Deer Lake Artist Residency Summer Series

Brianne Siu is a ceramic artist based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Kwikwetlem Peoples, also known as Vancouver and Burnaby. She earned her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design in 2019 and primarily works in ceramics. She was a year-long Artist-in-Residence at Medalta where her solo show qualified her to be a finalist for the Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics in 2023. Furthermore, she has now completed a few residencies that shifted her practice and guided her towards exploring mold making. Her practice now mainly revolves around slip casting porcelain forms and colourful surface decorations.

Coral Patola’s work explores the complexities and intersectionality of their identity, the immigrant culture of Chinese Canadians, the southeast Asian diaspora of Singapore and Malaysia, and their paternal Ukrainian heritage. Through sculpting and surface decoration their work acts as a form of escapism inspired by personal narratives. Coral uses their lived experience as a source of inspiration, filling the voids felt in childhood where their identity felt overlooked. There is a lack of genuine, nuanced representation of mixed-identities in fantasy. They hope to build a sense of belonging to these fantasy realms for those who have been typically othered.

Dani Proteau (she/her) is a contemporary artist based in Victoria, BC. Often drawing from an internal memory archive, Proteau weaves personal narratives with broader themes of information erosion and loss. Working primarily in photography, sculpture and installation, her recent projects investigate the tension between permanence and decay—an inquiry into what can and cannot be held onto. Proteau holds an MFA from the University of Victoria (UVic) and has received awards including the Audain Travel Award and the BC Arts Council Scholarship. Her close work with other artists—as a studio assistant, visual arts instructor at UVic, collaborator and media arts technician—has a significant and ongoing influence on her artistic practice.

Dora Prieto is a poet and translator based between Vancouver and Mexico City. Her work appears in Maisonneuve, Catapult, Capilano Review, GUTS, the Ex-Puritan and Acentos Review. She won the 2025 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for emerging writers in poetry and was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. A 2025–27 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she’s completing her debut collection Girl Tejido and co-translating JAWS by Mexican poet Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza. She is a member and co-founder of the El Mashup Collective, a community arts project focused on experimental poetry, analog film, sound and hybrid storytelling.

Gloria Jue-Youn Han investigates how traditions are formed, altered and adapted. Through craft, she explores modes of intimacy, care and devotion within a diaspora. Since 2016, Gloria has continued to study traditional Korean celadon ceramics under the mentorship of master potter Jung-Hong Kim and Sylvia Kim. She earned her BFA from Emily Carr University and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She teaches at Langara College and Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver. In 2024 she received the NCECA Emerging Artist Fellowship and was named a finalist for the Winifred Shantz Award in 2025.

Image credit: Faber Mo Neifer

Having lived across multiple continents, Julia Chang developed a curiosity towards the spatial relationship between people and places. She ventured into ceramics in 2019 by chance and is currently experimenting with raw materials as a form of research. Her interest in geological sources is notably tied to her work experience in architecture, where place-making inspired her to muse upon the past lives of rocks and the categorization of resource and waste. During her time at Deer Lake Artist Residency, Julia worked with various rocks and sands that she’s collected, creating transformed rock objects that hold memories of places lived and travelled.

Juliana Silva is a Colombian visual artist currently based in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National University of Colombia. In 2022, Silva was a grant recipient from the Canada Council for the Arts for her project Tactile Textile: Dance Forms in the Street. She was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2016 and 2019 and has been exhibiting her work in Colombia and Canada for over two decades. Silva works with sculpture, installation, photography, painting and animation. Throughout her interdisciplinary exploration, Silva investigates how cultural meaning is expressed through objects and their materiality, particularly focusing on fabrics and textile ornaments that carry deep cultural significance. Her research examines these materials as artistic tools rich in historical and symbolic value. Recently, Silva has broadened her practice to include art-making as a meditative process. She emphasizes that art serves not only as a creative endeavour but also as an aesthetic experience that promotes well-being—an essential remedy for the demands of today's fast-paced world.

Malina Sintnicolaas is a multi-media artist currently based in Vancouver, British Columbia. With a practice focused mostly in ceramic and fibre sculpture, Sintnicolaas questions the ways in which the material properties of ceramics and fibre might represent the complexities of anxiety, trauma and depression. Her intent is to create a dialogue, not for the viewer to connect with the specific emotion but rather to open up a space for contemplation of our interior lives through materiality, abstraction and affective works of art. She graduated with her Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University and completed her Master of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. She currently teaches visual arts and ceramics at the Richmond Arts Centre. She has shown her work both nationally and internationally including the Burrard Arts Foundation in Vancouver, BC, Art Mur in Montreal, Sculptor’s Alliance in New York and the Canadian Sculpture Centre in Toronto, ON. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Audain Travel Award, the Won Lee Scholarship of the Sculptor’s Society of Canada and the 2022 BC Arts Council Project Assistant Grant respectively. 

Mitra Mahmoodi is a ceramic artist based in Vancouver. Her work is inspired by the landscapes, architecture, and cultural traditions of the Middle East and Islamic world, drawing on her heritage to explore themes of memory and identity through handbuilt forms. She holds a Diploma in Ceramic Design from the University of the Arts London and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Since graduating in 2021, she has pursued a full-time studio practice. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally, including shows in Vancouver, Coquitlam, Alberta, London, and across the United Kingdom.

Xiangmei Su is a Chinese-born, Canada-based multimedia artist working across installation, painting, photography and video. Holding a BA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia, her practice explores identity, memory and cultural intersections. Su has exhibited widely in both China and Canada. Her first solo show, The Wind, was exhibited at the Changshu Art Museum in 2012. She later presented solo exhibitions at the Seymour Art Gallery (2020) and as artist-in-residence at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden (2022). In 2023 and 2024, she deepened public engagement through solo shows at Lipont Gallery (Richmond) and Canton-sardine Gallery (Vancouver), followed by a duo exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum in 2025. She has published four catalogues, delivered a TEDx Talk titled ‘Becoming Who I Am’ (2020) and served as an exhibition advisor for the West Vancouver Community Arts Council in 2022.