Ziyana Kotadia is a young advocate and writer in her final year of an Honours Specialization in Global Gender Studies and a Minor in Feminist, Queer and Critical Race Theory from Western University and Huron University College. She is passionate about poetry, performance, and politics and has a keen interest in exploring intersections among the worlds of academia, art, and advocacy. Currently, she is a research intern with the Undergraduate Student Research Internship program and was recently awarded a Research Fellowship with the Centre for Undergraduate Research and Learning. Most recently, Ziyana was the full-time 2021-2022 Vice-President University Affairs for Western’s University Students’ Council, one of the nation’s leading student organizations and London’s largest not-for-profit ($30+ million operating budget), where she championed gender equity projects and the voices of over 35,000 undergraduate and professional students as the Chief Advocate and Stakeholder Relations Manager to the university’s senior administration. During her undergraduate degree, Ziyana has been the 2020-2021 President and CEO of the Huron University College Students’ Council, the 2019-2020 Vice President and Artistic Director of the Huron Underground Dramatic Society, and was a 2021 Delegate for Equal Voice’s Daughters of the Vote program, where she represented her federal riding at a political leadership summit at Parliament Hill. Her most recent publications as of July 2022 include her second-place winning poem “Heir to A Garden Heart” in ‘Symposium’ and “Poetry, Prayer, and Politics: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Womanhood in the Canadian Ugandan Khoja Ismaili Diaspora” in ‘Liberated Arts: A Journal for Undergraduate Research’.
Ziyana Kotadia
