Biographies

In 1994, Stephen Andrews has been part of the collective exhibition Je crois le vent les a ôtés, presented at the Canadian Cultural Centre which also presented his project 1st Part of the 2nd Half in 2003.

Stephen Andrews was born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1956. Over the last thirty-five years, he has exhibited his work in Canada, the United States, Brazil, Scotland, France and Japan. He is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver), the Schwartz Art Collection (Harvard Business School), as well as many private collections. His work deals with memory, identity, technology and their representations in various media. Using images sourced from newspapers, television, film, cellphones and the Internet, Stephen Andrews creates hand crafted works in a range of mediums, including oil, latex, crayon, silkscreen and linoleum-cut printing, rubber stamps, and animation. A distinctive feature of Andrews’s art is his interest in creating the look of mechanical reproduction by analogue means. The artist has stated that in his work he renders: “the digital, the dot matrix in print reproduction, film or television technologies . . . by hand in an attempt to represent both the message and the means by which it is delivered.” By using a technique that gives equal weight to both media and message of his chosen topics, Andrews creates a space for reflection on our daily consumption of the imagery we get from media. Andrews’s work, taken individually, or as an œuvre, is an emotional and subjective reportage. He relays the effects, presented poetically, of contemporary historical context as it becomes personal. His work jaywalks at the intersection of the body and the body politic, the self and the social.

In 2017, Sara Angelucci has been part of the duo exhibition Piece by Piece (with Sanaz Mazinani) presented at the Canadian Cultural Centre.

Sara Angelucci is a Toronto-based artist working in photography, video, audio and installation. Over the years her projects have drawn from a range of personal photographs and films – to anonymous and found images. Based in the history of photography – from vernacular snapshots to professional studio portraiture – the history outside the image frame informs the direction of her research into natural and social histories implicated in the photograph. This research has directed a deep interest in natural history and her most recent work is informed by a study of avian and botanical beings. Sara Angelucci completed her BA at the University of Guelph (Ontario) and her MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is an adjunct professor in photography at the School of Image Arts Ryerson University and is represented by the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto and the Patrick Mikhail Gallery in Montreal.

The Canadian Cultural Centre constantly accompanied Iain Baxter, Iain Baxter& and N.E.Thing Co’s projects in France and is proud to reintroduce the artist in France under his new IAIN BAXTER& (the &man) name. In 2010-2011, the CCC presented Iain Baxter. Canadian Perspective, in partnership with the Art Gallery of Windsor, the University of Windsor, the Lethbridge University Art Gallery and the FRAC Bretagne. In 2017, the CCC was a partner of The Power of & at the Sorbonne Gallery in Paris.

IAIN BAXTER&, recently rebaptized IAIN BAXTER& the &man (after a first legal change of name from Baxter to Baxter& in 2005), is a pioneer of Canadian conceptual art. The multidisciplinary artist has spent the last six decades creating & exhibiting a unique body of work that defies the limits & definition of art. Though his boundless creativity, he interprets the connections between nature & technology, raising awareness of such contemporary global concerns as consumerism, environmentalism & the media. Baxter& is an exemplary multidisciplinary practitioner whose conceptual curiosity spans sculpture and installation, painting, photography, video art, film production, performance, and guerilla interventions. He was also one of the founders of Canadian conceptual art in the 1960s through the establishment of the conceptual art project and enterprise N. E. Thing Co. Ltd and his pioneering consulting work with Polaroid Corporation and Labatt’s Breweries.

Showcased worldwide, with a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2011 which travelled the following year at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the artist work as been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions as well as included in various public collections in Canada and in the United States, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Iain Baxter&’s achievements have been recognized through major distinctions & prizes, among them the Order of Canada, the Order of British Columbia & the Order of Ontario, as well as the Governor General’s Award in Visual & Media Arts & the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize. Iain Baxter& is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, as well as a Distinguished University Professor at SOCA, the University of Windsor’s new School of Creative Arts.

In 2011, the Canadian Cultural Centre presented Illuminated Manuscripts by Robert Bean.

Robert Bean is an artist, writer and curator living in Halifax (Nova Scotia). He is a Professor at NSCAD University. Bean has edited books and published articles on the subject of photography, contemporary art and cultural history. Utilizing public archives and collections, Bean considers the temporal uncertainty that photography and digital media evoke in relation to experience, technology and language. Specific to this project is the production of artwork and publications influenced by the culture of networks, mobile computing and obsolescence. Bean has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe, Korea and New Zealand. Bean is a recipient of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Canada Council for the Arts. Robert Bean was the Artist in Residence at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa, in 2010. Robert Bean's work is in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canada Council Art Bank, Global Affairs Canada Visual Art Collection (ARBZ), the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) Karlsruhe, Germany and the Donovan Collection, University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, Ontario. 

Dianne Bos’exhibition The Sleeping Green, No Man’s Land 100 Years Later, organized by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, was presented at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris in 2017 and was exhibited across Canada.

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1956, Dianne Bos received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University. She divides her time between the foothills of the Rockies and the Pyrenees.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally since the 1980s. Notable national exhibitions include Light Echo at the McMaster Museum of Art in collaboration with Astronomer Doug Welch, It’s You!: Unexpected Photographs from Papua New Guinea at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, P.E.I., “See Attached” a photographic dialogue with photographer Sarah Fuller at the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery and The Sleeping Green, No Man’s Land 100 Years Later, organized by the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, was presented internationally at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris in April 2017 and was exhibited across Canada including the Art Gallery of Hamilton and the McMichael Gallery.

Many of Bos’s recent exhibitions feature handmade cameras, walk-in light installations, and sound pieces. These tools and devices develop her investigations of journeying, time, and the science of light. This work appeared in the traveling exhibitions Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography, New Mexico Museum, Seeing, Science Gallery, Dublin Ireland. See the Stars, a multi-aperture tent installation created for the Midnight Sun Camera Obscura Festival in Dawson City, Yukon, and Star Shed at McMaster Museum in Hamilton.

She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Banff Centre. Her work has been shown in the United States, Ireland, France, Spain, Japan and Italy, and she is a sought after presenter on, and instructor in, alternative photography techniques. Many private and public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Glenbow Museum, Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, own her work. She has been twice nominated for the Scotia Bank Photography award and co-founded Exposure: Alberta’s Photography Festival.

In 2007, the Canadian. Cultural Centre presented Millie Chen’s Extreme Centre, in partnership with the Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie in Hérouville St-Clair

Millie Chen’s visual, audio and performative works are intended to interrupt habits of viewing. Materials, tools and methodologies are contingent on the needs of the moment, but at the core of all her projects are social inquiry and the use of sensory modes of perception in the generation of knowledge. For over a decade, she has focused on landscape and the invisible histories of the land. Chen’s artwork has been shown across North and South America, East Asia and Europe at venues and festivals including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), the Power Plant (Toronto), the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris), Centro Nacional des las Artes (Mexico City), the Contemporary Austin, Shanghai Expo, Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, Toronto Nuit Blanche, and FILE-Rio: Electronic Language International Festival (Rio de Janeiro). Among her awards is a 2003 International Residency Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to conduct a four-month Paris studio artist residency; a 2007 Chalmers Fellowship through the Ontario Arts Council to produce Demon Girl Duet, an audio-video based on two river journeys on the Niagara and the Yangtze; a 2020–21 Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship from the University at Buffalo to conduct research and production on Silk Road Songbook (SRS), a collaborative multidisciplinary project that weaves song into landscape. SRS facilitates the creation of grass roots songs that voice local concerns about land, sovereignty, and cultural identity along ancient and contemporary Eurasian trade routes; for each place, the voices will be the dynamic driving force, the land a shared visual anchor. Chen’s work is in several public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, University of Colorado Art Museum, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Art Bank of Canada Council for the Arts, Art Gallery of Ontario, Canadian Pacific Railway, and Toronto Transit Commission, and she has produced a number of major permanent public art commissions. Her writing has appeared in publications in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and China. Chen is a professor in the Department of Art, University at Buffalo.

Large surveys of Robin Collyer’s work have been presented in France, including at Le point du Jour, in Cherbourg (2012) and at the Centre photographique d’Ile de France, Pontault-Combault (2000). The galerie Gilles Peyroulet has been representing his work for decades in Paris. The Canadian Cultural Centre has been a partner on all those projects.

Robin Collyer was born in London, England, in 1949, emigrating to Canada in 1956. Collyer had his first solo exhibition in 1971. He works with photography, sculpture and public works. Throughout his career, his photographs and three-dimensional works have existed in parallel. Robin Collyer has exhibited his sculpture and photography across Canada and the United States, and in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England and France. In 1987 he exhibited at Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany, and in 1993 his work represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In 1999 an exhibition of Collyer’s photographs was organized by the Art Gallery of York University, which then travelled to the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France in Pontault-Combault, France.

Over the past four decades, Collyer’s work in photography and three-dimensional assemblages have responded to a world which has moved from analogue to digital. Collyer’s early black and white photographs looked critically at the limits of the photographic image and its claims to authenticity. Colour photographs of subjects in nature from the 1990s examine the notion of beauty. Retouched urban images with all of the text removed, highlight the ubiquity of commercial and corporate language in a public setting. This questioning of what we are looking at and what it depicts continues to be a central element of his photo works. Collyer’s photographs are understated, often ironic visions of the modern world. In his sculptures, the vernacular forms can be understood in the context of contemporary information and production systems.

The work of Donigan Cumming deals with themes of the body, truth and fiction, taboos of representation, and social engagement. Among his solo exhibitions are Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography (OK Harris/49th Parallel, New York, and CNP, Paris, 1986), The Mirror, the Hammer and the Stage (Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, 1990), Diverting the Image (Art Gallery of Windsor and CIAC, 1993), Pretty Ribbons (Les Rencontres d’Arles, 1994), Moving Stills (Mois de la Photo à Montréal 1999 and IFF Rotterdam 2000); Moving Pictures (MOCCA Toronto, 2005); La Somme, le sommeil, le cauchemar (Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 2006); and Kincora (Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montreal, 2010).

Retrospectives include Corps-à-corps : l’œuvre de Donigan Cumming (Vidéographe, 2020) and programmes at Anthology Film Archives (New York), Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), Pleasure Dome (Toronto) and Visions du Réel (Nyon). Major publications are The Stage (1991), Pretty Ribbons (1996), Gimlet Eye (2001), Lying Quiet (2004), Kincora (2008), Pencils, Ashes, Matches & Dust (2009), and Kerr’s Suitcase (2015).

Critical studies are included in The Photography Book (Phaidon, 1997); Art and Photography (Phaidon, 2003); Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the Canadian Imagination (MQUP, 2003), Das Lexikon der Fotografen (Knaur, 2003), The Photobook: A History II (Phaidon, 2006); Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (MQUP, 2007); Touching Surfaces. Photographic Aesthetics, Temporality, Aging (Rodopi, 2008); 100 Video Artistas (EXIT, 2009); Visual Arts in Canada: The 20th Century (OUP, 2010), Splitting the Choir: The Moving Images of Donigan Cumming (Canadian Film Institute, 2011); Une Collection. Maison européenne de la photographie (Actes Sud, 2015); and The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Photography (2015). His work is held by leading institutions in Canada, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Cumming lives and works in Montreal.

The Canadian Cultural Centre has been in constant partnership with the projects of Stan Douglas in France. In 2014 the CCC dedicated a solo exhibition to him, Abandonment and Splendour, at the same time as the retrospective Stan Douglas: Photographs 2008–2013, presented by the Carré d’Art, Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes in partnership with the CCC.

Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work. Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films and photographs – and more recently theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects – that investigate the parameters of their medium. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible.

Douglas’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide since the 1980s : in 2013, a major survey of the artist’s work, Stan Douglas: Photographs 2008–2013, was presented at Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes. It travelled as Stan Douglas: Mise en scène through 2015 to Haus der Kunst, Munich, followed by Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Interregnum was on view at WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels, and Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, in 2015. In 2016 Luanda-Kinshasa was presented at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and, in 2019–20, SPLICING BLOCK was on view at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin. The artist’s work was featured in the Venice Biennale in 1990, 2001, 2005 and 2019, and in Documenta, Kassel, in 1992, 1997 and 2002. The artist was recently selected to represent Canada at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

The Canadian Cultural Centre accompanied many projects by Pascal Grandmaison in France. He also represented it in his own exhibition space as part of the Mois de la Photo in Paris, in 2012, and participated with Isabelle Hayeur and Thomas Kneubühler in the exhibition In the Middle of Nowhere.

Pascal Grandmaison, born in 1975, lives and works in Montreal. He has exhibited extensively in Canada and Europe. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Casino Luxembourg-Forum d’Art Contemporain, the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Jessica Bradley Art + Projects (Toronto), Galerie René Blouin (Montreal), Prefix Photo (Toronto), Galerie Séquence (Chicoutimi), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Galerie B-312 and Espace Vox (Montreal), Jack Shainman Gallery (NY), Galerie Eponyme (Bordeaux ), Galerie Georges Verney-Carron and Galerie BF 15 (Lyon, France), Vidéochronique (Marseille).

His work has been included in many group exhibitions including Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing), the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris), Existentie (Ghent), Centre d’Art Contemporain (Meymac), Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Withworth Art Gallery (Manchester), Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec (Quebec City), the 2005 International Biennale of Contemporary Art in Prague, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University (Montreal) and the Edmonton Art Gallery.

His videos have been presented internationally, more recently at Haus der Kulturen des Welt (Berlin), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Edinburgh Art Festival, Le Fresnoy (Tourcoing), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centre de l’Image Contemporaine (Geneva). 

Pascal Grandmaison is represented by Galerie Blouin-Division, Montreal.

A photographer and graphic designer by training, Angela Grauerholz was a full professor at the École de Design at the l’Université du Québec à Montréal until 2017, where she taught typography and photography since 1988. From 2008 to 2012, she was head of the Centre de Design at the l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Grauerholz is also a contemporary artist and has participated in national and international exhibitions. She has taken part in many events, including the Sydney Biennale (1990), documenta IX (1992), the Carnegie International (1995) and the Montreal Biennale (2004). The winner of many prizes in graphic design, she was awarded Québec’s Prix Paul-Émile Borduas for her accomplishments in the arts in 2006, followed, by the Canada Council’s Governor General Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2014, and the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award in 2015. Along with her purely photographic work, she has worked on different types of photographic archives, addressing notions of memory, of space and place, as well photographic representation.

Adad Hannah was born in New York in 1971, spent his childhood in Israel and England, and moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s. He lives and works in Vancouver. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver, a master’s degree and a Ph.D. of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal. His work is in public and private collections around the world, and he has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, West Africa, China, South Korea, Australia, Russia, Argentina and Brazil. Adad Hannah has won a number of awards, including the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding mid-career artists in 2009. The artist is currently represented by Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain in Montreal and Equinox Gallery in Vancouver.

The Canadian Cultural Centre accompanied Isabelle Hayeur’s projects in France. It also presented her work during Mois de la Photo in Paris in 2012, alongside that of Pascal Grandmaison and Thomas Kneubühler in the exhibition In the Middle of Nowhere.

Isabelle Hayeur is a lens-based artist known for her photographs and experimental videos. Her approach is one of environmental, urban and social criticism. She is particularly interested in the feelings of alienation, uprooting and disenchantment. Since the late 1990s, she has been probing the territories she goes through to understand how our contemporary civilizations take over and fashion their environments. She is concerned about the evolution of places and communities in the neoliberal sociopolitical context we currently live in. She participated in many group exhibitions, such as the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts (North Adams), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), Istanbul Modern (Istanbul), Tampa Museum of Art, Bruce Silverstein Gallery (New York), Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain (Luxembourg), Today Art Museum (Beijing), Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie à Arles.

Geoffrey James was born in Wales, read Modern History at Oxford and began photographing in the early 1970s. He is the author or subject of more than a dozen monographs dealing with various forms of the manmade landscape, and has exhibited widely, with solo shows at the Palazzo Braschi in Rome, the Americas Society in New York and the National Gallery of Canada. Group shows in which he has taken part include Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992, and Into the Sunset, Photography’s Image of the American West, MoMA, New York, in 2009. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Governor-General’s Prize for Visual and Media Arts and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize. He lives in Toronto, where he was the city’s first photolaureate.

Born in Canada, Mark Lewis lives and works in London, United Kingdom. In 2009 he represented Canada at the 53rd Venice Biennale with his exhibition Cold Morning. Solo exhibitions include Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver 2008), Forte Di Bard (Italy, 2011), Van AbbeMuseum (Eindhoven, 2013), Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2014), The Power Plant (Toronto, 2015), Canada House (London, 2015), Le Bal (Paris, 2015), Austin Contemporary, Texas (2017), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, 2017) and Casa do Povo (Sao Paulo, 2019).

In 2015 Mark Lewis completed his feature film Invention. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Chicago Film Festival and others worldwide. It has received critical acclaim and was shown as part of the 2016 International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.

In 2016 Mark Lewis was awarded The Governor General’s Award for Excellence in Fine Art, in 2016. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including: 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (Sao Paulo), Real DMZ Project (Seoul), Beirut Art Centre (Beirut), Galerie Marcelle Alix (Paris), Serralves Museu de Arte Contemporanea (Porto), Centre Pompidou (Paris) and MUDAM (Luxembourg). His film installations are in the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the MUDAM (Luxembourg) and numerous other museums worldwide.

Mark Lewis is the co-founder and co-director of Afterall, based at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London where he is Professor of Fine Art. He is an editor of Afterall Journal and the series editor of Afterall One Works.

Jimmy Manning is primarily a photographer, although he has also made drawings, prints and carvings during his creative career. He is grandson to Peter Pitseolak, a photographer who was Manning’s earliest inspiration. Manning’s photographs explore daily life in his community, documenting landscapes and gatherings of family and friends. He was a former manager of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative’s Kinngait Studios and served as an international spokesperson and cultural ambassador on behalf of his local artist community. Manning’s photographs are included in the collections of the Canadian Museum of History, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. Jimmy Manning lives and works in Kinngait, Nunavut.

The Canadian Cultural Centre has supported many projects by Aude Moreau in France, including three organized by the curator Louise Déry: A Montréal, quand l’image rôde, in Le Fresnoy (2013–14) as well as L’Entre-images (Nuit blanche, 2013) and La Nuit politique (2015–16), both presented at the CCC.

Aude Moreau has a master’s degree in visual and media art from the Université du Québec à Montréal and her work combines her double educational cursus in scenography and the visual arts. Her work has been exhibited in Canada and on the international scene. Her exhibition La nuit politique was presented at the Galerie de l’Université du Québec à Montréal and at the Canadian Cultural Centre in 2015, then at the Casino Luxembourg and the Power Plant, Toronto, in 2016. Her work has also been presented at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2017), at the Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal (2018) and as part of the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin presented at the Musée du Louvre in 2020. Aude Moreau received the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2011), the Prix Powerhouse (2011) and the Prix Louis Comtois (2016). She lives and works in Montreal.

Based in Montreal, Nadia Myre is a nationally renowned interdisciplinary artist and Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishnabeg First Nation. As exemplified by seminal works Indian Act (2002), and The Scar Project (2005–2013), her work explores the politics of belonging by positioning it within a framework of Indigenous resistance and resilience. She has an extensive exhibition history, with over 115 shows – 25 of which have been solos in the last 10 years. Her work can be found in the Canadian embassies of New York, London, Paris and Greece. Most recent exhibitions include Balancing Acts (Textile Museum, Toronto, 2019), Show Me Your Wound (Dom Wein, Vienna, 2018/19), Code Switching and Other Work (The Briggait, Glasgow International, 2018), Tout ce qui reste/Scattered Remains (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2017–18). Myre is the recipient of numerous commissions and awards, notably the 2014 Sobey Art Award for Canadian artists under 40, and Compagne de l’Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec (2019).

Ian Paterson was born and raised in Brantford, Ontario. He graduated from Trinity College, University of Toronto, and became an art curator at the Oakville Galleries. In 1982 he moved to France and has lived there ever since. He was a Professor of Drawing at Parsons in Paris and the Paris College of Art. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe, and specifically in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Musée Carnavalet, Canadian Cultural Centre and Galerie Françoise Paviot. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery, Ottawa, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

The Canadian Cultural Centre presented Deep Water, a monumental installation by Ed Pien in 2001–02. Today, a metalcut by the artist, entitled Ancient Pine, welcomes all the visitors of the new Canadian Cultural Centre and the Embassy of Canada in France. This work was commissioned on the occasion of the grand reopening of 2018.

Ed Pien emigrated from Taiwan to Canada with his family at the age of eleven. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree from Western University and a Master of Fine Art from York University. He has recently taken early retirement from teaching part-time at the University of Toronto in order to focus full time on his art practice. Ed Pien started his art career being nurtured by artists-run centres. He has shown in venues that include Oboro, Montreal, YYZ, Toronto, Articule, Montreal, Langage Plus, Alma, Axenéo7, Gatineau and Access Gallery, Vancouver. He has also presented his work at the Drawing Centre, NYC, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, the Goethe Institute, Berlin, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, the Songzhuang Art Centre, Beijing; the National Art Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and the MASS MoCA, Massachusetts. Furthermore, Ed Pien has participated in the Montreal Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Moscow Biennale, the Beijing International Biennale, as well as the Curitiba Biennial, Brazil and most recently, in the Bienal Internacional de Asunción, in Paraguay. In June 2021, Ed Pien will present a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Entitled Present: Past/Future, the work will feature videos, photographs, objects and an installation developed from his ongoing exploration of time with a small group of Cuban Elders since 2014.

Public Studio is the collective art practice of filmmaker Elle Flanders and architect Tamira Sawatzky. Since 2009, Public Studio has employed a diverse range of media resulting in large-scale public art works, films, immersive installations, lens-based works and socially engaged projects. Public Studio was founded with the intent of exposing the antagonisms that define issues of public space and its disappearance, as well as the effects of globalization on our everyday landscapes. Their multidisciplinary practice has engaged topics such as war and militarization, ecology and urbanization, and political dissent. Central to their work is a desire to bridge notions of the aesthetic and the ethical, and question the role art can play in not simply “making meaning”, but “making meaning matter”.

Born in 1928, Michael Snow lives and works in Toronto. Michael Snow’s internationally active practice includes work in sculpture, painting, photography, holography, installation, bookworks, video, film, music, sound and several public art commissions. In 2020, Michael Snow presented an exhibition of sound related works at the Art Museum of the University of Toronto. The Art Gallery of Hamilton is presenting a major retrospective of his early work entitled Early Snow in 2020–21.

Some recent solo exhibitions, screenings and music performances include: In the Way at the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2012), Recent Works at Secession,Vienna (2012), Objects of Vision at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2012), The Legacy of Wavelength at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Solo Snow at Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal (2013), Michael Snow Photo-Centric at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2014), Sequences at La Virreina, Barcelona (2015), Culturegest in Lisbon and sculpture exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao. The Cinema of Michael Snow at Cinemateca Portuguesa, Lisbon (2019), Musique pour aujourd’hui at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2019), Rencontres Internationales Paris Berlin at the Louvre, Paris (2019). Snow’s work is in many collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), Ludwig Museum (Cologne and Vienna), Tate (London), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Snow has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972) the Order of Canada (Officer, 1982; Companion, 2007), and the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2000) for cinema. Snow was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (1995); in 2004 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Université de Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2011 he was awarded the Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

In 2003 Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak presented the installation . . . Before I Wake at the Canadian Cultural Centre, accompanied by a catalogue written by the critic Paul Ardenne. The centre has also supported several projects by the duo in France.

Lisa Steele (born in Kansas City, lives in Toronto) and Kim Tomczak (born in Victoria, BC, lives in Toronto) have worked exclusively in collaboration since 1983, producing videotapes, performances, and photo/text works.

Major public art commissions include: Watertable (2009, and expanded in 2011) a light and sound installation under the Gardiner Expressway (a raised highway) that marks the original shoreline of Lake Ontario at the foot of historic Fort York; . . . bump in the night (Barrie) (2010) commissioned by McLaren Art Centre and installed in bus shelters; Falling Up (2006) a video work for the Winnipeg Art Gallery; Love Squared (2006) screened on the 2,400 square foot video board at Yonge & Dundas Square in Toronto.

A major survey of their work, The Long Time: the 21st-Century Work of Steele + Tomczak, curated by Paul Wong (with a eighty-four-page catalogue), opened at On Main Gallery and VIVO, Vancouver, BC, in September 2012 before being exhibited around Canada for five years.

Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak are co-founders of Vtape, an award-winning media arts centre established in 1983 in Toronto. They have received numerous grants and awards both individually and collaboratively, the latter case including the Bell Canada prize for excellence in Video Art, a Toronto Arts Award, and in 2005, a Governor General’s Award for lifetime achievement in Visual & Media Arts. They were awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of British Columbia, Okanagan in 2009.

Born in Prague, Jana Sterbak studied the history of cinema with John Locke and Tom Waugh as well as painting with Yves Gaucher and Guido Molinari at Concordia University (Montreal) where she completed a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. In the 1980s, she pursued her studies in art history at the University of Toronto and New York University, studies that she abandoned in favour of her artistic production. In the 1990s, she moved to Paris to teach at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA).

Jana Sterbak’s career now spans more than forty years. The artist has defined contemporary art through her sculptures, videos, installations and performances. Her work has taken on unusual forms and materials to ruthlessly consider the human condition with the famous Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic. From Here to There, presented at the 50th Venice Biennial in 2003 renews the relationship between spectator and art by using the dog Stanley equipped with a portable video camera system. The resulting footage then edited and projected on six screens. She occupies an enviable position on the national and international art scene, with major exhibitions presented at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, the Palais des Papes in Avignon, London’s Serpentine Gallery, the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, the Galerie Im Taxispalais in Innsbruck and the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany, earlier this year.

Her works are included in several Canadian, European, American and Australian museum collections such as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, the San Diego Art Museum, the MAAXI Museum (Rome), the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and the Queensland Museum and Brisbane, Australia, in the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal.

Adrian Stimson is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta, Canada. Adrian has a BFA with distinction from the Alberta University of the Arts and MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. He is an interdisciplinary artist and has exhibited in three international biennales: Photoquai, Paris, 2009; The Shoreline Dilemma, Toronto, 2019; and Narin, Sydney, 2020.

His paintings are varied and his bison series are melancholic, memorializing, political and sometimes whimsical. They evoke ideas of cultural fragility, resilience and nostalgia. His performance art looks at identity construction, specifically the hybridization of the Indian, cowboy, shaman and two-spirit being. Buffalo Boy and the Shaman Exterminator are his two reoccurring personas. Adrian Stimson is also known for putting his body under stress : in White Shame Re-Worked, he pierced his chest seven times, recreating a performance originally done by Ahasiw-Muskegon Iskew; he crawled across the desert in 43-degree heat for What about the Red Man?; for Burning Man’s The Green Man he recently dug a trench in a five-day durational performance, sunrise to sunset. His installation work primarily examines the residential school experience – Adrian Stimson attended three residential schools in his life. He has used the material culture from Old Sun Residential School on his Nation to create works that speak to genocide, loss and resilience. His sculptural work includes Spirit of Alliance, a public sculpture in Saskatoon, Bison Sentinel healing gardens of the First Nations University of Canada and Inii Bison Heart, Bronze Bison to be unveiled in the summer of 2020 in Calgary.

Adrian Stimson was a participant in the Canadian Forces Artist Program, which sent him to Afghanistan in 2010. Two exhibitions resulted: Holding our Breath and Terms of Engagement, which toured across Canada. The artist was awarded the Alumni of Influence award by the University of Saskatchewan in 2020, the Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2018, REVEAL Indigenous Arts Award, Hnatyshyn Foundation 2017. He was awarded the Blackfoot Visual Arts Award in 2009, the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005 and the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2003.

In 2011 the Canadian Cultural Centre presented Les Histoires extraordinaires de Diana Thorneycroft. Paysages grinçants d’un imaginaire canadien.

Diana Thorneycroft is a Winnipeg artist who has exhibited various bodies of work across Canada, the United States and Europe, as well as in Moscow, Tokyo and Sydney. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 Manitoba Arts Award of Distinction, an Assistance to Visual Arts Long-Term Grant from the Canada Council, several Senior Arts Grants from the Manitoba Arts Council and a Fleck Fellowship from the Banff Centre for the Arts. Diana Thorneycroft taught as a sessional instructor at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art for twenty-four years. Since 2010 she has been focusing on her studio practice full time, and has gallery representation in Canada and Europe. Known for making art that frequently employs black humour and hovers on the edge of public acceptance, Diana Thorneycroft has pursued subject matter that often challenges her viewing audience. Stemming from her most recent touring installation Black Forest (dark waters), she has just finished her first a stop-motion animation short film entitled Black Forest Sanatorium.

The Canadian Cultural Centre accompanied many of Michèle Waquant’s projects presented in France. In 2002–04, it dedicated a solo exhibition to her, L’Observatoire, organized with Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brest. In 2019, the Canadian Cultural Centre welcomed the artist as part of a special evening focussing on her films, organized in partnership with the film magazine Transfuge.

In 2005, Johannes Zits was part of Canadian Club, a major group exhibition by the Toronto collective Persona Volare, which occupied all five floors of the Canadian Cultural Centre.