Nazanin Zarepour

Nazanin Zarepour is a writer, publishing artist, and researcher based in the Great Lakes region. Nazanin’s editorial and writing practice experiments with text and print as an agile and mobile medium. They are the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Vermin, a Toronto-based critical experimental publication centred on the subversive and peripheral.

Currently, Nazanin is in the process of completing a PhD in Comparative Literature, with a minor specialization in Media Studies at Cornell University. Their research focuses on Marxism and culture, questions of media technology and armament — including nuclearity and the political economy of oil, anthropology and debates on the secular, print and visual cultures, and West Asia and its diasporas (with a particular focus on Iran).

The contents of this website are mostly writing & arts work. Email me for a full academic CV.

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SELECTED WORK

A Portrait is a Gift: A Conversation Between Ibrahim Absuitta and Nazanin Zarepour

Writing for Ex-Puritan, 2026

A Portrait is a Gift is a discussion with artist Ibrahim Abusitta on his exhibition “Operations” at Whippersnapper Gallery. In dialogue, we interrogate questions on the relationship between struggle and culture, the sanctification of the arts, and the impetus behind documenting resistance at a distance.

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The Vermin Issue 03: (un/in)scripted

Publication, 2026

In the third issue of Toronto-based experimental publication, The Vermin, artists, writers, and editors question publishing within a publication. (un/in)scripted offers a self-reflexive terrain to examine what we are both doing and not doing when we write, print, and disseminate.

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Won’t you rage with us?

Writing for Hamilton Artists Inc, 2025

An exhibition essay for a group show by Nala Ismacil, Miles Obilo, and Sage harnessing rage collectively, Won’t you rage with us explores the global bifurcation of rage, “dangerous” artists, the museum as a “democratic” space, and collage as a DIY tactic beyond the institution.

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Disted

Artist book, 2025

Disted is a long-form poem and artist book exploring the grammar of missing and absence. This risograph-printed book features text overlaid on 35mm photographs taken from Toronto Island, occasionally obscured by a number of hand-cut openings and folds.

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The Vermin Issue 02: Against Pleasure

Publication, 2025

The Vermin’s second issue explores the negation of pleasure that ranges from suffering to the banal. Against the backdrop of our feel-good pleasure-centric political and cultural terrain in the capitalist hubs of the Global North, this issue offers an invitation toward political questioning beyond the pleasure principle.

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Spectral Futures / Heed the Feather Quill’s Warning

Exhibition essay and poster, Trinity Square Video, 2024

This double-sided take-home print made for the exhibition of Spectral Futures (curated by Vince Rozario) features an essay on one side and a poem on the other. The essay traces the trope of the “Uprooted Artist” mired by diasporic longing, and urges a different kind of re-telling that refashions the past toward the future.

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My Body/Not Body

Installation for Charles Street Video, 2024

My Body/Not Body is a large-form poem, featured in Kristine White’s “What is a Body Worth” exhibition at Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts.

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Manufacturing Bureaucracy: Alienation in Ottawa’s Public Service

Writing for The Maple, 2022

Early into their education, Ottawa youth are fed unrelenting advertisements encouraging them to enroll in either the Federal Student Work Experience Program, or, alternatively, a co-op position, where they’re prepped and primed to join the public service immediately upon graduation. This article asks why the neoliberal Canadian government maintains a vested interested in expanding its bureaucratic apparatus, despite the general consensus that many have “little to do” at their jobs.

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Encampment Evictions: Toronto’s Attack on Class Consciousness

Writing for The Maple, 2021

The pandemic proved to be a temporal shift for Toronto, with the lines between housed and unhoused being blurred. With this temporal shift of encampments spreading across the city, the housing crisis becoming increasingly visible and the growth of support networks, the City’s ideological mission was put under threat. As a result, Toronto police ramped up encampment evictions this May to further invisibilize unhoused people and limit public support.

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