Every year, creative grad students from across the disciplines submit compelling images of their research and scholarship to the Image of Research competition. To accompany each image submission, the creator writes a short paragraph explaining how the image relates to their wider academic work, giving us a glimpse behind the scenes.
We caught up with some of the award winners from the 2026 Image of Research competition to ask them more about their process. Enjoy this interview with Syed Faizaan Ahab, a graduate student in Art Education and People's Choice winner in this year’s contest, and then view the video to hear Ahab read his award-winning submission, "Move".
Why did you enter Image of Research this year?
I entered the 2026 Image of Research competition because my work exists at the intersection of performance, embodiment, and arts-based research, and I was deeply interested in what it would mean to translate movement into a single still image. The idea that a fleeting performance-based research moment could be captured and held within a frame felt both challenging and profoundly powerful. Entering Image of Research felt like an opportunity to explore how embodied research could communicate through visual stillness while still carrying the emotional and conceptual weight of movement.
What was the process of coming up with your image?
The image was created from a still frame taken from a video-based research project. Because the research itself was rooted in movement, the process was not about staging a photograph independently, but about allowing the choreography, the camera, and the body to work together over time until a moment emerged that could hold the intensity of the larger performance. I spent a great deal of time thinking about how movement translates into stillness, what happens when a gesture is interrupted, frozen, or suspended in an image. As someone deeply invested in arts-based research methodologies, I was interested in how a still frame could function almost like evidence of embodiment, capturing traces of motion, emotion, tension, and vulnerability within a single visual composition. The final image became powerful to me because it exists between movement and silence. Even though it is static, it still carries the residue of performance. That tension between motion and stillness became central to the work and reflected my broader research practice in dance, curriculum, and embodied inquiry.
What did you learn or take away from this experience?
This experience reinforced for me how powerful visual and arts-based research can be in communicating complex ideas to wider audiences. Often, research is expected to exist primarily through text, but Image of Research reminded me that images, bodies, and artistic practices can also generate rigorous forms of knowledge and connection. I also came away with a stronger understanding of the relationship between performance and documentation. In dance, movement disappears as soon as it is performed, but this experience showed me that an image can preserve not only a moment, but also the emotional and conceptual atmosphere surrounding it. It made me think more critically about documentation not as secondary to performance, but as an extension of the research itself. Most importantly, the experience reaffirmed my commitment to arts-based research and to continuing to explore how dance and visual representation can create new ways of thinking, feeling, and understanding research.
Read Ahab's entry
This image captures a video-based research project, Move, at the intersection of movement, listening, and power. The three performers stand facing the viewer, gesturing classical South Asian dance vocabularies. Yet their bodies are held in stillness rather than spectacle. Their hands articulate meaning, but their expressions remain restrained, refusing explanation and performance as entertainment. This tension highlights how embodied knowledge is often rendered hypervisible yet misread within dominant cultural spaces. The stark lighting and frontal composition render the performers almost haunting, neither fully absorbed by the space nor entirely outside it. This visual ambiguity reflects what Allie Martin describes as the politics of listening, where sound and presence are interpreted through social hierarchies rather than neutral perception. Just as Martin argues that sound "happens in interpretation" (Martin, 2025), this image suggests that movement, too, is legible only through the frameworks viewers bring with them. The performers' stillness becomes a form of sonic restraint, an echo of moments where cultural expression is asked to quiet itself to belong. In this way, the image operates as both documentation and critique: a reminder that presence, like sound, does not require permission to exist, even when it is misheard or only partially seen.
Visit the Image of Research website for more information about this celebration of graduate student research.
This interview was conducted by Brandon Stauffer, Videographer here at the Graduate College. Brandon came to the Graduate College with a background in journalism and is now working to showcase the impact of Higher Education at Illinois.
