Mirzam Perez Receives Iowa Artist Career Accelerator Grant to Advance Textile Sculpture Work
Mirzam Perez, professor of Spanish, has been selected as a new artist in the Iowa Artist Career Accelerator Program for 2026. In addition, Perez received a grant award of $2,500 which she will use to research and develop a new series of large-scale mixed media textile sculptures inspired by pioneering women sculptors whose practices embody resilience, identity, and material innovation.
She will travel to New Mexico and New York to study the work and legacy of various artists—figures whose creative paths both reflect and challenge her own. These research trips will lay the groundwork for a new body of work exploring themes of migratory memory and transformation, expanding Perez’s ongoing use of symbolic motifs—campfires, books, cartographies, and salmon—while connecting them to a broader lineage of women’s sculptural practices.
She shares “I’m deeply honored to receive this grant, which allows me to delve into the legacy of women sculptors whose work has shaped and challenged the boundaries of material and meaning. This support gives me the space to explore my own practice more boldly, and to trace connections between personal memory, migration, and the collective histories embedded in form and fabric.”
As a program member, Perez joins other new artists in peer learning, mentorship opportunities, and business development resources for artists of all disciplines to support their artistic practices and increase their professional skills and capacity. This Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA)/Iowa Arts Council program is funded in part through a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts and an appropriation by the Iowa Legislature to IEDA.