Meet our Fulbright alumnus Qazi Fazli Azeem who is also Pakistan’s first and only ‘self-advocate’ for Autism Spectrum. He has been always passionate about helping people and knew that he wanted to have a career focused on helping people in some capacity. Qazi has always loved arts. He believes art gives meaning to life and helps us understands the world around. Because of his strong believe in the power of arts, he uses design and technology for self-advocacy, training parents, doctors, and special educators and to help them understand various concepts around Autism, get practical advice and take on the highly valuable inside perspective. He has an ideology that when a person sees a powerful Autism-friendly design, he feels it touching deep within his core, giving him the power to make real-life development changes. This ideology taught him a great sense of resiliency.
Qazi Fazli Azeem has been serving as an Assistant Professor and the Program Manager of MS Media Studies and MS Advertising at Media Science Department at SZABIST University, Karachi for last three years. He has completed MFA in Design at the Dynamic Media Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston between 2012 and 2014, through the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright Scholarship Program. He had an excellent opportunity of meeting American self-advocates at Autism Conferences and public awareness events as well as leading researchers, educators, and public policy makers during his two years in Boston. “I am thankful to the U.S. State Department for sponsoring my education and enabling me to interact with the American people, American self-advocates and American educators, most of whom I now know as friends and colleagues.”
Qazi has been spreading Autism awareness in Pakistan since 2006 when he was diagnosed as an adult on the spectrum (Asperger’s Syndrome). He was a student of visual communication design and was quite familiar with the process of explaining design work to clients and educators. He started using the same approach to explain Autism to people. He started self-advocacy unapologetically because he always believes in ‘Being the Real You’. Everything he worked towards was focused on bringing about positive, sustainable, and productive change that betters the lives of Autistic people, young and old.
While in Boston, during his research, he had the privilege of meeting Dania Jekel. She is Executive Director of the Asperger/Autism Network (AANE) and granddaughter of Dr. Sigmund Freud. On April 02, 2013 on U.N. World Autism Awareness Day, he represented South Asia as a panelist at the United Nations. Because of his dedicated efforts in Autism awareness, he represented Pakistan at the Regional Autism Conference in India and at the UN office in Kenya during the 2015 U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit, presided by U.S. President Barack Obama.
Qazi Fazli Azeem feels very fortunate to have a career he loves. He is living successfully because he never resigned to fate and dealt everything with courage. This is the reason fortune favored him always!
