Haadia Hyder is a Community Engagement Intern at Urban Arts Space. She's also a first-year Public Policy major with a minor in City and Regional Planning and an Urdu specialization. She is an avid artist, with a current focus on large abstract paintings in oils and acrylics, having exhibited her work across the city, including with Urban Arts Space, Blockfort, and Wild Goose Creative. You can find her first mural downtown, between Goodale and High Street, as part of Summer Spray with the Short North Arts District. Beyond abstract and contemporary painting, she loves drawing comics and portraits. Haadia uses painting as a way of processing the world around her and turning over ideas- she relishes in the freedom and possibility abstract work allows. 

If she's not in class, studying, working, or making something, you'll find her watching movies at Gateway Film Center, reading nonfiction or writing personal essays at a local coffee shop, or spending time with her friends. If she's not doing any of those things, she's practicing or performing with 8th Floor Improv, OSU's premier long-form improv team, or at the Sundial, OSU's satire magazine (think The Onion, but even funnier).

She's deeply passionate about re-shaping systems to work for us, the people, through government and policy, to create a more just and equitable world- eliminating systemic barriers in our individual and collective pursuits of wholeness. John Adams once said, "I must study politics... that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy... in order to give their children a right to study painting..." She studies politics and paints.