Past ARTISTS IN residence

 Kathy holds a Bachelor of Design Degree from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design and has fourteen years of experience as an Art Educator. Her practice includes working in acrylics, watercolours, oils, and fabric and her subject matter usually focuses on celebrating nature. As an Art Educator, Kathy believes that students should be able to explore art processes, and while being given guidance and inspiration, don’t have to be attached to a prescribed outcome, but instead be encouraged to express their own creative ideas. Her teaching experience includes currently being an Art Instructor for

several places here in the lower mainland and previously in Alberta, where she taught for various galleries and art centres, all of which has given her experience instructing in the classroom, as well as in the studio. She has also been an Arts Programmer for the Calgary After School Program, and recently volunteered for eight months at Inner City Arts in Los Angeles. She loves facilitating collaborative community art projects and has run several large scale school-wide projects for Calgary elementary schools and has also facilitated two large community mural projects for Anytx Community Arts in Calgary.

Mishel is a mixed media artist with a BFA from KPU. Mishel is the co-curator

with APTPOP and runs Arrieta Art Studio in New West. She primarily focuses on teaching and curating art. In her personal practice she uses abstract methods to create engaging paintings and installations with a focus on community engagement and interaction. She aims to create pieces that speaks to the audience aesthetically while also being able to express memories, concepts and emotions through it.

 Nura Ali is a visual artist, community organizer and social activist, living and working in Vancouver,  British Columbia. Her multidisciplinary practise engages issues of memory, place building, displacement and power. Nura is committed to community oriented organising and for this reason became one of the founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union,  a unionized workers cooperative with a mission to transform labour practices within the arts and cultural sector.

Tim Bauer is an illustrator, comic book creator, and educator based in Vancouver. Before settling up in Vancouver, Tim lived in the state of Kansas where he got his first degree in East Asian Languages and Culture. This prompted him move to S.Korea where he was afforded the chance to travel around Asia and teach English for five years. Eventually Tim would move to Vancouver to get a degree from Emily Carr in Illustration in 2015. Since then, he has taught courses in graphic design while self-publishing his own comics. Most of Tim’s work focuses on detailed drawings that create a strong narrative while creating an immersive setting. Tim creates comics that contain queer content and is a proponent of LGBTQ2A+ comic creators and is in the works to create a Queer comic and zine fair in Vancouver. He hopes for all of his students to feel free enough to explore and to tell their story in creative ways, but mostly to have fun while doing it. 

Allison Chow is an artist and writer based in the surrendered ancestral lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, known colonially as Vancouver. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, her practice draws from her studies of visual language, communications and a lifelong passion for immersing herself in literary worlds. Inspired by 4 years of working in a social innovation studio, she integrates tools such as ethnography and co-design into her practice, aiming toleverage curiosity and connection for systemic wellness and grassroots change. With a deep commitment to community-engaged art, Chow invites others to join her as fellow art makers, thinkers, and researchers through playful embodied practices. Her recent project, the "Communal Poetry Machine," examines different ways of uncovering the hidden narratives of familiar places through sensory exploration and documentation.

Whether it's in the classroom or her public works, Chow seeks to cultivate spaces that deepen our relationship with imagination and contribute to the creation of a more compassionate pluriverse where we all can belong.

Maggie has been serving the community with inspired programs and workshops for all ages for over 30 years. She is a full-time artist who teaches across Canada and whose.practice is influenced by the Reggio Emilia philosophy.  She is a founding member of the Arts and Play Society, an organization launched as a non-traditional art education consulting practice.

Maggie encourages a strong bond between parents, community, and children as what forges  quality, well-rounded learning experiences. This strong foundation will support our children as they continue moving forward in their education to become future citizens. Maggie believes Art is essential to life in our communities. She is passionate about art education and strives to support and share her values. 

Maggie uses Art to promote well-being and create a space for social connection. She is an active member of the Expressive Arts Therapy Association and Holistic Arts Based Program facilitator. In addition, Maggie recently joined Nature Kids BC to promote eco-literacy and an inspired appreciation of the natural world. She is also a contributor to a book: Beautiful Stuff 2nd Edition: Beautiful stuff from Nature (Edited by Cathy W. Topal and Lella Gandini).

Jocelyn Gosling lives and works on the traditional and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səlilw̓ ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), QayQayt First Nation, Kwantlen, q̓ íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), Semiahmoo, Tsawwassen First Nations, kwikwəƛəm (Kwikwetlem), and Stó:lō Nation. She is committed to ongoing learning and reflection in her role as an artist and educator on these lands.

Jocelyn is a visual artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Minor in Counselling from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her practice is rooted in intuitive painting and a deep emotional connection to animals and the natural world. Working primarily in acrylic, she layers vibrant colours to evoke feeling and reflection, often incorporating charcoal for bold, expressive mark making.

Inspired by her upbringing around horses, Jocelyn explores the emotional and spiritual bonds between humans and animals. Her abstract works reimagine traditional depictions of the horse and the human form, shifting the focus away from physical representation and toward internal states of being. Through curiosity, emotion, and memory, Jocelyn’s process becomes an exploration of how experiences feel rather than how they appear. She brings this same intention to her community-engaged work, emphasizing process over final product and inviting students to be curious, take creative risks, and reflect on their own perspectives. She is especially passionate about creating inclusive, supportive spaces where young people feel safe to express themselves authentically and discover new ways of seeing and making. For Jocelyn, the most meaningful art experiences have come from the connections and insights learned along the way.

Nellie Gossen is an interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the Musqueum, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh first nations. Working through the media of fashion, costume, textiles and performance, Nellie uses clothing as a tool to think and feel through social systems. Considering the many truths of industrial labor and consumption, her work explores the material of mainstream fashion as a vehicle for study, spaciousness, social action, rigorous love practice and phenomenological inquiry. Drawing on one background in fashion design and another in religious studies, Nellie is particularly interested in the space that is created when clothing and contemplative practices meet.
Nellie has presented her work at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz (Berlin), Altes Finanzamt (Berlin) and Ku’damm Karree (Berlin). As a costume designer and textile collaborator, Nellie has worked with artists such as Nancy Tam, Steven Hill, Francesca Frewer, Erika Mitsuhashi, Alexa Mardon, Elissa Hanson and Lexi Vajda. Nellie holds degrees in Fashion Design from Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee, as well as in Religion, Literature and the Arts, from the University of British Columbia. She is currently studying contemplative end of life care with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care.

Susan is an educator with over 20 years of experience (Canada, USA, Switzerland).At the UN School in New York Susan was inspired  to develop integrated arts programs that encourage dialogue. At York University (Toronto), Susan worked as a course director with teacher candidates in the Faculty of Education. Susan’s most recent workshops are designed to address the important work of teaching visual literacy.  Students engage in creating photos with the use of DSLR cameras. Through dialogue Students consider the relevance of responsible publishing and the role students play in shaping online culture. Central to the learning experience is the notion of perspective taking both through the lens and in discussion. Through her teaching, Susan encourages  students to take time to see through a lens and discover beauty in the ordinary.

Originally from Vancouver Island, Kirsten Hatfield holds a Fine Arts Diploma from North Island College and a BFA  from Emily Carr University. She is heavily involved in the local arts community as a practicing artist, curator, art director and art educator. Her personal practice fluctuates between a wide variety of materials but is always centred around painting and colour theory. Her work has been featured on CBCarts, BBC, Huffpostarts, Seventeen Magazine, New York Magazine and locally in Sad Mag and Discorder Magazine. She currently resides in Vancouver where she shows locally and internationally.

My abstract paintings are a combination of memory and dream imagery  exploring the contradictions of the artificial and the natural, the digital and the physical, organization and chaos, flatness and depth, synthetic and natural colours, the sublime and the banal, nostalgia and progression. The intention is to explore the physical and cultural environment of a post-internet and technologically progressive society that is obsessed with nostalgia and tradition; simultaneously existing in the past and future.

Alanna Ho is an educator, community engaged artist (sound-focused) and cultural producer based in New Westminster, BC. Her research is on deep play, female representation and feminist activism in the arts, and accessible art programming in early education. The Rainbow

Forecast Project, founded in 2016, an initiative created to examine the critical connection between radical pedagogy in the arts, and empowering children and young womxn beyond the classroom. She is dedicated to integrating child-led play; inquiry and process based learning; and 21st century learning skills into classrooms. Using storytelling, games and play as the main momentum, she introduces sound and new media technology as a creative tool in combination with traditional materials to aid in the unravelling and discussion of sensitive topics such as diversity in representation and environmental awareness.

Reed Jackson (BFA Film Hons 2017, SFU) is a queer filmmaker/soundmaker/educator on stolen, occupied, unceded səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, Skwxwú7mesh, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm lands. Their work is generated from an endless stream of hungry questions. Recurring themes include ecological intersubjectivity, myth & magic, and the trouble of having and sharing a body. 

Kellen takes an experimental approach to materials, drawing from experimental analogue film traditions and a childhood of making potions in the mud. In their teaching, they are working toward models of collaboration that embrace vulnerability, passion, and curiosity, as opposed to emphasizing technical proficiency. 

Kellen’s approach to facilitation comes from a background in theatre, nurtured by liberatory problem-solving pedagogy. They fully embrace clown logic -- non-linearity, non-rationality, and taking the art of play very seriously! Kellen works to enable and encourage kids to engage with big questions from exactly where they’re at, emphasizing that there are no “right answers” -- only generative thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations that we can all keep learning from and building on togethe

Guná, also known as Megan Jensen is from the Carcross, Tagish First Nation, located in southern Yukon. Guná grew up witnessing the cultural practices of her community including dance, song, language, potlatching annual harvesting on her traditional territory. she was fortunate to learn and grow surrounded by the practises of her ancestors, and this has inevitably informed her practise as a dancer, composer, writer and the dominant part of her practise - painting. Guná has been a student of formalize for ten years and has previously been apprenticed by Nisga'a artist  Mike Dangeli and William Wasden of Alert Bay. She is now in her final year of attaining her Bachelor of visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. 

Guná's mandate is to foster culturally safe and inclusive spaces for students to enable students to  experiment and feel comfortable inquiring into the unknown. Guná firmly believes that all students have an innate capacity to be creative, and that their unique gifts must be nurtured. Guná always aspires to find ways to integrate teachings from her community in order to create spaces of cultural understanding. 

Heather Lamoureux is a community organizer, artist, and facilitator living on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsliel-Waututh territories. She is the Artistic Director at Vines, and has grown with the festival since it’s beginning over the past seven years. Heather is  grateful to have been learning with the community of artists who percolate the work Vines does. She is committed to her responsibility to imagine and co-create nurturing creative spaces for artists. Outside of Vines Heather utilizes her Somatic Education training from Tamalpa Institute to facilitate movement and expressive arts classes. In the past I have worked for Raven Spirit Dance, PuSh International Arts Festival, Dancing on the Edge and the Firehall. She loves to garden at Harmony garden, X̱wemelch’stn pen̓em̓áy, hang out by a river and eat good food with community. I can sometimes be found performing in unexpected outdoor spaces with the collective Pressed Paradise.

Augusta has an ongoing practice in textiles and apprenticed as a shoemaker in 2015 in Krakow, Poland. She holds a degree in Industrial Design from Emily Carr University of Art and Design graduating in 2020 with a focus on craft and design research. In 2025 Augusta graduated from The National Theatre School of Canada in set and costume design. Her approach to design is rooted in context, material exploration, and narrative, with research and playing a central role in her practice.

Pia Massie is a multi-media artist whose work has been exhibited in festivals, museums and galleries throughout North America and Europe, including The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne; and the grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC.  Her teaching career includes universities, elementary schools and community programs. 

Sculpture was the first art practice that I took seriously. When I started to work on site specific, large scale installations in a mono-no-aware approach my sculpture became more about experiencing a moment in time and less about material objects. 

Although now I am known for my films, writing and performances. I also practice tea, take care of bees and help start gardens, in a continuing commitment to engage art in the service of activism. 

I anticipate creating a studio space where community can expand and create, finding their own voices, and working with the materials that come naturally to them.

Marzieh is a doctoral candidate in art education at The University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on artful and pedagogical ways of Making-Place and cultivating a sense of place through art making and walking. Holding both an MFA and BFA in visual arts, her artistic practice entangles material and digital engagements as modes of visual and textual storytelling. Marzieh is curious about how places influence one's ways of art-making and how one can make (a) place(s) through the art-making process. In her teaching and making

practices, she prioritizes care-oriented, slow, intentional, and invitational ways of thinking through art-making and meaning- making. Marzieh seeks to create conditions for co learning and collective creativity, valuing each learner's lived experience while encouraging collaborative exploration.

Adiba Muzaffar is a filmmaker from New Delhi, India. In recent years, her practice has evolved into media art and installation work, inspecting film as a body and skin as an interface. Through video narratives led by personal accounts and experiments with materials, moving images and sound she perseveres to yank at invisible stigmas. Ongoing work includes 360 video tours and branded content for a VR art staging platform.  
Muzaffar has worked as an educator in varied roles since 2018. While working as an ECE at Frog Hollow in 2019 she came across the Reggio Emilia approach in a Reggio inspired program with 5-12 year olds. Her teaching methodology has hence evolved to include emergent learning and pedagogical documentation (making thinking learning visible).  

Andrew Phillips is a community organizer, designer, educator and emerging social practice artist. His interdisciplinary research-based projects explore the entangled relations of human and natural systems through the diverse sites, situations, forms and experiences of everyday life. Experimenting with playful and sometimes eccentric methods and tactics for public engagement and participation, Andrew constructs spaces and processes for conversations, relationship building, and collaborative inquiry about eco-social matters. As a pedagogical process, his works encourage people to ask critical questions to attend more widely and deeply to the plurality of human and more-than-human ways of knowing and being that coproduce everyday life. 

Andrew holds a BA in Political Science from Queen’s University, and is a graduate of the Institute without Boundaries’ postgraduate program in Interdisciplinary Design Strategy.  He is currently completing a Masters of Educational Studies (EDST) at UBC that centres on critical public pedagogies for future ecologies; alternative ways of being/learning together in/through place. 

Nisha Platzer (she/her) is a queer filmmaker and photographer living with disabilities in Vancouver, Canada. Drawn to vibrant shades, her films meld sounds and imagery that you can dream and drown in. Nisha’s short film, Vaivén (2020) won the best film award at aluCine Latin Film & Media Arts Festival and competed at festivals worldwide including Raindance, Festival Nouveau Cinéma, FIDBA, and Ji.hlava. Her award-winning feature debut, ‘back home’ was supported by Telefilm Talent to Watch and presented at the Docs-in-Progress Canadian Showcase at Cannes Film Festival. Nisha studied at the renowned Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba and her work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and the National Film Board of Canada. Nisha is a member of Vancouver’s Iris Film Collective, which promotes the creation and sharing of analog film and she often leads workshops in super8 and other experimental film techniques. Recently, she was artist-in-residence at the Klondike Institute for Art and Culture (KIAC) in Dawson City, Yukon. Her happy place is making art anywhere away from a screen, but particularly in the darkroom or in nature.

Alex is a visual artist born in Guatemala who immigrated to Canada as a political refugee with their family at a young age. In these challenging early years, Alex found art to be a valuable and transformative creative outlet. Later, they pursued a degree in Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The principle themes of Alex’s work revolve around cultural identity, the natural world, and the struggle between competing Canadian and Mayan cultural beliefs. As such, their work is often exploratory, revolving around reconciliation between Western and Indigenous cultures. Their work extends into musical performance, photography, traditional Mayan dance, gardening, ceramics, textiles, watercolours, and community-based initiatives. Central to their practice is their desire to communicate introspective lessons through traditional storytelling, and support a sense of interconnectedness for all.

Alysha Seriani is a settler media artist and inter-generational learner who has been making participatory projects using school iPads with AIRS since 2020. Over the past decade, she's led film, video art and animation creation with many local artists and community organizations including artist-run centres, indoor and outdoor schools, universities, festivals, and museums. Al's style of facilitation and artmaking with children and youth weaves together strategies for social-emotional learning, popular education, depth education, intersectional feminism, anti-colonial animism, somatic awareness, secure attachment and disability justice. She is committed to listening and showing up to each particular place in ways that honours its past and future flourishing.

Shamina Senaratne is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, born into mixed cultural realities each asserting particular perspectives, the importance of identity, and finding a way to feel rooted as a foundation of wellbeing. Every society is comprised of so many personal realities interacting. Throughout her art practice she has been interested in how we tread the space between us, find connection and understanding, find opportunities to share personal realities ie. “this is me, tell me what it’s like to be you.”

“Working with textiles and collage, mark-making and found/collected natural materials, allows me to consider encoding texture and form with metaphor and meaning rather than creating linear narratives using full sentences and prose to relate to place, questions of belonging and “notes” on personal observations of beauty. Storytelling can be embodied in an object. An object or performance can be entrusted with the story or record-keeping of an experience or an emotion.” 

Each of Shamina’s works or installations begins with deep observation of a local or personal experience. She looks forward to working with students to find new ways of seeing and talking about their experiences of where they live and who they are, through writing and experimenting with a variety of visual art techniques. Discovering personal ways to ground themselves, create relationship to their neighbourhood and the land they walk on, creating their own stories of belonging can support students’ emotional regulation through reflection, creativity and artistic expression.  

An interdisciplinary artist, Shamina's textile-based contemporary art has been shown in curated and juried exhibitions in Canada, the US and Europe. She has also written and published poetry and short fiction. Shamina’s approach as a contemporary artist is informed by her BA in Communications, Publishing and History, and Certificate in Public History (SFU).

Nova is an Anishinaabe OjibweTwo-Spirit and transgender interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, educator and storyteller. Nova is a proud enrolled member of the Pinaymootang First Nation locatedin Treaty 2 territory and is a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at EmilyCarr University of Art + Design. As an interdisciplinary artist, they weave together a multiplicity of digital and traditional mediums such as video, photography, sound,illustration, beading, performance, and storytelling in exploring/experimenting with new modes of representation through the lens of their Anishinaabe Ojibwe lived and felt experiences. They are a collaborator, producer and video mentor with Access to Media Education Society, and their work has screened at festivals such as imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (2021) and Vancouver Queer Film Festival (2022). As storytellers, they take pride in sharing their personal journey, knowledge and teachings to all ages and have performed storytelling events across Turtle Island. Nova also teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design as a sessional professor.

Zhuohan Yin, who usually goes by Grace, currently lives in Burnaby, BC. She was born in Shanghai, China, but moved to Canada shortly

after. Wherever she visits, she hopes to be a polite guest. She graduated in 2022 with an HBA from the University of Toronto, completing the Visual Studies Studio Specialist program as well as a minor in Art History.

Presently, Grace volunteers at Burnaby public elementary schools doing all sorts of odd jobs and fun things: leading lessons, helping

with large art projects, translating for students, and organizing a school-wide student art exhibition. Throughout the past year of volunteering, she has noticed that there is a severe lack of support for all things art in elementary schools—especially visual art. Students didn’t have a safe space to create, and there were never enough opportunities for kids to contribute and express themselves through

art. Despite having barely any sort of plan, she decided to try to bring art back into elementary experiences, with the student exhibition as one of the first steps. Grace likes to draw. Although most of her drawings are pencil on paper, she also uses acrylic paint on scrap plywood, digital art programs, video editing software, and words (incorrectly) to draw. These drawings are about everything and nothing, but mostly have to do with herself, and having fun.