Maisa Mreiwed is a Syrian-Canadian artist, researcher, and educator based in London, Ontario, Canada. She holds a Fashion Design Diploma from LaSalle College, a BA in Religious Studies, and MA in Art Education from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. In 2007, the Arab International University (AIU) in Syria, recruited Maisa to launch and head the Fashion Design Department. She also taught several courses such as Islamic Art, Textiles, Fashion Phenomena, and Costume History. Her passion for teaching and learning about the arts in its diverse forms led her to create intricate works embedded with signs and symbols that address issues and raise questions inspired by the past and present. To Maisa, art is a powerful visual narrative that connects people to each other and to the environment.

Maisa’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally through residences, exhibitions, public art, and conference presentations in Canada and abroad. Presently, her work can be found at the Art à la Carte in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario building, on traffic signal boxes organized by London Arts Council, London, Ontario, and on the book cover of Art as an Agent for Social Change published by Brill Publishing (2021). In 2022, Maisa received the Lakehead Arts Integrated Research Award inspired by climate change and action. Her chapter “Storytelling through Textiles: The Re-birth of a Phoenix Called Damascus" has been published in the book “Making Connections in and through Arts-based Educational Research” by Springer Education (2023). She is a member of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies (CACS), the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), and The International Society for Education Through Art (InSEA). Her current project examines storytelling through textiles.