Selected applicants for program allocation
Soeine Bac is a Korean-born immigrant to Canada, who works with movement, installation and sound; movement remains central. Improvisation and the study of nature grounds Bac’s practice. Bac investigates the relationship between body, space and the natural world, informed by Zen Buddhist philosophy, somatic awareness and site-specificity. Bac also explores sound as a way to sense space and the ephemerality of experience. Bac enters a space without preconceptions, allowing transformation through encounter while minimizing human intention. Rooted in the East Asian thought of emptiness, this approach guides Bac’s improvisation and the search for spirituality in art. Bac aims to cultivate relational, ecologically attuned spaces where coexistence can emerge. Learn more.
Selina Brenner is an interdisciplinary vocalist, lyricist, and performing artist whose work explores shifting notions of home, memory, and belonging. Growing up between the United States and Switzerland, they navigate themes of displacement, re-rooting, and collective storytelling through sound, film, text, and movement. Their practice integrates poetry, field recordings, and motion picture, creating immersive works shaped by both conscious and intuitive states. Intimate and collaborative, their work often unfolds with filmmakers, dancers, musicians, and community, forming layered exchanges across disciplines. Their main project, Living Room Stranger, is an ongoing interdisciplinary exploration they will deepen through site-specific engagement with Burnaby’s Deer Lake and its surrounding community. Learn more.
Jack Campbell is a Canadian composer, concert violinist, arts producer and recording artist. Called a “prodigiously gifted young violinist” (The Strad) and a “young master of the arts” (London Daily News), Campbell has performed in: Canada, England/Wales, France, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States. Current album releases are: “Sounding Bombe; Enigmatic Music” (Jack Campbell, violin, Neil Osborne, producer), “Planets” (Jack Campbell, violin, Hank Bull, piano, Arthur Bull, guitar, John Brennan, drums, Liam Murphy, Saxophone) and “Inventions” (Jack Campbell, violin, Hank Bull, piano).
Named a “writer to watch” by CBC Books and Shondaland, Christina Cooke is the author of Broughtupsy—which was shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize; named a "Best Book of 2024" by CBC Books, Elle, Electric Literature, and Debutiful; and listed as recommended reading by over 30 outlets including Vogue, The Toronto Star, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Bazaar. A Journey Prize winner and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Caribbean Writer, PRISM international, LitHub, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. Born in Jamaica, Cooke is now a Canadian who lives and writes in New York City. Learn more.
Brandon A. Dalmer recently completed his Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University. Dalmer’s work explores the way images are generated and the tenuous understanding we have with expanding technologies. Through the use of fabrication, generative processes and robotic assistance, his painting practice aims to contextualize and elucidate the often unseen processes underlying our everyday lives. This also acts as a method of archive. His practice is open-source allowing others to expand upon it, granting a form of technological undeath.
Dalmer has participated in a number of residencies and exhibitions across Canada and internationally. He currently lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal. Learn more.
Maya Florey is a Burnaby-based sculptor who draws inspiration from plants, animals, rocks and fungi, creating otherworldly, yet strangely familiar forms. Florey received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Ceramics from Emily Carr University in 2023. Since graduating, they have been teaching at community studios, exhibiting their work in several group shows and a solo show and making, at their studio and as a 2025 artist in residence at Medalta. Florey was the recipient of the John C. Kerr Chancellor Emeritus Award for Excellence in Visual Arts (2023), Carole Badgely Emerging Artist Award (2024) and Micki MacKenzie Educational Craft Bursary (2025). Learn more.
Claire is an artist, writer, and analog photographer based in Yuułuʔiłʔatḥ (Ucluelet). Her embroidered 35mm images are entanglement meditations, conceptualizing connection and loss with natural fibres and dental floss. Claire’s poetry is embedded with contemporary blue collar feminism, and has been anthologized with The Land and Labour Poetry Collective (Roseway Publishing), longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize, and printed in various magazines. Her latest scholarly research, published with Queen City Writers, offers social commentary on tarot, pop-culture, and consumption. Claire is a founding member of The Cumberland Film Club, a film photography art collective. She holds a BA in English and a Certificate in Proficiency in Language and Culture.
Rachel Helten is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, choreographer and educator whose practice weaves movement, writing, music and storytelling. Based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the sxʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, she embraces deep listening, collaboration and embodied vulnerability as pathways to personal and collective liberation. A Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from Simon Fraser University, her work has been presented locally and internationally, and she is deeply thankful for the heart-led artists and communities she learns from. In 2024, Rachel became Artistic Director of soma anima arts (evolving from Kinesis Dance Society), advancing interdisciplinary, inclusive and transformative creation rooted in compassion, imagination and connection. Learn more.
Filipino-born Khim Mata Hipol is an emerging interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the sxʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Through photography, Hipol examines how a sense of identity can be manipulated through commercialization. He explores the intersections of tourism, souvenir objects, and official government symbols, demonstrating how countries establish identity through these representations. Through portraiture, he illustrates how individuals use these objects to express patriotism and nationalism while simultaneously questioning their meanings and invoking ideas of colonialism and the “foreign.” Learn more.
Sarv Iraji holds a Bachelor of Art in Film Studies from the Soore Art University of Tehran and a Master of Fine Art in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia. They work in the expanded field of image, sculpture, performance and text. Their work has been exhibited in Iran, Canada, France, Germany and South Korea. Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Iraji currently resides on the unceded lands of the the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
In the studio, they think about the construction of politics and systems of ideology, and their practice concerns the history and the material of these systems. Focused on cinema and architecture, they are interested in frame[ing] – what it beholds and how it is perceived.
Noelle Lee 李茵諾 (Lei Yan Nok) is an interdisciplinary, process-based artist, working predominantly with dance, performance and visual arts. Lee is rooted in an exploration of the individual and collective psychosomatic landscape in its relationship to individual and collective sociopolitical processes. Lee lives and works for greater understanding and healing towards love and compassion. Interested in improvisational sound and movement, somatic therapeutics, archetypes and myths, and the cultivation and movement of energy, Lee’s work is informed by all those who came before and all those that will come — forever grateful to the living entity of land for its support. Born in Hong Kong, Lee has a Cantonese-Hong Kongese mother and a Fujianese father, and was raised between Hong Kong and Makassar, Indonesia.
Joni Low is a writer, curator and scholar focused on interconnection, intercultural perspectives and sensory experience. Currently a CGS-D SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, she researches artists who are sensing towards different ways of knowing and towards decolonial healing. Low has curated exhibitions with artists including Germaine Koh, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Charles Campbell, Hank Bull and Laiwan. Her writing is published in catalogues and journals such as Artforum, Canadian Art, and ESPACE Art Actuel. What Are Our Supports? – her co-edited anthology of 23 artists/writers reflecting on supports during precarious times, based on her 2018 project – was a 2024 City of Vancouver Book Awards finalist. Learn more.
Lauraine Mak is a Vancouver-based artist whose practice investigates visual cultures produced by late capitalism through the use of repetition and paradoxical sentiments, culminating in painting, sculpture, moving image and installation. In 2019, she joined the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf as a guest student under Rita McBride, and she completed her Master of Fine Arts at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2024. She recently exhibited at Centre A in Vancouver, as well as in Austria and Hong Kong, and is currently preparing for her first international solo exhibit in Egypt, scheduled for May 2026. Learn more.
Anahita Monfared is a Persian-Canadian actor, writer and dancer who lives, plays and creates between Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the sxʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations and New York City (Lenapehoking). They work with text, movement and performance art to explore the body politic, gender/sexuality, violence, disability, displacement and disobedience. A former Brooklyn Poets fellow, you can find their work in the Poem-a-Day series, Beloit Poetry Journal, Canadian Shores Anthology, Bloodletter Magazine and Edge City. Currently, Monfared is finishing their debut poetry collection, Not This Body. Monfared is a Bachelor of Arts graduate of New York University’s Tisch Drama. Learn more.
From the late 1990s to the 2010s Justin Neal juggled day jobs in San Francisco and New York with amateur theatre at night. In 2013, he focused on dramatic writing full-time, relocating to his family’s Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation) territory to pursue a joint Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing and Theatre at the University of British Columbia. His screenplays have placed him in competitions, programs and residencies across North America. His feature screenplay The Skins Game was awarded production funding by Telefilm and will commence filming in 2026. As playwright and founder of Holy Crow Arts, he has successfully premiered new plays, So Damn Proud (2021) and Keepers of the Salish Sea (2024). Neal is an alumnus of Canadian Film Centre’s Writers’ Lab and a 2024-25 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Learn more.
Born and raised in Manila, Marc Perez is the author of the chapbook Domus (Anstruther Press, 2025) and the full-length collection Dayo (Brick Books, 2024), which won the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. His poems have also appeared in The Fiddlehead, EVENT, CV2 and Vallum, among others. A recipient of grants from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, he currently serves as a Poetry Ambassador for Vancouver Poet Laureate, Elee Kraljii Gardiner.
*Transferred from 2025.
Born in Vancouver, Salima Punjani is a self-taught multisensory artist who uses mediums like soft sculpture, vibrotactile, spatial sound, field recordings, digital video and photography and relational aesthetics. She is particularly interested in how multiple senses can be used to expand the possibilities for people to feel welcome in art spaces, notably creating artful experiences of empathy, intimacy and connection. Her recent work explores themes of pleasure, grief, rest as resistance to systemic injustice and how medical data can be subverted into finding human connection rather than pathologies. She holds a Bachelor of Art in Communications and Political Science from Carleton University, a Graduate Diploma in Journalism from Concordia University and a Master’s in Social Work from McGill University, with research focusing on the intersection of the arts and care work. Learn more.
Born in Chiba, Japan, Ayako Rokkaku lives and works between Berlin, Porto and Tokyo. Her artistic process is instinctive and performative: she applies acrylic paint with her bare hands, translating the movement of her body directly onto the canvas. Rokkaku’s visual language seamlessly shifts between elusive abstract formations and figurative elements, drawing inspiration from the kawaii culture (Japanese for cute) and capturing the boundless imagination of a child. Known for her vibrant canvases filled with fantastical characters and imagined landscapes, Rokkaku often stages live painting performances that highlight her process and foster a direct connection with the audience. She has presented major solo exhibitions at The Long Museum, the Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art, Museum Jan, Danubiana Art Museum and Kunsthal Museum. Learn more.
Jane Shi is a poet, writer and organizer living on the occupied, stolen and unceded territories of the of the sxʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022) and the winner of The Capilano Review’s 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest. Her debut poetry collection echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024) was shortlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched and bodies are not violated. Learn more.
Angeline Teoh Simon is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lethbridge, Alberta, Treaty 7 Territory. She graduated from the University of Lethbridge in 2018, with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Art Studio. As a second-generation biracial Canadian, her practice explores familial narratives and the dynamics within contrasting cultures. Working with collage and ceramics, Simon’s practice investigates intergenerational memory and diaspora, stemming from her experience spending summers with her maternal family in Malaysia. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions including the Art Gallery of Alberta, Esker Foundation, Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, Southern Alberta Art Gallery and PLATFORM Centre for Photographic Arts. Learn more.
Ruby Singh is a multi-award-winning composer, producer, performer and educator living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His artistic practice spans music, poetry, film and installation, exploring myth, ecology, justice and speculative futures. In 2022, Singh received the Lieutenant Governor’s Jubilee Award for excellence in Art and Music. In 2023, he was nominated for a JUNO, and won both the Western Canadian Music Award (WCMA) Global Artist of the Year and the BC Touring Council’s Artist of the Year. In 2024, he was awarded the WCMA Electronic/Dance Artist of the Year. Whether building interactive installations or live performances, Singh believes in art’s ability to reimagine futures, to repurpose aesthetic freedoms toward civil and environmental justice. Learn more.
Taaye is a process-driven artist whose work explores materiality alongside diasporic subjectivity and the poetics of estrangement. Working primarily with East Asian mineral pigments (岩絵具 iwaenogu; 岩彩 yán cǎi), her practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (2024, 2025), the BC Arts Council (2025), and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council Emerging Artist Grant (2025).
She has upcoming residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Vancouver’s Centre A. Her work has been exhibited at the Centre of International Contemporary Art in Vancouver and Art Next Expo in Hong Kong. Taaye holds a Bachelor of Fine Aarts from Rhode Island School of Design. Learn more.
Foroozan Talei Fard is a Persian-Canadian, Vancouver-based artist who was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. She has graduated from Emily Carr University with a Bachelor of Visual Arts focusing on ceramics. Talei Fard works part-time at the UBC Chan Centre. She also teaches pottery at Palette Art Studio, as well as working with different artists and communities. As a Persian-Canadian, craft and art have been a significant part of her life. She has a lifetime experience of using her hands creatively. She is pushing herself and exploring the unconventional uses of materials outside of their common usage — such as knitting with clay. Learn more.
Feven Tesfay is a Tigrayan interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) Peoples. Her practice is rooted in care, memory and storytelling, drawing from harm reduction and community-building principles. Through writing and her ongoing series, “Whirlpool,” she uses heat, water and intentional space-making to create environments for reflection, release and collective grounding.
Idaresit Thompson is a writer, an interdisciplinary artist and a lawyer currently living on the ancestral and unceded Coast Salish homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her artistic and research practice weaves performance and conceptual art with critical legal studies, Black psychoanalytic theory and Black feminist thought. She has written for several publications and is a member of Liberated Planet Studio, an experimental research collective where she began developing a movement practice. Presently, her work examines how contemporary understandings of Blackness and humanness remain shaped by modern racial slavery and colonialism. Through her work, she seeks to engage in dialogue with Black communities worldwide.
Taryn Walker is an award-winning queer, interdisciplinary mixed-Indigenous artist of Nlaka'pamux, Syilx and European ancestry based on the unceded territories of the sxʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Their practice incorporates drawing, printmaking, installation, video and sound, exploring futurity, queerness, non-linear time, playfulness and healing. Walker holds a Master of Fine Arts from Simon Fraser University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria, with work shown across Canada, the United States and beyond. Learn more.
Jordan Waunch is an award-winning Métis producer, writer, director and public speaker based in the Coast Salish territories. A graduate of British Columbia Institute of Technology's Television & Video Production Program, Waunch has gone on to build a career focused on the development of Indigenous led storytelling in film, TV, animation and XR media. In 2019, Jordan produced and directed the project, "Sisters Of Sorrow," through Telus STORYHIVE’s first ever Indigenous Storyteller Edition and produced the Queer Indigenous horror film, “Terror/Forming.” His most recent producing/directing project, “Shadow Of The Rougarou,” is playing on Lumi, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network streaming service.
Sheri-D Wilson (aka the Mama of Dada) is the award-winning author of 15 books, four short films, three plays and four poetry/music albums. Known for her electric performance-style, she has presented her work at many prestigious festivals in Canada, USA, UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Mexico and South Africa. Her most recent work is a one-story epic trilogy of speculative poetry entitled The Oneironaut (∅1, ∅2, ∅3), published by Write Bloody North.
Her work has received many awards and honours, including the Order of Canada, an honorary Doctor of Letters – Honoris Causa from Kwantlen University, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Calgary, the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry and the Women of Vision Award. A strong advocate for social change and community building, in 2003 she founded The Calgary Spoken Word Society and remains the Artistic Director today. For 11 years the society produced a very large Spoken Word Festival and sidekick School Program. In 2005, Sheri-D founded The Spoken Word Program at The Banff Centre and was Director/Head Faculty until 2012. She splits her time between Calgary and Vancouver, with her dog Willow.
Ketty Haolin Zhang, born in Chaoyang, China, is a visual artist working primarily in painting and sculpture. Informed by her diasporic experience as a 1.5 generation immigrant, her practice navigates her relationship with placelessness, self-construction and (non)belonging — the simultaneous desire to belong and to resist being defined, and how desires and memories take material form in the in-between spaces. Zhang's work has been featured by Dazed, CBC Arts, SAD Mag and Prism International, and exhibited at White Columns, Field Projects, Beijing Design Week, Centre for International Contemporary Art, Centre A, Canton-Sardine, The Bows, The Reach Gallery Museum and Surrey Art Gallery. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from University of British Columbia.
Mengya Zhao is a Chinese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, working across ceramic sculpture, illustration and printmaking. Her practice blends surrealism with cultural storytelling, drawing from her Sichuan heritage, immigrant experience and observations of daily life. Through layered textures and imaginative hand-built forms, she explores vulnerability, identity and the subtle discomforts shaped by hearing loss and cross-cultural belonging. Zhao has exhibited in Canada, the United States and Belgium, with her most recent group exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK. She is currently undertaking a residency at one of Germany’s historic porcelain manufactories, where she is developing new sculptural directions. Learn more.