Meet our Teach Inspire Create 2026 speaker: Aziza Kadyri
- Written byAziza Kadyri
- Published date 04 November 2026
From textiles and traditional craftsmanship to artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, Aziza Kadyri brings together different worlds through her creative practice. Exploring the connections between cultural heritage, identity, migration and technology, her work challenges us to think differently about how stories are told, whose histories are remembered and how creativity can shape our understanding of the world.
We’re delighted to welcome Aziza, a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across installation, performance, textiles and digital technologies, as a keynote speaker at the Teach Inspire Create Summit 2026. Drawing on a creative journey that has taken her from studying diplomacy to exploring fashion, theatre and technology, Aziza will share how experimentation, collaboration and embracing uncertainty have shaped her practice.
Alongside her artistic practice, Aziza co-founded Qizlar, a feminist collective in Uzbekistan that creates space for women to connect, share knowledge and skills, and explore new opportunities through community-led creative projects.
Ahead of the Summit, we spoke to Aziza about the experiences and ideas behind her work, how emerging technologies are changing creative practice, and why staying curious matters when navigating an uncertain creative landscape.
1. You grew up between Taipei, Tashkent, Moscow and Beijing. How have these different cultural experiences shaped the way you see the world and approach your creative practice?
Growing up in different countries taught me that people can see the same thing very differently, depending on their language, culture and experiences. I think this notion forms the centre of my practice: I’m interested in translation, misunderstanding, and ways we try and make ourselves legible to others. My relationship with Uzbekistan, which is my ancestral home, is also shaped by distance and through semi-forgotten family stories, tactility of textiles, a mix of languages, and inherited memories. My work with material practices, performance and digital technologies allows me to explore these overlapping experiences without having to resolve them into a single identity. I’m drawn to combining media that might seem disconnected or incompatible. I like to see what emerges when they come together.
2. How have you found the experience of embedding themes like decolonisation and migration into your work and what does it mean for you to be able to share this in your work?
These questions often enter my work through something very personal: my grandfather’s inventions and patents, my grandmother’s unpublished memoir, or even knowledge passed between women through textiles. Through these personal stories, I explore why some voices become part of history, while others are overlooked. Experimenting with artificial intelligence models has brought another dimension to this. I’m interested in what happens when complex, lived experiences meet systems that often reproduce very simplified images of people and places. I want my work to open conversations about how emerging technologies shape the way we experience and understand migration, as well as how they can reinforce colonial power relations. I explore these questions through my own experiences and collaborations, without claiming to speak for an entire community.
3. What changes or trends in the creative industries are you most excited about right now? And what do you think educators can do to help their students succeed in an ever-changing creative landscape?
I’m excited by work that blurs the boundaries between different media and brings together different senses. We experience the world through sight, sound, touch, and movement, often all at once, and I’m interested in how creative practice can embrace that. In my own work, textiles become interactive interfaces, sound becomes sculptural, audiences engage through movement and touch. Combining these elements helps me explore ideas in ways that a single medium might not allow. I think these encounters can open up unexpected ways of creating and sharing knowledge.
For educators, I think the challenge is to help students stay curious and open, as the world changes and technology develops so quickly. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed or discouraged by the pressure to keep up. I think education can help students build the confidence to explore new tools while asking bigger critical questions that remain relevant across technologies and media. Those questions can guide the form their work takes, help them decide which tools will best serve their ideas.
4. How do you approach blending social activism in your work?
For me, this starts with concrete decisions: who do I work with? How do we make decisions together? How do I make sure every contribution gets recognised? Which narratives are being highlighted? When I collaborate with embroiderers, for example, I invite them to bring their own ideas and expertise into the work. This matters especially in projects that involve research around AI, where the technology can attract more attention than the people and labour behind the final piece.
Co-founding Qizlar has given many of these concerns a collective form through community projects, informal education and opportunities to share skills. That work informs my artistic practice, although the two do not always take the same shape. An artwork can prompt a difficult conversation or make an overlooked history visible, but sustained collective organising involves the ongoing work of building relationships and supporting one another beyond an exhibition.
5. Our annual Summit is titled ‘Teach, Inspire, Create’. What do these words mean to you personally? What topics will you cover under these themes?
For me, “teach” brings to mind my schoolteacher, who submitted my textile paintings to competitions without telling me and helped me learn to take my own creativity seriously. “Inspire” makes me think of collaborators whose approaches have led me to rethink a form, an idea, or even my role in a project. “Create” means being willing to become a beginner again, whether I’m trying to understand machine learning or digital embroidery - and letting unexpected results change the direction of my work. In my talk, I’ll reflect on what it takes to keep choosing an artistic life without knowing whether it will work out. I’ll share my path from leaving a diplomacy degree after one day to moving to China and finding my way through fashion, theatre and tech. I’ll discuss how experimentation and collaboration helped me continue through uncertainty, and how my socially engaged practice informs my thinking about women’s labour and collective support.
Register now to join us on Friday 20 November at the Teach Inspire Create Summit 2026 for a day of sharing ideas and celebrating the power of creative education.