Del Vaz Projects is a non-profit art space based in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 2014 by Jay Ezra Nayssan in a home-turned-artists space in Santa Monica—and accredited as a 501(c)(3) in 2021—Del Vaz Projects mounts exhibitions, produces publications, and stages programs centering visual art, performance work, and moving-image media. Named after the Persian phrase دست و دلباز (dæst ō del bāz), meaning openhanded and openhearted, our approach is intentional, relational, and resourceful. We collaborate with artists across generations and geographies to manifest projects in our space and throughout our city’s cultural and historical institutions—with each endeavor, infusing diverse environments with a sense of collective intimacy, intellectual inquiry, and expressive invention. 

Our space serves as an incubator for artists, archives, and estates and is driven by four essential initiatives: a curatorial platform that produces on-site and off-site exhibitions that are free and accessible to the public; a research collective comprised of fellows and freelancers who pair cutting-edge scholarship with experimental authorship to craft insightful texts for Del Vaz Projects’ shows and publications; an independent press that designs, publishes, and distributes artist books and exhibition catalogs—featuring critical texts commissioned by contemporary writers and cultural innovators; and an artist production fund that secures fiscal and material resources through our extended community of collaborators in order to support underfunded artists as they pursue ambitious projects.

Del Vaz Projects embraces a specificity that does not deny inclusivity—translating those personalized values cultivated from its founding in Nayssan’s Westside apartment to ensure that artists feel the freedom and experimentation of home in any space they occupy. With each project we curate and program, we strive to redefine standards and encourage our partnering institutions to imagine beyond the parameters of their program—devising new ways to adapt their spaces and resources to the aspirations of the artist. Del Vaz Projects remains committed to ensuring that the voices we champion are reflective of a multiracial, economically diverse, international, and LGBTQIA+ inclusive society and, through their work, inspire the intersection of disparate audiences—growing at a thoughtful pace and scale that prioritizes cultural dialogues that are impactful and meaningful to our city.

About Jay Ezra Nayssan

Jay Ezra Nayssan, the founding director of Del Vaz Projects, is a queer, Jewish, Iranian-American for whom place, community, gathering, and exchange are of personal and cultural significance. His familial experiences of exile and immigration fuel his devotion to dissident and divergent communities, with a curatorial perspective informed by his investigations into how creative practice catalyzes notions of the built and natural environment, the mutability of conceptual and physical bodies, material culture in colonial geopolitics, and queer intersectionality in modern and historical contexts. With a diverse academic background that provides him with unconventional insights into the arts, Nayssan instills Del Vaz Projects with a holistic, multidirectional, and distinctive approach—over the last decade, facilitating dialogues between vast generations of artists working across various mediums and subjects.

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To obtain a Public Inspection Copy of our 2021, 2022, or 2023 Tax Return, please email info@delvazprojects.com with your request. 

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