2023 Graduation Awards

Sadie Red Wing

Sadie Red Wing (sadieredwing.com) is a Lakota graphic designer and advocate from the Spirit Lake Nation. Red Wing earned her BFA in New Media Arts and Interactive Design at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She received her Master of Graphic Design from North Carolina State University. Her research on cultural revitalization through design tools and strategies created a new demand for tribal competence in graphic design research. Red Wing urges Native American graphic designers to express visual sovereignty in their design work, as well as, encourages academia to include an indigenous perspective in design curriculum. Currently, Red Wing serves as an Assistant Professor at OCAD University (Toronto, ONT).

Avery Shaw

Avery is an interdisciplinary designer. Her work as a designer spans from product design and manufactured goods to research and conceptual design. Avery has over a decade of experience working as a product designer and developer, focusing on products for the home and designing for commercialization. She brings advanced experience in designing home furnishing products, across many categories including furniture, outdoor, decor, tableware, and home textiles. In her personal practice, she uses a process-led approach to guide her work. Using different materials and mediums, she explores themes around the home and sustainability; such as empathy towards objects, concepts of build/natural environment and how our views of the world influence our understanding, our habits and our space.

Scott Yu-Jan

Scott Yu-Jan is an artist and designer from Vancouver, Canada. Since graduating from Emily Carr, he has helped build disruptive products and services for industry leaders such as Amazon and Google. In addition to being an interaction designer, Scott is also a content creator on YouTube where he shares his creative process through storytelling and film. Driven by a mission to inspire and empower new makers, Scott's projects delve into diverse creative approaches, methodologies, and exercises that challenge the conventional perception and utilization of everyday objects.

Marina Antunes

Marina has been writing and discussing film for over 15 years, first on a personal blog, followed by a decade-long tenure on the now retired Row Three. In 2008, she joined the writing staff at Quiet Earth, becoming Editor-In-Chief in 2014, a role she still holds. Over the years, she has also produced and hosted a number of podcasts including Before the Dawn, a long-running podcast on the Twilight franchise, Girls on Pop, a podcast on film and popular entertainment from women’s perspective and After the Credits, bi-monthly film podcast with nearly 300 episodes.

Marina is a member of ACM and ACM SIGGRAPH, the Online Film Critics Society, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and the Visual Effects Society. She is the President of Spark CG Society and the Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH chapter. She has also served on juries for several film festivals including DOXA, St. Louis International Film Festival, and the Whistler Film Festival. She joined the Spark CG Society in 2014.

Nancy Lee

Nancy Lee 李南屏 is a Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist, curator, filmmaker, DJ and cultural producer. Their work stimulates and enlivens space, making a provocative statement about how inescapably interconnected we are with our surroundings. In 2017, Nancy directed the first contemporary VR dance film "Tidal Traces" in collaboration with Emmalena Fredriksson with the National Film Board of Canada. Nancy’s interdisciplinary works have been presented at Cannes Film Festival, SXSW, MUTEK, Berlin International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, and more. They are an XR instructor at IM4 Media Lab at Emily Carr University, board director of Love Intersections Society and artistic mentor at Festival of Recorded Movement. Nancy is a co-founder of Chapel Sound, an electronic music and art collective supporting emerging artists, and CURRENT Symposium, an intersectional and multidisciplinary initiative featuring artistic and educational programming for women, gender diverse and artists of colour. They also run a DIY studio in Vancouver Chinatown hosting cross-genre shows, workshops and residencies. As a Sundance Institute New Frontier Alumni, Nancy has been collaborating with Kiran Bhumber on a speculative sci-fi exhibition “UNION”, exploring 3D scanning/printing, XR, and multi-channel sound and video installation. Nancy recently finished an XR artist residency, SATELLITE, at Society of Art and Technology in Montreal and will be starting another residency in their Satosphere immersive dome theatre this summer.

Ying Wang

Growing up in pre-digital era China, Ying is part of the generation who came of age during China's drastic modern transformation. In her late 20s, she immigrated to Canada and began her self-taught journey in filmmaking and media arts.

As a migrant who has lived through dynamic shifts in political power, Ying is drawn to projects that can reveal the historic geopolitical complexity from a global perspective. Her first feature film, Sisters, is a docu-drama based on her younger sister's struggle with eating disorders. Her second film, The World is Bright, is a 116-minute documentary that chronicles the 10-year journey of two Chinese parents seeking the truth behind their son's death. This film garnered the Sea to Sky Award at VIFF in 2019 and the Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award at

Hotdocs in 2020. It was also nominated for Best Feature Length Documentary and Best Editing at the Canadian Screen Awards in 2021.

Ying participated in the Banff Spark Accelerator for Women in the Business of Media in 2021 and served as a mentor at the Doc Lab during the 2022 Whistler Film Festival. Currently, she is completing a new documentary Three Year and writing the script for a fiction feature sponsored by Telefilm.

Ying is an active advocate for the arts, serving on the board of the Racial Equity Screen Office (RESO) (www.reso-ca.org) and Moving Images Distribution (movingimages.ca). She is also the president of Cinevolution Media Arts Society (cinevolutionmedia.com), an organization she co-founded in 2007 in Richmond, BC.

Zoë Chan

Before joining the Richmond Art Gallery as Curator in 2022, Zoë Chan worked on several exhibitions as Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Most recently, she curated Codes of silence at Richmond Art Gallery (2023), as well as Uncommon Language (2020-21) and Stories that animate us (2021) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. In her research, she has delved into such subject matter as youth, food, embodied storytelling, hybrid documentary practices, and diasporic representation. Her writing has been published in C Magazine, esse arts + opinions, and Momus, among other publications, and in 2015, the Canada Council for the Arts awarded her the Joan Lowndes Award in recognition of excellence in critical and curatorial writing. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University.

Devon Knowles

Devon Knowles material centred practice, which includes sculpture, installation, two-dimensional and public work, focuses on the production methods of objects and their materials. It specifically considers how together they influence and form the language that surrounds them. From coloured glass, concrete, steel and aluminum to denim fabric, paper spitballs and street detritus, the varied histories, economies, and social meanings of diverse materials and processes are unpredictably combined.

By moving these elements from their expected and everyday contexts, her work heightens our appreciation of their properties and capacities. In working and reworking material, using traditional and contemporary fabrication and craft methods, a rich language of the relationship of material and method emerges. As she engages with theories of perception, optical effects, and tactility, alongside the direct act of making, Knowles encourages the viewer to access her work from a shared intimacy and sympathetic attentiveness.

She lives and works in Vancouver, Canada situated on the shared and unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally and is in public and private collections. She is represented by Equinox Gallery and is faculty at Langara College, snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓.

Joni Low

Joni Low is a writer and independent curator whose practice explores interconnection, intercultural conversations, and sensory experience. Currently she is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, researching artists who are sensing otherwise to access different ways of knowing – and how this resonates across art, neuroscience, somatic therapies and healing. Low’s exhibition projects – with artists including Germaine Koh, Charles Campbell, Chloë Lum & Yannick Desranleau, Hank Bull, and Laiwan – have been presented across Canada over the last 10 years. Her writing is published in exhibition catalogues and periodicals including Artforum, Canadian Art, ESPACE Art Actuel, and Yishu: Journal for Contemporary Chinese Art. She is co-editor, with art historian Jeff O’Brien, of the recent anthology What Are Our Supports? – which includes 20+ local and international artists and writers reflecting on supports during precarious times (Information Office, 2022). Low is a recipient of Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and City of Vancouver funding, and has served on numerous juries including the VIVA Art Award, the Sobey Art Award, and the Lind Prize.