Bio
BA, Drama
MA, Documentary by Practice
PhD, Art and Media
Gaylan Nazhad is a British artist working across photography and documentary film. His practice explores identity, displacement, memory, and the subtle dynamics of human interaction, examining the emotional and psychological spaces that emerge between people, place, and lived experience.
Born in South Kurdistan, Nazhad grew up during a period marked by war, poverty and political violence. Much of his childhood was shaped by circumstances beyond his control, including experiences connected to genocide and displacement. The loss and fragmentation of childhood became an early, unspoken foundation of his understanding of memory, absence and survival.
Rather than treating these experiences as subjects in themselves, Nazhad's practice has evolved around the traces they leave behind: what people remember, what they lose, what they carry with them, and how ordinary life continues in the presence of uncertainty. His camera is drawn less to spectacle than to the quiet evidence of human experience, gestures, silences, relationships, places and moments that might otherwise disappear.
This perspective has informed a career spanning more than three decades across photography, documentary film, television and education. He began his professional career in 1992 as a television presenter in South Kurdistan before moving into theatre directing and later documentary filmmaking. Over time, photography became central to his practice, developing into a sustained engagement with lived experience, social memory and the complexities of everyday life.
His work has been presented at cultural and academic institutions including the National Portrait Gallery London, Watermans Arts Centre, FACT Liverpool, Broadway Cinema Nottingham, Sheffield DocFest, New Art Exchange Nottingham, the University of Nottingham, and the Library of Birmingham, alongside exhibitions and screenings throughout the United Kingdom, the Middle East and China.
His practice has also been featured by BBC Radio, BBC East Midlands, Notts TV, Kurdsat TV and LeftLion Magazine, extending his work beyond galleries and cinemas into wider public and cultural conversations.
Nazhad is the author of more than a dozen publications. His most recent monograph, Silk and Dust, continues his long-term engagement with contemporary social experience through a quiet, observational approach, exploring the spaces between intimacy and distance, presence and absence, memory and everyday life.
Following his graduation from Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2009, Nazhad began teaching internationally, lecturing in photography and documentary practice at universities across the Middle East and China while continuing his artistic practice.
Today, his work moves between personal memory and collective experience, between places he has known and places he encounters. Across photography and film, he remains interested in the fragile space between what is remembered and what is forgotten — and in the human capacity to continue, even after what has been lost.
