictions imposed during the Trump administration closed the door more firmly still. She does not know when she will hold him again, or sit at a table with her family, or hear their voices without a screen between them.
And yet, every morning, she rises to make art. Negar is a second-year MFA student in the Illustration, Design, and Animation Department at the University of Arizona School of Art, where she also serves as a drawing lab instructor. Recently, she was recognized with awards from the Arizona Artists Guild and the Arizona Watercolor Association in support of emerging artists, and she will be formally honored on April 21, 2026, at the Arizona Artists Guild in Phoenix. These milestones mark achievement—but they do not begin to tell the whole story.
Because what Negar truly does is transform longing into light. She pours it into her watercolors, where color becomes breath. She builds it into her installations, where absence becomes presence. She animates it into moving images that tremble with tenderness and defiance. For Negar, art is not decoration; it is survival. It is a way of insisting on humanity when the world feels determined to erase it.
She believes art deepens our understanding of what it means to be human. Through art, we return to our hearts. Through art, we offer those hearts to one another. Through art, we gather—quietly but powerfully—to stand against the dark.
So Negar wakes each day and begins again. This is how she keeps going. This is her story.
Producer: Özlem Ayşe Özgür
Videographer: Danny Sax, Özlem Ayşe Özgür
Editor: Nate Huffman
