Darian Goldin Stahl is an American printmaker and bookmaker based in Montreal, Canada. She is currently enrolled in the PhD Humanities program at Concordia University in Montreal. Her thesis project, “Lived Scans: Aesthetic Phenomenological Encounters with MRI Scans and the Patient Experience,” was awarded the prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Darian employs research-creation methods to investigate how a haptic engagement with a person’s own medical scans can restore a sense of agency over the medicalized body, and in turn, change the way a doctor views her patient from a representative object into irreducible subject.

Darian’s artwork is situated at the intersection of patient narrative, biomedical imaging technology, and multi-sensory printmaking practices. She employs visual metaphors to better represent what it is like to live with chronic illness on a daily basis. To this end, she combines signifiers of illness (such as MRI scans and hospital gowns) with sound, light, aromatic oils, and skin impressions to create immersive psychological snapshots of the patient’s mind while she is being scanned in the hospital. This research-creation project is a collaborative cycle of informing and reconstructing illness identity, with the aim of advancing the field of medical humanities and fostering a more empathetic relationship between medical practitioners and their patients.

Darian holds an MFA in Printmaking from the University of Alberta and a BFA in Printmaking from Indiana University Bloomington. She has received grants from many organizations to fund the production of her artwork, including the Edmonton Arts Council, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Hexagram (Montreal), and the Renata and Michal Hornstein Foundation. Before beginning her PhD, Darian completed an eight-month Scholarship Residency at Malaspina Printmakers in Vancouver. She has exhibited her work in many galleries and conference venues around the world, including Impact 10 (Santander, Spain), Martha Street Studio (Winnipeg), Kelowna Art Gallery, Kimura Art Gallery (Anchorage, Alaska), Art Gallery of St. Albert (Alberta), and the Ottawa School of Art. Most recently, Darian and her collaborating partner and sister, Devan Stahl, published an edited volume on their practice entitled, “Imaging and Imagining Illness: Becoming Whole in a Broken Body,” through Wipf and Stock Press.

To see Darian’s work, please visit her website: www.dariangoldinstahl.com