MEET ARTREACH'S 2025 ARTIST CREATION PROJECT GRANTEES!

ArtReach is proud to announce the 16 projects that were awarded funding through our 2025 Artist Creation Project granting program!

These grant funds are available thanks to our partnership with the

Toronto Arts Council

Andrew Donnelly: To The Grave

Andrew will create 4-5 sculptures that preserve abstract remnants of anonymous secrets through charcoal rubbing, image transfer, and resin-casting techniques. A true secret can be heavy or light, ordinary or extraordinary, fleeting or persistent, but it is always known only to one. It leaves traces through actions and words without ever fully revealing itself. The sculptures subvert the traditional notion of confession, acting as a fossilized record of personal interest and highlighting the quiet profundity inherent in the solitude that secrecy affords.

Aniqah Rahman: Textile Collage Zine

Aniqah will fabricate an eight-“paged” hand-sewn zine out of linen and cotton to explore materiality, intimacy, and friendship. This zine is a means of honouring processes of making art and being-in-relationship that prioritize taking one’s time, putting in the extra effort, and the deliberate pursuit of inconvenience in a culture that increasingly isolates us by devouring our time with work, consumerism, and oppression.

llfatoull: The Living Frame

llfatoull will create a 3D-printed lightbox where animated light creates a living presence, making the frame a portal. Animations will play like pulsing patterns that look like something is trying to reach out to the viewer. The piece explores the realms of whimsy, mystery, and the unknown, and the audience is encouraged to come up with their own idea of what the story could be of the animation sequences.

Ghislan Sutherland-Timm: of another kind

Ghislan will make a 5-minute short film following the POV of a space rover surveying black, ambiguous “aliens” on an uncharted planet. Shot on analog film, the project incorporates the process of burning and scanning film to create a constellation-like aesthetic that overlaps and transforms the recorded visuals. The project reflects on how the depiction of aliens in sci-fi draws on Black experiences and cultures, including the Atlantic slave-trade and colonization, to reimagine narratives of prejudice, xenophobia, and cultural identities.

Janine Ilya: perhaps, in the midst of my rest.

Janine will develop a large-scale, multi-layered installation that weaves together textiles, light, and shadow to explore themes of grief, hope, recovery, and the evolving contours of identity. The work gives form to the quiet, internal practice of hope—allowing light to press through the obscure moments that accompany healing and loss. Rather than concealing these experiences, the installation acknowledges their weight and complexity, offering them space to exist not as fragments or broken remnants, but as integral layers of the self.

KIVRA: Mindscape: The Introduction

KIVRA will record 5-6 alternative R&B songs exploring themes of self discovery, intimacy, and escapism through melody, lyrics, and atmospheric production. Songs will investigate the tension between vulnerability and strength, love, transformation, and self discovery that reflects the artist and her journey of growth as an artist and woman, and will result in a cohesive body of work that feels intimate and otherworldly.

Lensoflicia: A TDot Throwback: Basement Jams

Alicia will create a photoshoot celebrating early 2000’s Toronto dancehall culture, inspired by Sean Paul’s Get Busy, capturing the energy, style, and community that defined a generation. Through staged photoshoots and portraits, the project will highlight the rhythm, fashion, and attitude that shaped this era, emphasizing how music and style forms identity and belonging within the city’s Caribbean diaspora. The work explores themes of cultural memory, nostalgia, and the long-lasting influence of early 2000s dancehall on Toronto’s music and fashion today.

Midyan Samson: Ajokhi

 Midyan will produce five family portraits in traditional Eritrean attire, along with brief video interviews and b-roll. The project reflects on ajokhi, a Tigrinya expression of calm and encouragement with no direct English translation, but similar to “don’t worry” or “you’ve got this.” The intention is to highlight moments of connection, resilience, and familiarity within the Eritrean community.

Mio Muyoboke: Mio Needs A Win

Mio will write and illustrate an autobiographical 20 page comic about being in your mid-20’s with no drive, exploring themes of finding yourself, transitioning in life, and community. This comic asks what is drive? In your mid 20s, what should I be doing? Who am I actually? What do you do to explore these questions to get an answer IF you get one? The finished comic, while not giving any concrete answer, is going to do one thing: show that yes, someone else feels this way too.

Mirza Sarhan: mohsin

Mirza will shoot a 5-minute experimental short film exploring how friendship evolves under shifting political and ideological pressures, incorporating Shakespearean language and poetic storytelling. Set largely in a tea shop, the film follows two friends as they reunite against India’s rising right-wing climate, reflecting the tension between loyalty, identity, and morality. Inspired by Malcolm in Macbeth, the protagonist returns from Canada to a changed homeland, confronting both his past and the challenges of displacement.

Myuri Srikugan: A fleeting moment held close

Myuri will shoot a portrait series of Tamil women in Scarborough, captured through analog film and digital photography, exploring the beauty of a self-loving diaspora. The portraits will embody duality: memory and modernity, fragility and strength, home and displacement, and the project asks: How do Tamil women carry love across borders (for both themselves and others)? How is beauty expressed in care, memory, and resilience? What does it mean to create home in Scarborough while living in diaspora?

Nia O: UnDoings

Nia will compose an environmental ambient soundscape collection that explores climate anxiety, mindfulness, and the reclamation of African ancestral wisdom. Each track will involve a layered combination of environmental sounds, instrumental elements, and guided meditation. Themes include reconnecting with ancestors, lineage and going deeper into the interconnectedness of nature and precious human life. The intention is to weave ecological, ancestral and mindful presence into each soundscape, creating a place for home to be rediscovered in the sounds and within.

Nina Bloom: Worst Case Scenario

Nina will record a five-track indie rock EP about experiencing life in your 20s during a time of instability and uncertainty, and the loss of hope in a better tomorrow. Through the use of intricate melodies, interesting instrumental parts, clever key changes, and various arrangements, the EP will approach themes like the lack of community in our generation and how the decisions of past generations have affected our lives, in addition to talking about feeling powerless when it comes to universal/ systemic injustices. 

ROSHANAK: Dollhouse Diaries

ROSHANAK will record an original four-song dark pop EP that explores themes of mental health, survival, resilience, and identity through lived experiences as a queer Iranian woman and autistic artist. Musically, the EP blends dark pop, indie pop, and jazz pop influences, creating a cinematic sound world that feels like stepping into a music-box: haunting, layered, and theatrical. The EP is both a testimony to both what the artist has endured, and an invitation for listeners, especially young people, to feel seen in their own struggles.

Rubiat Fusigboye: Out of Orbit

Rubiat will fabricate two multimedia sculptures using physical computing to explore how emotions and control shape our experiences of time through interactive, abstract clocks.  Inspired by personal feelings of time’s instability, from moments of grief dragging endlessly to joyful moments that vanish in an instant, the work explores cultural differences in perceptions of time as linear or fluid. By merging art and technology, this project seeks to illustrate time as a living, unpredictable experience shaped by bodies, feelings, and cultural insight.

Trey Robinson: SURROUNDED

Trey will create a large-scale visual art piece deeply rooted in Ojibwe culture. The vision behind this piece is to celebrate Indigenous artistry while fostering a connection between adversity, community, and resilience, reflecting themes of identity, heritage, and the interconnectedness of all that the artist has had to overcome. By merging vibrant acrylics, professional graffiti paint, markers, and spray paint, the painting will embody a contemporary twist while honoring ancestral techniques, sparking conversations about the evolution of Indigenous art in today’s world.

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

• Berhano -  a photographer and filmmaker

• Calypso - a spoken word and multidisciplinary artist

• celinee - a musician

• Kari - a filmmaker and product designer

• Maryam Mohamed - a visual artist and dressmaker

• Waawaasmokwe -  a singer and songwriter

Want to learn more about this grant? Head to artreach.org/projectgrant