Alumni Success Stories

Jason Cusator ('06) will be holding his first solo exhibition, This Exists. The Canadian artist spent his youth growing up in rural BC and the Yukon and took to art at a young age, finding it a grounding escape in periods of change and uncertainty. Working primarily in acrylic and oil on non-figurative abstract paintings, his work is at times dark with an undertone of vibrancy, all the while remaining playful. For Jason, abstract allows for the expression of what cannot be articulated in other mediums.

This Exists
434 Columbia Street, Vancouver BC
September 30 - October 12 | 11am-7pm daily (6pm on Sundays)

Emily Carr alumna Tiziana La Melia ('08) received the distinguished $25,000 RBC Canadian Painting Competition award Wednesday, October 1, 2014, for her work, Hanging onto the part. The award, now in its 16th year,  is one of the largest in Canada and recognizes emerging artists.

Tiziana's work, along with the two runner-up winners, will now become a part of the RBC Corporate Art Collection, which currently numbers more than 4,000 pieces.

The 2014 Mayor’s Arts Awards have been announced and will take place October 7 at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre.

The University is proud to announce that Erdem Taşdelen (MAA '10 and current sessional faculty member), is the recipient of a Charles Pachter Prize!

Excerpted from Canadian Art:

Alumna Martha Sturdy returns to her roots with a newly-launched collection of wearable sculpture. 

After graduating from Emily Carr in 1978, Sturdy went on to gain international reputation as her bold, iconic wearable sculptures made their way onto the pages of ELLE, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and onto runways such as Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta, and Marc Jacobs.

Alumnus Kevin Eastwood (’99) is an award winning filmmaker who has worked on everything from dark comedies (Fido, the 2007 movie about a boy and his pet zombie), to TV biopics (2008’s Elijah), to documentaries dealing with serious global issues (Eco-Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson in 2011, and Oil Sands Karaoke in 2013). These projects, and the many others to his credit, have found critical, commercial and financial success and made Kevin a sought-after producer and director. Still, the unprecedented success of his latest project, Emergency Room: Life and Death at VGH, exceeded all his expectations.

Award-winning filmmaker Kevan Funk ('11) debuts his next short, Bison, at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). 

From the TIFF site: Set on a rural Saskatchewan ranch during the annual branding season, Bison follows a young man who heads to the country for a guys’ weekend, but is profoundly unsettled after he makes a disturbing discovery. Kevan Funk’s follow-up to Yellowhead is a disquieting study of the continued colonization of the West.

Suzy Taekyung Kim (’03) has been awarded a commission by Percent for Art (Percent), the New York City Permanent Public Art Installation program funded by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Suzy’s work will grace an entrance wall in a building, with an expected installation date of 2016.

Suzy shares, “It is an honor for me to be a part of NYC public art collection among highly established NYC artists. It will hopefully to encourage painting graduates to appreciate our fine art program at Emily Carr.”

Alumnus Tim Barber's ('03) photography has been selected as the cover for Elton John's upcoming album, The Diving Board, by none other than the man himself.

Barber's work was introduced by a mutual photographer friend; John is an avid art collector, and is believed to have one of the largest private photography collections in the world.

Says Barber, "Elton John phoned me himself, which was really a surreal moment. He introduced himself and asked me about the image and talked about the idea of using it for the cover."

Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything is the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work and will be presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery from May 31 – September 1, 2014. Deftly capturing the spirit of the age—or, as the artist refers to it, “the 21^st century condition”—Douglas Coupland’s ideas are often encountered on the written page. But the themes he explores in his writing have appeared in his artwork as early as the 1980s when he was a student at the Emily Carr College of Art & Design, (Class of '84).