Saied Dai is Persian by birth, Saied Dai was born in Tehran in 1958 and came to England at the age of six.
He began his seven years of art training at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design and shortly after was awarded a place at the Royal Academy of Arts for his postgraduate studies. There, he was privileged to come into contact with artists of real distinction such as Peter Greenham, Norman Blamey and Roderic Barrett.
He was regarded well enough to be invited back to the RA Schools to teach under Leonard McComb’s Keepership, where drawing was seen to be the cornerstone of all the disciplines. He says, “I was fortunate enough to be taught art as architecture. Drawing reveals the way an artist thinks. It is the means by which one makes visual relationships.”
On recommendation from Norman Blamey RA, Saied was also placed to teach at the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture in Regent’s Park at its idealistic inception.
After being elected to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 2004, he won the prestigious Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture and the Society’s Gold Medal in 2006, followed by the Prince of Wales Drawing Award in 2007.