Outstanding Contribution Award, Curator

Daina Augaitis (b.1953) is a Canadian curator based in Vancouver whose work focuses on contemporary art. From 1996 to 2017, she was the Chief Curator and Associate Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia. Augaitis has published prolifically, and her catalogues and essays have made significant contributions to the scholarship on Canadian Indigenous art. In 2014, her exhibition Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything was the first retrospective of Coupland’s visual art. Augaitis was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award in 2014 for curatorial excellence in contemporary art, with a special mention of Coupland’s retrospective. Augaitis’ 2012 retrospective Muntadas: Entre/Between was exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Gulbenkian Museum, and Jeu de Paume. Augaitis was awarded the Alvin Balkind Curator’s prize in 2023.

Artistic Achievement Award, Visual Artist

Thaddeus Holowina (b. 1949) is a visual artist, teacher, letterpress printer and publisher. Holowina holds a BA in Communication and Fine Arts from the University of Windsor. Holowina taught in the Department of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, from 1976 to 2016. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including noteworthy solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), The Rooms (St. John’s, Newfoundland), the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, New Brunswick), and the Heckscher Museum (Huntington, New York).

His 1998 mid-career retrospective exhibition, Extended Vision: Photographs by Thaddeus Holownia 1978–1997, organized by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, travelled across Canada and to the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. Holownia is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fulbright Fellow and an elected member of the RCA. He has twice received the Paul Paré Medal from Mount Allison University in recognition of excellence in teaching, creative activity, research, and community service, as well as receiving the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for High Achievement in the Visual Arts from artsNB and the Order of New Brunswick. The artist currently lives and works in Jolicure, New Brunswick.

Artistic Achievement Award, Filmmaker, Writer, Artist, Photographer

Bruce LaBruce (b.1964) is an internationally acclaimed, Toronto-based filmmaker, writer,  and artist.  LaBruce’s filmography includes several music videos, short films and fourteen feature films. LaBruce has been called the father of the Queercore movement due to his work publishing the punk zine J.D. with fellow artist G.B. Jones. Queercore is known as an avant-garde movement originating in the late eighties and early nineties, which rejects mainstream gay culture and queers punk culture, to be more sexually revolutionary. LaBruce’s films often engage with explicit gay sex, exploring taboos and fetishes and pushing the limits of representation. LaBruce’s radical sexuality is linked to an ongoing political activism, as the director constantly pushes back against oppressive homophobic and misogynist attitudes. LaBruce’s filmography has been exhibited at numerous film festivals, including the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal, the Berlinale, TIFF & the Locarno Film Festival, to name just a few. LaBruce’s career was highlighted in 2015 in a MoMA retrospective that featured nine of LaBruce’s features as well as a program of short films, all of which have now become part of MoMA’s permanent film collection.

Artistic Achievement Award, Visual Artist

Kent Monkman (b. 1965) is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist. A member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory (Manitoba, Canada), he lives and works between New York City and Toronto.

Known for his thought-provoking interventions into Western European and American art history, Monkman explores themes of colonization, sexuality, loss, and resilience—the complexities of historic and contemporary Indigenous experiences—across painting, film/video, performance, and installation. Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge received notions of history and Indigenous peoples.

Monkman’s artworks are held in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum; the Hood Museum of Art; the Heard Museum; Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Glenbow Museum; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and macLYON. Private collections that house his works include Art Bridges; the Horseman Foundation; the Tia Collection, the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation; Forge Project; the Gochman Family Collection; the Sobey Art Foundation; and the Rob & Monique Sobey Foundation. His works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the National Gallery of Canada; Royal Ontario Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Hayward Gallery; Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art; Musée d’art Contemporain de Rochechouart; the Philbrook Museum of Art; Palais de Tokyo; and the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College. Monkman has had two nationally touring solo exhibitions, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience (2017-2020), and The Triumph of Mischief (2007-2010). In 2019, Monkman was commissioned as the inaugural artist to make two monumental paintings for The Met’s Great Hall Commission project. He has created other site-specific performances at the Royal Ontario Museum; Compton Verney, Warwickshire; and the Denver Art Museum.

Monkman’s short film and video works, collaboratively made with Gisèle Gordon, have screened at festivals such as the Berlinale (2007, 2008) and the Toronto International Film Festival (2007, 2015). Monkman and Gordon’s literary collaboration, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island, was published in 2023. Monkman is the recipient of the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (2017), an honorary doctorate degree from OCAD University (2017), the Indspire Award (2014), and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award (2014). In 2023, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada—Canada’s highest civilian honour.

Saidye Bronfman Award, Furniture Designer

For over forty years, Peter Pierobon (b. 1957) has been exploring the sculptural possibilities of furniture inspired by nature and an interest in archaic texts.

His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in noteworthy collections in museums such as, the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), the Museum of Arts and Design (New York City, USA), the Canadian Museum of History (Gatineau, Quebec), the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Ontario) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, USA), among others.

He was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004 and has taught extensively across North America at institutions, including the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), the California College of the Arts (San Francisco), the Penland School of Craft (Bakersville), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Deer Isle), School for Furniture Craftsmanship (Rockport). Pierobon currently lives and works on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia.

Artistic Achievement Award, Visual and Media Artist, Cultural Critic, Historian

Clive Robertson (b. 1946) is a performance and media artist, curator, critic, musician, and educator based in Kingston, Canada. Since the 1970s, Robertson has advocated for national cultural policy within the artist-run centre movement and has directed interdisciplinary project spaces in Calgary, Toronto, and Ottawa. In the early 1970s, Robertson and artist Paul Woodrow co-founded one of Canada’s first artist collectives, W.O.R.K.S. The group produced diverse projects, including audio works, an art festival, and television programs. They eventually established the Parachute Center for Cultural Affairs, one of the first artist-run centres in the country. Robertson taught art history and cultural studies at Queen’s University from the mid-1990s until 2016. Robertson was a founder of the ground-breaking interdisciplinary artist magazine Centerfold (1976), which became Fuse: A magazine on art, media and politics (1980- 2014). Centerfold and Fuse

situated artistic production within its social context, becoming an essential source of information and critical discourse for people bridging new media forms and engaged practices.

Artistic Achievement Award, Multidisciplinary Artist, Emerging Arts

Sandra Rodriguez is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, technology and human experience. A filmmaker and sociologist of new media technology (PhD), she creates linear, interactive, and immersive experiences, garnering multiple awards (including a Peabody, Numix, Best VR Leipzig, best storytelling UNVR, and a Golden Nica at Arts Electronica). In the last 15 years, her work has diverted the intended uses of machine learning, generative AI, and large language models to explore their pitfalls and potential in unexpected forms – from AI-augmented ballet performance to multi-user explorations of human cognition, installations on Data and Desire, and large-scale exhibits. Rodriguez is a Sundance Storylab fellow and a Sundance Institute and MacArthur Non-Fiction Grantee. Between 2015 and 2022, she was a visiting artist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she led HackingXR, MIT’s first official course on emergent media. She creates works of art today that speak about issues that will affect us all tomorrow.

Artistic Achievement Award, Visual Artist

Jin-me Yoon is a Korea-born, Vancouver-based artist whose work explores the entangled relations of tourism, militarism, and colonialism. Since the early 1990s, she has used photography, video, and performance to situate her personal experience of migration in relation to unfolding historical, political, and ecological conditions. Through experimental cinematography and the performative gestures of family, friends, and community members, Yoon reconnects repressed pasts with damaged presents, creating the conditions for different futures. Staging her work in charged landscapes, Yoon finds specific points of reference across multiple geopolitical contexts. In so doing, she brings worlds together, affirming the value of difference.

Over the last three decades, Jin-me Yoon’s work has been presented internationally in hundreds of exhibitions, and she has mentored many students over the years while teaching at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts. In 2018, she was elected as a Fellow into the Royal Society of Canada; and in 2022, she was awarded the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award.