2025 Graduation Awards

Nayeli Jimenez

Nayeli Jimenez is originally from Mexico, and works as a campaigner and designer in unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. She has a degree in Communication Design from Emily Carr University, and has dedicated most of her creative career to projects related to social and environmental justice. Nayeli is passionate about the role of art, design, and storytelling in resistance movements, and has been organizing locally and internationally for the past decade — mostly focusing on climate and migrant justice. Before making her way to full-time campaigning work, she worked in the publishing industry for 7 years as a designer and art director, and still designs books from time to time.

Mark Rutledge

Mark is Ojibway from the Wolf Clan and is a member of the Little Grand Rapids First Nation, located 268 air kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, on the shores of Family Lake near the Manitoba/ Ontario border.

As one of Canada’s Indigenous design leaders, he has established one of Canada’s first Indigenous design studios in the North. With a decades of experience, he has worked with virtually all of Yukon First Nation’s communities and on a wide variety of projects with them from print publications to logos and website development. Mark has had the privilege and honour of working with organizations in NWT and Nunavut and from across Canada and Internationally.

Julia Kwan

Julia Kwan is a Canadian screenwriter, director, and occasional producer of her own short and feature films. She has brought a keen sense of the Chinese-Canadian cultural experience to her films. Several of the films were made in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada. Her feature films include Eve and the Fire Horse (2005), as well as the feature length documentary film Everything Will Be (2014), and short film 10,000 Delusions (1999). Awards and recognition include the Best Canadian Film Award from VIFF, Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize the Claude Jutra Award at the 2006 Genie Awards, and Best Direction and Screenwriting at the prestigious British Columbia Leo Awards.

Michelle Helene MacKenzie

Michelle Helene Mackenzie is a Canadian writer, musician, and artist born in Vancouver, the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She uses electronics, modular synths, field recordings, video, text, and archival research to explore sonic perception, ecological consciousness, and deep listening. Michelle holds a BA from Simon Fraser University and spent five years pursuing a PhD in Literature from Duke University, where she became interested in literatures of necrophiliac-agonies, the possibilities of sounding the unheard hills of banshee-perturbations, and the violence and cultural amnesia that devours feminine genius. She is currently a PhD Candidate in Music at the University of California San Diego. Mackenzie’s works have been presented with 221A (Vancouver), the Albertinum (Dresden), the Capilano Review’s Small Caps (Vancouver), the Cultch’s Soft Cedar (Vancouver), Deep Blue (Vancouver), the Esker Foundation (Calgary), the Hand (New York), Kadist Gallery (San Francisco), the Operating System (Brooklyn), the Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver), the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Western Front (Vancouver).

David Fine

David Fine is a Canadian filmmaker, who works in animated film alongside his British wife Alison Snowden. They made the Oscar-winning short animation, Bob's Birthday and the TV series Bob and Margaret. Their latest work is the NFB short film, Animal Behaviour, which was nominated for an Oscar and has won numerous awards otherwise, including a Canadian Screen Award for best short animation. Their work has been Oscar nominated four times, with the one win. They’ve written, animated and directed animation, documentary and live action films and commercial work.

Jesse Birch

Jesse Birch (he/him) is Curator of Nanaimo Art Gallery (2014-present). He is also a writer, educator, and artist who was born and raised on Snuneymuxw territory. Jesse has lived in Vancouver, Seoul, Kyoto, and Amsterdam, and in 2014, he returned to the Island with his partner and son to reconnect with his home community and join the team at Nanaimo Art Gallery.

Jesse holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Photography) from Emily Carr University, a Master of Arts degree in Art History (Critical and Curatorial Studies) from the University of British Columbia, and he is an alumnus of the Curatorial Program at De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam. He sees curating as both a profession and a collaborative practice that brings artists and artworks into relation with people, places, and histories. He is also an active potter and a member of the Tozan Cultural Society, which stewards a four-chamber, wood-fired noborigama kiln, south of Nanaimo BC.

Cindy Mochizuki

Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, animation, drawing, audio fiction, performance, public artworks, films and community-engaged projects. She has exhibited her work in Canada, US, Australia, and Japan. Recent exhibitions include the Art Gallery at Evergreen, Kamloops Art Gallery, Prince Takamado Gallery, and Nanaimo Art Gallery. She has created illustration and animation design for theatre companies including the Arts Club Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Rumble Theatre, Theatre Replacement, and Little Onion Puppet. She has received the Vancouver’s Mayor’s Arts Award in New Media and Film (2015) and the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts VIVA Award (2020).

Alison Yip

Alison Yip is a Canadian artist currently based in Cologne, Germany. Yip works through painting, wall treatments, writing, and objects to find ways of speaking to the dissociative and dispersed nature of our cognitive apparatus while embracing the persistence of figuration and often through psycho-phenomena. Questions of personal agency, alternative histories and picturehood are often the result of these investigations. Yip holds a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design, Calgary. She continued her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany and received an MFA from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Chris Andrews, Montreal, CA; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, CA; Kantine, Brussels, BE; Damien and the Love Guru, Zurich, CH; Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin, DE; Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, DE; and Lady Helen, London, UK.