Ace Kazkayasi: Acceptance

Ace will produce Acceptance, a 5-minute short film that will explore the emotional and psychological challenges faced by a man with Bipolar I as he navigates love, shame, and the impact of living with Bipolar 1 in society. The story follows a man who, after falling for a coworker, feels pressured to hide his diagnosis to appear "normal”.

Cave Pearls: Forgotten Icarus

Cave Pearls will explore disenfranchised grief by re-imagining the story of Icarus through the construction of wings and a bronze breastplate. The costume will then be fully realized in a photographed self-portrait series.

Jasmine Yiweza: Un Petit Bout

Jasmine will write and direct Un Petit Bout, a 5-minute short film that invites viewers to sit in on a conversation between a daughter and her mother. Set during the final stretch of a long drive to the airport that will see the daughter leave for university, the film will make a private conversation public, intimately exploring relationship dynamics, cultural influence, and generational patterns.

Kinu Patel: Dos Energías

Kinu will produce Dos Energías: an autobiographical short film scraping together vlogging footage & field notes, as windows into the artist’s life, gathered on their second solo backpacking trip through Central America. The film aims to serve as a practical resource for transmasculine folks to more confidently travel abroad, in the tropics. It also offers personal reflections, from weathering unforeseen storms in solitude, to tensely navigating border control & diffusing awkward-at best bathroom debacles, ultimately challenging the concept of “transitioning” on a physical, social & spiritual basis.

Maryam Mohamed: Labour Labour Labour

Maryam will create Labour Labour Labour, an artistic work taking the form of a dress and apron that can be both worn and also shown as a sculpture or performance piece. The project intends to make a commentary on gender roles in Indo-Guyanese culture, specifically with regard to women in the domestic sphere. The title repeats to reference domestic labour, paid labour, and childbirth.

Melly Davidson: CLOSE ONE!

Melly will create CLOSE ONE!, a queer poetic investigation of scars as a counter-archive, as a memory map, as the anti-icloud. Merging interviews, poetics, collaging, and photo-documentation, this multi-modal zine explores queer storytelling and identity in relation to the body, time, and memory.

Priscilla Williams: Inner Landscapes: A Winter Exploration

Priscilla will craft Inner Landscapes: A Winter Exploration, a collection featuring three large, bold sterling silver jewellery pieces each inspired by the textures, forms, and feelings evoked during winter. Through this project, they will delve into how the cold season, with its lack of sun and dormant landscape, impacts both the external world and our inner lives.

Middle: Bring Me to My Knees

Middle will self-record and produce Bring Me to My Knees, an audio exposure-therapy exploration that observes the emotional landscape of emerging from isolation. The track is a direct confrontation of social anxiety and self-doubt, and will blend genres, drawing from the artist’s Caribbean roots and love of experimental soundscapes.

Shulamit Sappire: a year(ish) in grief

Shully will create a year(ish) in grief, a zine combining visual and written content reflecting on the artist’s journey following the loss of their father. The project will explore the messiness of grief, mourning in distance, and the complexities of a family death, serving as a creative outlet to process emotions and foster a sense of connection with others who have faced similar losses.

Steffi Ng: Letters Home 回家

Steffi will create Letters Home 回家, a series of digital self-portraits capturing the artist moving through an installation of photos printed on large organza panels of family and landscapes from the artist’s life in Hong Kong. The project will explore newcomers’ evolving recollections of homeland and kinships with long-distance family and friends.

Tiara Chutkhan: A New Home for Sumintra: A Story of Caribbean Indenture

Tiara will write A New Home for Sumintra, a 20-page children’s book that introduces the concept of Caribbean indenture to young readers. The illustrated book follows Sumintra, a young girl whose family decides to leave their life behind in rural India for what they hope will be a better life in the Caribbean.

X Ali Khan: Patience I

X Ali Khan will create Patience I, a piece about learning that what is meant to happen will happen, and always in its own time. That we cannot sidestep our way to healing. A piece that teaches the artist about acceptance and love in the face of disability and housing/welfare violence. Patience I is comprised of 3 pieces of furniture that have travelled with the artist through 9 moves across 3 provinces in 4 years. The furniture will be reclaimed via paint and collage and recreated into a 3D mixed media art installation.

Yahn Nemirovsky: Forms of Devotional Ephemera from Outer Space

Yahn will develop Forms of Devotional Ephemera from Outer Space, a 2-minute stop motion animation film featuring handmade 2D paper and textile figures. Capturing a spirit of devotion to that which is temporal and transient, these abstract forms, accompanied by fragmented stitched text, will be pictured in movement and change—billowing, expanding, shrivelling, interacting, and disappearing.

We were also able to invest in the artistic development the following artists:

• Abdu Aljahma - a photographer, filmmaker, and zine-creator

• Angel Time - a photographer and multidisciplinary artist

• Fatima Mohamed - a VFX artist, visual artist, and YouTube content creator

• Karen Cheung - a zinemaker, visual artist, and multidisciplinary creator

• Shyla Gray - a singer and songwriter

Ace Kazkayasi: Breath

Ace will produce "Breath", an impactful 3-minute experimental short film which seeks to shed light on the often-hidden struggles of abuse survivors. The project's primary motivation is to challenge common misconceptions about abuse and its survivors while humanizing their experiences.

Bisma Jay: Stolen Suppers

Bisma will create a photography series exploring the impact of rising food costs, which forces many people to steal basic food items. They will gather anonymous testimonials from youth who have been caught shoplifting, and shoot a series of five photographs capturing the youths’ stolen food items.

Damon Couto-Hill: Unfolding

Damon will produce a series of 3-4 life-sized portraits painted on folded and sewn canvas to interrogate colonial imaginations of ideal and grotesque bodies. He will use photography, digital collage, and other collage methodologies to satirize the emergence of white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist ideologies from Western collective consciousness.

Jasmine Yiweza: Kiss Your Friends on the Mouth

Jasmine will produce a short documentary as a love letter to friendship. The film will be a collection of interviews, camcorder footage, and archival materials exploring the excitement that comes from knowing others and being known- choosing to give them your time and energy and knowing that they have chosen you back.

Lilah Hill: Community Care is Punk

Lilah will create a zine that acts as a love letter to the disabled community, who have continued to show each other care and compassion throughout the ongoing pandemic, even in the face of government abandonment. It will explore the idea of care as a radical act of resistance, celebrate those who are already participating, and encourage those who aren't to join in.

Marcella Driver-Moliner: Critter Persona

Marcella will create a 60-second computer-generated animation (CGI) that employs satire and metaphor to depict a world inhabited by insects to explore the themes related to the convoluted search to represent and honour identities.

Miracle Trigger: Project Sparky

Miracle Trigger will develop “Project: Sparky," an engaging 2.5D, turn-based digital RPG game. "Project: Sparky" unfolds a captivating journey in the digital gaming world, emphasizing storytelling and stunning visuals.

Nailah Renuka: Threadbare

Nailah will create a contemporary aerial hoop act that explores the delicate balance performers face between pursuing technical perfection and expressing their authentic, vulnerable artistic voice. Threadbare aims to lead the audience through an artist's journey as they navigate their way into the powerful embrace of vulnerability and learn to celebrate the beauty found in imperfection, urging the audience to reflect on their own relationship with authenticity

Niya Ahmed Abdullahi: Sabti Yaam

Niya will create a single channel video and projection, short diasporic film that will take viewers into the world of a young girl from Scarborough with roots in Harar. Set during a found-family get together over boon (coffee), the film emphasizes how these gatherings keep us grounded and allow us to remember what is important.

noonjeem: Orchids Are Blooming!

noonjeem will create a 4-song EP called Orchids Are Blooming! The EP will be approached from a techno-spiritual lens, weaving together sound synthesis, field recordings and the human voice to unearth the sacred and the profane in the everyday.

Phoenyx: A Rose Is Still a Rose

Phoenyx will deliver a mixed-media zine project exploring how Black women and femmes experience desirability. Through short-form essay, interviews, and digital collage, the zine will explore how Black women and femmes, LGBTQIA+ and heterosexual alike, seek out their physical and emotional pleasure in this landscape.

Sun: Nama Ooru Thai Pongal

Sun will create and present large-scale paintings surrounding themes around Thai Pongal, a celebration of the harvest and the beginning of the month of Thai, the first month in the Tamil Solar calendar, and a time to show gratitude for the land, for nature, and for community. The paintings will explore reflections on the relationship with the ritual as a 1.5 generation Tamil Immigrant.

Wura Sol: New Year, New Sound

Wura will write, record, produce, mix, and master new music to be released in Spring 2024. Through meticulous writing and an improved sound, Wura’s goal is to write and release quality music with an elevated sound.

We were also able to invest in the artistic development the following artists:

• Bhuchung Kata- a storyteller and filmmaker that shares Tibetan stories

• Dizzy Ricamara- a filmmaker, creative director, and founder of Friends from the Endz

• Hyunsun Park- a emerging illustrator and painter specializing in gouache

• jefferydraws- a multimedia 2D animator and storyboard artist

• kiwimii- a multidisciplinary artist, cartoonist, illustrator, and workshop programmer

• Maryam Mohamed- a textile artist and dressmaker who explores Indo-Guyanese themes

• Meïdy Grégoire- an art director, producer, and curator

• Veeda Tanwir- a textile artist and visual artist who explores her Tajik and Afghan roots

• Yunguava- a weaver, performance artist, costume designer, stylist, and creative director