Upcoming Workshops

Meet the artists

2024 artists in residence

• Chelsey Stuyt

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  Chelsey Stuyt (she/her) is a photographer working primarily on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh nations. She holds an MA from the University of Bristol and is currently the season photographer at Pacific Theatre and Tightrope Theatre in Vancouver. 

  My work is about playing with the constructed image. The purpose of an image is to show us something, but in the era of ubiquitous smartphone imagery our drive to curate and manipulate creates images that showcase only what we want to be seen. My interest lies in juxtaposing that carefully constructed facade with hints of what may lie beneath it. 

  Chelsey Stuyt’s Instagram 
  Chelsey Stuyt’s Website 
   

• Ciara Brady

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  I am primarily a textile artist working in the film industry for over 15 years. I began in Ireland in 2010 after completing a post graduate degree in Performance and Production through my native language, Irish. My art consists of performance and production elements coming together. 

  My time in film has been spent mainly working in the costume department, specifically special effects where we breathe life and soul into the costumes of characters you see in all your favourite movies and shows. I am fascinated with the processes’ we use to convincingly portray character through clothing, the various mediums that can be used to alter color and texture, and to restore items that would otherwise be waste. 

  I am an advocate for the upcycling/ restoration movement and most of my work involves elements of recycled materials. I breathe textile art and its dramatic elements including how we interact with materials from a performance perspective and how character can be created with these elements in mind. As a performer, feeling the transformation with the step into a costume is quite transcendental. It is intriguing to observe how what we wear informs us as an individual, a society, and as artists. I play with juxtaposition the old and the new, side by side, interchangeable and malleable, according to our artistic vision. I have a strong connection with nature, the ebb and flow in life and all things and love to practice relinquishing control over outcomes via organic methods. In this residency, I will deep dive into the nature of colour, colour theory and the colours of nature through work on natural and bundle dye techniques using natural and organic fabrics and materials.

  Ciara Brady’s Instagram  
  Photo: @creativeinspo_daisy

• Pat Chessell

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  Pat Chessell is a Canadian folk singer-songwriter renowned for his soulful melodies, poignant lyrics, and captivating storytelling. With a career steeped in collaboration and a deep-rooted passion for championing the underdog, Chessell has carved a unique niche in the Canadian music scene.

  Chessell's talent has not gone unnoticed, earning him coveted opening slots for iconic acts like Tegan and Sara, Jim Byrnes, The Paperboys, Sharon Shannon, and Delhi 2 Dublin, among others. His live performances are known for their raw energy and heartfelt connection with audiences, showcasing his unwavering commitment to his craft.

  At the heart of Chessell's music lies a profound empathy for the human experience and a dedication to amplifying the voices of those often overlooked. Through his songs, he paints vivid portraits of life's struggles and triumphs, embodying the spirit of resilience and hope.

  Residing in Vancouver with his wife Alexandra and son Liam, Chessell finds inspiration in the beauty of the Pacific Northwest landscape. As he embarks on an artist residency in North Vancouver, he eagerly anticipates delving deeper into the region's rich cultural tapestry. With North Vancouver as his muse, Chessell looks forward to crafting a new body of work infused with the essence of the Vancouver region, exploring its landscapes, stories, and people.

  In his quest to illuminate the human experience through music, Pat Chessell continues to captivate audiences with his heartfelt melodies and poignant storytelling, leaving an indelible mark on the Canadian folk music landscape.
   

• Willoughby Arevalo & Isabelle Kirouac

  The Art & Fungi Project is an ongoing series of artistic projects led by artists/facilitators Willoughby Arevalo and Isabelle Kirouac. Together, they offer artistic experiences in relation to fungi and how they shape and connect our world growing the interconnections between the community, the land, and it's more than human inhabitants.

   

  Willoughby Arévalo is a mycologist, visual artist, author and educator. He is passionate about how fungal lives shape our world. His lifelong friendship with fleshy fungi has led him down a mycelial pathway – from a start in field identification and mushroom hunting, branching into cuisine, DIY cultivation, farming, education, writing and eco-arts. For over a decade, he has shared mycology with communities across North America, especially his own. His community-engaged art work engages fungi in the artmaking process: thematically, materially, and as active collaborators. Originally from Arcata, California (Wiyot and Yurok Territories), he strives to be a good guest on Coast Salish Territory.

  Isabelle Kirouac is a choreographer, interdisciplinary artist and educator born in Quebec, on the unceded territories of the Abenaki nation, and currently living in Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. She uses movement as a tool to investigate the poetics of the senses, and to process questions raised in her everyday life. Isabelle researches the intersection between the world of fungi and somatic practices, movement improvisation, immersive experiences and community engaged projects in collaboration with mycologist and visual artist Willoughby Arévalo. Isabelle's work has been performed extensively across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Colombia and Europe. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.  

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• Hannah Campbell

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  My art practice is rooted in themes of shared experience, world making and storytelling. Through photographic means both digital and manual, embroidery, drawing and writing, I work to create narratives that often lay somewhere between fact and fiction. These liminal spaces that lack a sense of absolute often creates space for the viewer or reader to place themselves into the story, to imagine beyond what is being seen into their own lived experience. Most of my photographic work is accompanied by text, sometimes the writing is collected by the viewer themselves. I enjoy this dialogue that unfolds between a photo and text, and how it can influence and shape how we see things. I also often embroider or draw directly on to my photographs, working to add layers and perspectives to the story being told. Much of my work leans into gently shifting moments of the everyday, creating a photo where fiction and reality have blurred lines. It is in this subtle altering of the real photo that a different perspective can be seen. Through a multi-disciplinary approach, my practice works to utilize stories as a way to explore how the personal expands beyond ourselves in to shared experiences.

• Erin MacNair

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   Erin MacNair (she, her) lives in North Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh people in British Columbia, Canada. Her stories are published or forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, such as The Baffler, Augur, The Walrus, Grain, EVENT, december, Orca, PRISM international, The Razor, Pulp Literature, The Fiddlehead, and others. When not writing, Erin can be found taking pictures of mushrooms, metalsmithing in her tool-filled woman-cave, playing the bass (badly) and ferrying kids to Ultimate Frisbee practice. More info at erinmacnair.com.

• Camilo Martin-Florez & Carolina Silva

  Camilo Martin-Florez

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  Camilo Martin-Florez is a Colombian-Canadian filmmaker and film-research, whose artistic practice focuses on live, multimedia and performative cinema. Martin-Florez's practice includes found-footage filmmaking, film remediation and video art/performance. Martin-Florez filmography is composed of cinema pieces, i.e., The Vernacular Danse, The Interrupted Chilean, The Common Guilt, Whose Boards Are These, Sakartvelo 36x36, among others, that have been selected and screened in various festivals and art events around the world. A resident of North Vancouver, during the present artistic residency, Martin-Florez will explore video-art performances with recycled and original material, that will be accompanied by live poetry and live music.

  Carolina Silva

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  Carolina Silva is a Colombian musician, proficient in various musical disciplines, including composition, singing, and songwriting. Her musical education focused on classical, musical theater, and traditional Latin American folklore, refining her skills in each genre. She has participated in esteemed choral competitions across Europe, earning notable recognition. Carolina's compositions are deeply personal, serving as a vehicle for introspection and reflection on life's themes. Through her music, she explores her own experiences and questions herself, inviting listeners on a journey of self-discovery and contemplation, aiming to share her distinctive voice and perspective with audiences worldwide. 
   

2023 artists in residence

• Dolores Altin & Elvira Monteforte

  Dolores Altin and Elvira Monteforte (aka Elvis and Lola) are public artists with a passion for environmental art. They make art that makes a difference and that's meant to be experienced in person. The art work is site-specific and often uses recycled and natural materials to create a sense of place. The artists strongly believe that art should be accessible to everyone, thus creating pieces that can be enjoyed by all.

  Read our story about their artist in residence projects: Bugging out – artists in residence create willow sculpture insects

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• Allison Chow

  Artist bio

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  My work is all about making experimental (mental and physical spaces) that spark curiosity and compassion to help bring about collaborative healing and visioning in the community. Making like this lets me live thousands of lives and stories within my own. It lets me stretch my creativity and stay a life-long learner. Working like this I also heal parts of myself around belonging.

  The three most important things I want to communicate are hope, imagination and power. In which we always have the chance to re-imagine, learn and expand our models of community, knowledge and power to tap into collective strength and indigenous solutions generated with and by the people that live in the system.

  As a multidisciplinary maker, I work with a lot of found objects.

• Lori Goldberg

  Project details coming soon!

  Artist bio

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  Lori Goldberg was born and lives in Vancouver. She attended Langara College Fine Arts program, Ontario College of Art and Design and Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Canada Council Grant, two Tony Onley Artist's Project Scholarship and the Vermont Artist Award.

  Her work is in the collections of the Canada Art Bank, Contemporary Art Gallery, the City of Vancouver, Michael Audain private art collection and VGH Foundation. Major exhibitions include South Main gallery, Vancouver / Justine Barnike Gallery, Ontario / Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver / the KX Kunst Kampfnagel Gallery, Hamburg.

  As an artist, Goldberg has always sought intersections with broader communities, developing collaborative and mutually instructive inquiries about how art can impact positive environmental changes. She has spearheaded socially engaged project in Akumal, Mexico, Governors Island, NYC, Vancouver and Squamish BC.

  She served for three years as the Provincial Representative of C.A.R./F.A.C. a Canada-wide advocacy and education NPO. As well, she was a founding director of the Vancouver Salish Sea Artist Residency. Over the last two decades, Goldberg has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and frequently presented at Hollyhock on Cortes Island.

• Nathan Lee

   Nathan Lee’s Artist in Residency

  During Nathan Lee’s artist residency with NVRC, he created a model of The Rookery, along with a step-by-step education guide for the community.

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  Moodyville sawmill opened in 1863. The community of Moodyville was an early mill town and one of the first permanent European settlements in North Vancouver. While the population was multicultural, it was far from equal. By 1889 there were 160 men employed at the mill, 36 of whom were of Chinese descent. Produced as part of NVRC's Artist Residency program, this project explores the “Chinese Rookery,” an ethnic enclave on the lowlands of the site. Little is known about the lives and working conditions of the people that lived here. This model is an interpretation of the site conditions based on the available archival information.

   

  Make Your Own Rookery

  Build a scale model and discover for yourself what the area may have been like. 

• Pierre Leichner & Johnny Trinh

  Artists Pierre Leichner and Johnny Trinh hosted 'Stories from the Kitchen' where over four sessions, chefs from the community offered demonstrations of foods from various cultures: Indigenous, Persian, Asian and Ukrainian.

  Participants had an opportunity to taste and enjoy the dishes together. After the meal, the artist facilitators led discussions and story sharing. The food offered prompts to share memories, consider cultural significance and create new stories together as a community. 

  This series took place at Lions Gate Community Recreation Centre over four Thursday evenings from March 30 to April 20.

• Gemma Crowe

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  Gemma Crowe is a new media and movement artist exploring ways of knowing beyond cognition  by encouraging a felt-sense through aesthetic affect. Her thesis research is concerned with the illusory potential of sound and the sensory apprehension of movement. Gemma will be continuing this research now, with the performance of sound through dance.

• Pattern Nation

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  Pattern Nation is a slow fashion sustainable clothing design brand, artist collective and creative platform for colourful humans run by cosmic partners and spouses Cyd Eva and Costa Besta and friend and artist Brianna Klassen. They create handmade one-of-a kind & small run ungendered street wear and accessories, interactive art installations called blobs, visual art and surface pattern designs, fashion films and photography, DJ & live music sets, events, workshops, collaborative projects and more. Their current work takes place on the stolen, unceded and traditional territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm people (Kwikwetlem) in Coquitlam BC and have previously worked and lived in Vancouver Canada (all), Durban and Cape town South Africa (Cyd & Costa) and Bangalore India (Bri).

2022 artists in residence

• Cara Guri

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  Cara Guri is a visual artist based in Vancouver, BC.  She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University and has completed a painting residency at Columbia University. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Takao Tanabe Scholarship, the Brissenden Scholarship, and the Bishop’s Undergraduate Prize in Fine Arts.  Her work has been exhibited in Canada and New York, NY. Recent exhibitions include The Reach Gallery Museum, Burrard Arts Foundation and the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie. She has also completed artist residencies with hcma, Burrard Arts, and The City of Abbotsford and was an artist with Vancouver Mural Festival. 

  In her current painting practice, Cara explores the relationship between identity construction and portraiture. Her works examine the transactional nature of portraiture: the information that is given to the viewer and that which is withheld. Through her paintings, she re-examines conventions and symbols that are found in historical portraiture by translating them into her current reality in a way that disrupts their original meaning and questions what it means to see and be seen.

  Cara Guri's website

• Cath Hughes

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  Cath Hughes is a British and Canadian multi disciplinary visual artist, living and working with gratitude on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil Waututh nations. She holds a BFA from Oxford University, and an MA from London University as well as a Postgraduate Certificate of Education from Goldsmiths College and recently participated in the postgraduate painting correspondence course facilitated by Turps Art School. She has worked for many years in art and gallery education, including at Tate Modern and the National Gallery in London before immigrating to Canada in 2008. She now teaches at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Burnaby Art Gallery and the Shadbolt Centre. 

  Cath Hughes Art | Facebook
  Cath Hughes' website

   

   

• Nathan Lee

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  CONTEXTURE is a noun that refers to an interwoven structure – a fabric.  It is also the work of Nathan Lee.  CONTEXTURE weaves together threads of place, history, culture, and ecology into playful, richly layered objects of art and design. 

  Nathan’s creative approach seeks to engage meaningful social and ecological concepts with humour and whimsy, while celebrating overlooked natural and cultural systems. His projects are built on a foundation of thorough research and layered with site-specific meaning. The end result is relevant and playful, profound and engaging.

  Nathan Lee's website

   

2019 artists in residence

• Jackie Bateman

  Jackie Bateman, Author, Screenwriter, Copywriter jacbateman.com/about

  Jackie Bateman is a British author and screenwriter. She was raised in Kenya, lived in London and Edinburgh, and eventually found home in Canada in 2003. She has published three award-winning novels: a character-driven, psychological suspense trilogy set in Scotland. The books are being developed into a television series called Thirst. Locally, she was featured at the North Shore Writers Festival in 2017 and that year’s Local Authors Cafe, events which received enthusiastic praise from both the audience and the festival organizers. jacbateman.com
   

• Matthew Ariaratnam

  Matthew Ariaratnam is an interdisciplinary sound artist, composer, guitarist, and listener based on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations – also known as Vancouver, BC. He creates sensory walks, writes dumbpop and chamber music, and frequently collaborates with choreographers, visual artists, and theatre-makers. His Soundwalks are focused on the sensory perception of listening. matthewariaratnam.wordpress.com/

• Virginia Duivenvoorden

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  Virginia Duivenvoorden

  As a maker of dance Virginia removes hierarchy within the form, embracing a specific  combination of freedom and technique. The concept for this residency has grown out of research observing the human figure composed in space. The simplicity of the form tells a story as a vibrant living image or tableau vivante. Whether live or recorded, creating movement this way invites all trained and untrained participants to create together live compositions of art. Moving, breathing sculptures in space, informed by and including dance. imageryexercise.com