2021 Graduation Awards

Emanuel Ilagan

Designer, Square

Emanuel is a designer and art director living and working in Toronto, Ontario. He brings a wealth of cross-disciplinary knowledge to his design practice, combining over 7 years of agency experience at Concrete Design and Bruce Mau Design with work at various retail companies, digital start-ups, and as an independent creative consultant. He holds a BSc in Biological Science with a minor in Film Studies from the University of Alberta and a BDes in Communication Design from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

His work has spanned brand identities, strategy, packaging, digital, experiential, and book/editorial design, having worked with clients such as ASICS, lululemon, Canada Goose, Page Two Books, Patrick Ta Beauty, and the University of Toronto. He is currently balancing his day job at the fintech company Square with his own freelance studio practice.

JJ Mah
Designer / Climb Category, Arc’Teryx Equipment

JJ Mah is an industrial designer based in Vancouver, Canada, whose focus is on products and systems that allow people to get out and play in the outdoors.

JJ’s love for the outdoors was driven by growing up on the North Shore of Vancouver, B.C where he spent most of his time in the mountains: rock climbing, biking and skiing. He climbed competitively as a youth athlete and adult, representing Canada at the international level. Today, pursuing outdoor adventure defines his lifestyle and his work.

Prior to design, he studied cinematography and lighting, and worked as a lighting technician in Vancouver’s film industry on TV series and feature films such as Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Underworld: Awakening, and Godzilla. JJ is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Jaclyn Phillips
AIX Designer, Microsoft

Jaclyn’s work focuses on creating inclusive transparent end-to-end experiences for users and collaborators within the AI ecosystem. This has been achieved through a dedication to design processes and holistic design methodologies. Over the past few years at Microsoft Jaclyn has been working on building and scaling new design teams and products while evangelizing her core design priorities across product groups.

Jaclyn is a proud Emily Carr graduate. Her current product work can be experienced via SharePoint’s Syntex offering.

Thank you also to the faculty and faculty emeritus jurors who selected the recipients of the DESIS Radical Sustainability Award and the Ecological Design Graduation Award.

John Donkin
Supervising Director at Bardel Entertainment - CG Feature for Disney+

John earned an Academy Award nomination in 2003 as the producer of Gone Nutty, an animated short created at Blue Sky Studios featuring the popular Scrat character from the "Ice Age" films. Donkin came to Blue Sky Studios in 1998 as the managing technical director.

One of his first projects was to help complete the Academy Award winning short film Bunny. He developed the production pipeline for Blue Sky's first animated feature film project Ice Age, before becoming the film's Associate Producer. Donkin went on to produce several other Blue Sky Studios projects including Rio and Rio2, which became a global hit franchise; Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which grossed over $887 million worldwide; Ice Age: Continental Drift, Robots, and Blue Sky's Academy Award nominated short No Time for Nuts.

Donkin began his computer animation career in 1983 where he studied with the world renowned CGRG (Computer Graphics Research Group) at The Ohio State University. He went on to be a senior animator at the pioneering CG company Cranston/Csuri Productions.

Ann Marie Fleming
President, Sleepy Dog Films

Ann Marie Fleming is an independent Canadian filmmaker who has works in a variety of different genres, formats and lengths. Her films often foreground issues of family, history and memory, exploring themes of her mixed-race immigrant experience.

Her last two fiction feature films -the dark comedy The French Guy (2005) and the animated Window Horses (2016) –and her documentary The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003), had their North American premiere at TIFF. The French Guy won best feature at the Boston Underground Film Festival and her graphic novelized version of The Magical Life… was nominated for two Eisner Awards and won the Doug Wright Award for Best Canadian comic.

Window Horses won Best Canadian and Best B.C. Film from VIFF, best Canadian Screenwriting Award from the Vancouver Critics’ Circle, a Leo Award for Best Direction in Animation and Best Score, Best Film from Reel Asian Film Festival, Best Canadian Film from the Canadian On-Line Critics Association and was selected for TIFF’s Top 10, Telefilm’s Canada 150 world tour as well as winning awards from festivals all over the world including Best Animated feature from the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

Her student film, You Take Care Now (1989), was one of 10 short films selected for TIFF’s Canada’s Top 150 list of Essential Cinema.

In 2020 Ann Marie made OLD DOG, a meditation on aging, and VANCOUVER APRIL 2020, as part of an artist series responding to the early days of our COVID pandemic.

Ann Marie is president of Sleepy Dog Films and an animation alum of Emily Carr College of Art and Design.

Casey Wei (she/her)
Manager, Video Out Distribution & Outreach at VIVO Media Arts Centre

Casey Wei is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and writer based in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Her moving image works include Murky Colors (2012), Vater und Sohn/Father and Son/父与子 (2013), Kingsgate Mall Happenings (2014), art rock? The Popular Esoteric (2018), Tuning to Oblivion: Piece for Monsanto Corn (2019), and various others. She holds an MFA from Simon Fraser University. Her current projects include Agonyklub, Kamikaze Nurse, and ReIssue. She sometimes works as KC Wei or Karen Zolo.

Jeff White
Creative Direction / VFX Supervision ILM: Vancouver

Jeff White is a Visual Effects Supervisor and Creative Director for ILM Vancouver. In 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored White with a Technical Achievement Award for his original design of ILM’s procedural rigging system, Block Party. That same year he received an Oscar nomination for visual effects for his work on Kong: Skull Island.

White joined Industrial Light & Magic in 2002 as a creature technical director. He is a graduate of Ithaca College’s Cinema and Photography program and has a Masters of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Prior to attending graduate school, White worked as technical director for Laika Studios in Portland, Oregon.

After arriving at ILM, White worked as a Creature Technical Director on a variety of films including: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events, War of the Worlds, and Star Wars: Episode III “Revenge of the Sith”. White is also the co-creator of ILM’s well-known Block Party creature rigging system, which automates the time-consuming process of complex character rigging. On Transformers he served as Digital Production Supervisor. Continuing his work with the franchise, White served as the Associate Visual Effects Supervisor on Revenge of the Fallen and Co-Visual Effects Supervisor on Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

In 2012, White served as the ILM Visual Effects Supervisor on Marvel’s blockbuster film The Avengers directed by Joss Whedon and received both an Academy Award and BAFTA nomination for the work. After a stint supervising the early work on Michael Bay’s Transformers Age of Extinction, Jeff assumed the role of Visual Effects Supervisor on Warcraft, based on the legendary video game by Blizzard Entertainment. In 2017 he served as the Visual Effects Supervisor for Kong: Skull Island, for which he received a nomination from the Visual Effects Society for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature in addition to the Oscar nomination.

Bopha Chhay

Bopha is a writer and curator who lives and works on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, also known as Vancouver. She is the Director/Curator at Artspeak, an artist-run centre with a specific mandate to encourage dialogue between visual arts and text/writing practices. She has held positions at Enjoy Public Art Gallery (New Zealand), Afterall (Contemporary arts research and publishing) Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design (UK) and 221A Artist run centre (Vancouver). Chhay graduated with an MA in Art History from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Emily Neufeld

Emily was born and raised in farming country where Treaty 6 and 7 meet in what is now called Red Deer, Alberta. She now lives and works in the unceded territory of the Squamish and T’sleil Waututh peoples in North Vancouver. She is examining her own Mennonite and Scottish settler colonial histories by investigating her relationship to these Indigenous lands in which she now lives and works. Her definition of this place extends beyond the land itself to include plants, the soil microbiome and animal habitats (including the human animal).

Emily's work explores how all of these aspects of place influence and are influenced by each other. Recent solo exhibitions include Prairie Invasions: A Lullaby (2020, Richmond Art Gallery, BC), Before Demolition: Tides (2019, Eyelevel Gallery, NS), Motherlands (The Pole, Den Haag, ND) and Before Demolition (2017: Burrard Arts Foundation, BC). Emily was recently long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. She received her BFA from ECUAD in 2013. Neufeld has created and participates in community sharing gardens, and sees land as fundamental to her research process.

Charlene Vickers

Charlene is an Anishinaabe artist living and working in Vancouver. Born in Kenora, Ontario and raised in Toronto, her painting, sculpture, and performance works explore memory, healing, and embodied connections to ancestral lands.