Mid-Career Awards: Visual Arts and Curatorial Excellence
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts, of $30,000 (formerly $25,000), is awarded annually to a Canadian mid-career artist who has demonstrated excellence and innovation in their body of work and who shows promise of outstanding artistic achievement in the years ahead.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence, of $20,000 (formerly $15,000), is awarded annually to a Canadian mid-career curator of contemporary visual art in recognition of their contribution to the advancement of the contemporary visual arts in Canada.
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2026
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts
Howie Tsui 徐浩恩 (he/him)
Photo: Rémi Thériault, courtesy of Howie Tsui.
Howie Tsui (徐浩恩, b. Hong Kong) is an interdisciplinary artist based on unceded Coast Salish territories. His practice spans ink brush painting, interactive sound sculpture, lenticular light box and installation. Tsui constructs tense, fictive environments that gleefully deflate revered art forms and narrative genres, often stemming from the Chinese literati tradition. He employs a stylized form of derisive and exaggerated imagery as a way to satirize and disarm the homogenizing agendas of broadening regimes. The most notable branch of his practice involves the use of algorithmic animation sequences to raise questions around order/chaos and the potential of social harmony through self-organized societies. Tsui synthesizes diverging socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, surveillance and the “abject other” through a wry outsider sensibility - casting light onto the contradictions of diasporic life.
Select solo exhibitions include: Patel Brown, Toronto (2025), Hanart TZ, Hong Kong (2024); Glenbow Museum (2023); Art Windsor-Essex (2022); Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2021); The Power Plant, Toronto (2020); Ringling Museum of Art, US (2020); Ottawa Art Gallery (2019); OCAT Museum, Xi’an (2018) and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2017). Select group exhibitions include: Macao International Art Biennale (2023); Art Gallery of New South Wales (2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary; Hong Kong (2021), Para Site, Hong Kong (2014); and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2013). Tsui’s work is included in the following public collections: National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Canada Council Art Bank, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Ottawa Art Gallery, City of Ottawa, Global Affairs Canada, RBC Collection, Centre d’exposition de Baie-Saint-Paul and M+ Museum of Visual Culture. Tsui received the Canada Council for the Arts’ Joseph Stauffer Prize (2005), was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2018) and was shortlisted for the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award (2024). He holds a BFA from the University of Waterloo.
Tsui, Howie. An Elegy for Dust #1 (earth), 2024. Yixing purple clay pot, stones, stoneware, Chinese ink, metallic paint, patina, wax paste, horsehair, foam, wire, epoxy, cyanoacrylate, black quartz gravel, aquasoil, lava rock and joss sticks. 72 L x 80 H x 47 D cm. Photo: Rachel Topham, Chinese Canadian Museum. Courtesy of Howie Tsui.
Tsui, Howie. The Banquet, 2023. Paint pigment and ink on mulberry paper mounted on silk. 106.5 × 218 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Hanart TZ Gallery.
“To be recognized in this way affirms that the quiet, diligent work I dedicate to my practice can be found, understood — and considered belonging within the Canadian contemporary art community. The award anchors my convictions, silences the bouts of debilitating doubt that seep in through the crevasses, and emboldens the pursuit of works that might otherwise remain unrealized. My deepest thanks to the jury members for their thoughtful support and acknowledgement — so very humbling. And my deep gratitude to the Hnatyshyn Foundation for offering such a generous award focused on what is, frankly, a sneaky-precarious arc in an artist’s career. I want to congratulate all the longlisted and shortlisted artists for their brilliance and continued grind. I look forward to engaging with their work.”
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence
Crystal Mowry (she/her)
Photo: Carey Shaw. Courtesy of Crystal Mowry.
Crystal Mowry is the Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, a position she has held since 2021. She previously served as Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, collections, and publishing for over a decade. Her work often explores the tension between perceived authenticity and troubled forms of representation. As a curator operating primarily within a public art museum, she treats her role as equal parts co-conspirator and translator, drawing on roots in studio practice to support artists in the development and subsequent touring of new projects. Her career path has been shaped by curiosity and a particular interest in how to make a public trust a site for experimentation. This has led her to work as an artist, a studio assistant, and in unconventional creative gigs before entering museum work in 2005.
Mowry’s curatorial work includes thematic group exhibitions such as The Limits (2011), Imitation of Life (2015), I’ll be your Mirror (2018), What the Bat Knows (2022), and Thick as Thieves (2025). In 2013, she co-curated Romancing the Anthropocene, one of three zones commissioned by the City of Toronto for its annual Nuit Blanche event. Her solo projects with artists Deanna Bowen, Maggie Groat, and Ernest Daetwyler have received Exhibition of the Year Awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (now Galeries Ontario Galleries). She is a recipient of a Waterloo Region Arts Award (2020) and has been shortlisted for the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence (2024, 2025). Her writing has appeared in various artist-focused publications on the work of artists such as Brendan Fernandes, Shary Boyle, August Klintberg, Annie MacDonell, among others. She regularly serves on industry juries and advisory panels, most notably for the Sobey Art Award (2015), the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021), and the Canadian pavilion for the 2026 Venice Biennale. Crystal was born in Tkaronto (Toronto), where she completed undergraduate studies in sculpture and installation at the Ontario College of Art and Design University before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). She is currently based in Treaty 4 (Regina), where she lives with her family.
Installation view of Deanna Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Curated by Crystal Mowry at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid. © Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Artwork © Deanna Bowen. Courtesy of Crystal Mowry.
Installation view of Annie MacDonell: The Beyond Within (2023). Organized and circulated by the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, in collaboration with the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Curated by Crystal Mowry and Leila Timmins. Photo credit: Carey Shaw. © MacKenzie Art Gallery. Artwork © Annie MacDonell. Courtesy of Crystal Mowry.
“It has been a privilege to count artists as my most inspired educators over the years. They have taught me how to centre curiosity in my work and to consider our shared questions – from the ones posed in the intimacy of the studio to the speculative prompts we work through in written offerings – a record of what we realize anew together.
As someone who always felt like I had more questions than answers, I am humbled to be in the company of the incredible colleagues – the long list, preceding laureates, and the jury – who have inspired me through their own curatorial accomplishments. My curatorial work most often unfolds deliberately in museums because I believe they are spaces where we can still learn in public, and where if we are lucky, a record of that learning contributes to a public trust.
Mid-career award attention is a reminder that there is still time to be a fulcrum, to consider unexpected shifts in your practice with assurance from your peers. I am deeply honoured by this award and grateful to be recognized in this moment.”
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2026
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence
Cheryl Sim
Cheryl Sim is the Director and Chief Curator at PHI in Montreal as well as an artist and scholar. She began her career in 1992 at Studio D, the feminist studio of the National Film Board of Canada. At PHI, she has curated major exhibitions including GROWING FREEDOM: Yoko Ono and Revealing Narratives: STAN DOUGLAS, and most recently, Efflorescence/The Way We Wake by RAJNI PERERA and MARIGOLD SANTOS, as well as Unity and Darkness by MANUEL MATHIEU. She has contributed essays to numerous artist publications, and her doctoral dissertation became the book Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and Culture in a Chinese Diaspora published by Bloomsbury Academic UK in 2019. She has guest lectured at universities across Canada and has animated numerous panels and artist conversations in arts institutions, festivals and fairs including Papier Art Fair, MUTEK, Ars Electronica, Art Toronto and World Art Foundations. She has served on several peer review juries for the Canada Council for the Arts as well as the jury for the prestigious Sobey Art Award (2022) and the Musée nationale des Beaux-Arts du Québec Contemporary Art Prize (2024). An active volunteer, she is currently President of the Board of the Canadian Art Museum Directors Organization (CAMDO) and serves on the Board of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC).
Mona Filip
Mona Filip is a curator and writer whose career spans two decades of developing critical visual art programs, supporting the production of new works, and introducing national and international artists to local audiences. Displacement and adaptation are core concerns of her curatorial investigations, informed by personal experiences of immigration and diasporic living. Bringing together a range of perspectives on collective memory, place and belonging, her projects examine the relationship between the personal and the political, ways of rewriting and redressing histories, museum restitution and repair, and storytelling as world-building.
With an idea-driven and dialogue-focused approach, Mona collaborates with artists to produce experiential installations that transform the familiar white cube, meaningfully respond to unconventional environments, and engage the public on sensorial, emotional and intellectual levels. Throughout her work, she fosters innovation within artistic practices and exchange of ideas across disciplines.
Originally from Bucharest, Romania, Mona received her BFA from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington DC, and her MFA from SUNY at Buffalo. She has commissioned significant new works by Canadian artists such as Caroline Monnet, Sameer Farooq, Ghazaleh Avarzamani, Karen Tam, and José Luis Torres, while also curating the first Canadian exhibitions of acclaimed international artists Raphaël Zarka, Christian Hidaka, Sigalit Landau, and Isabel Rocamora. She is currently Chief Curator at Contemporary Calgary.
Mireille Eagan
Mireille Eagan is Curator of Contemporary Art at The Rooms in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, where her work has significantly shaped the presentation, interpretation, and public understanding of contemporary and historical art in the Atlantic region. Previously, she was Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and has worked with galleries and artist-run organizations across Atlantic Canada.
Eagan has curated more than 150 exhibitions, individually and collaboratively, including Christopher Pratt: The Places I Go (2015), the nationally touring retrospective Mary Pratt (2013–15), Mary Pratt: This Little Painting at the National Gallery of Canada (2015), and the Terra Nova Art Foundation’s official collateral project at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Her curatorial practice is grounded in close attention to artists, place, and public engagement, with a sustained commitment to strengthening the scholarly and cultural record of Newfoundland and Labrador and Atlantic Canadian art.
A respected writer, editor, lecturer, and juror, Eagan has served on juries for the Sobey Art Award, RBC Canadian Painting Competition, Salt Spring National Art Prize, Scotiabank Photography Award, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Strathbutler Award. Her writing has appeared in Border Crossings, C Magazine, Canadian Art, The Globe and Mail, Visual Arts News, and Inuit Art Quarterly, and she has lectured widely across Canada and internationally.
Taqralik Partridge
As an independent curator, Taqralik Partridge works closely with Inuit and other circumpolar Indigenous artists with an Inuit approach to community and family. She creates exhibitions for Inuit first, prioritising Inuit languages and creative practices. Taqralik Partridge has worked as the Associate Curator of Indigenous art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and adjunct curator at the Art Gallery of Guelph. She has co-curated exhibitions for the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the Ottawa Art Gallery. Taqralik is the former Director of the Nordic Lab at SAW (Ottawa). Her visual work has travelled internationally, including to the 2020 Sydney Biennale and in the touring exhibitions Among All These Tundras (2020) and Radical Stitch. Taqralik was the first Inuit Editor-at-large for the Inuit Art Quarterly.
Crystal Mowry
Crystal Mowry (she/her) is the Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. She previously held the position of Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, collection, and publishing activities for over a decade. Her solo projects with artists Deanna Bowen, Maggie Groat, and Ernest Daetwyler have received Exhibition of the Year Awards from Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries. She is a recipient of a Waterloo Region Arts Award (2020) and has been shortlisted for the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence (2024, 2025). She has written texts for various artist-focused books on the work of Brendan Fernandes, August Klintberg, Shary Boyle, and others. Originally from Tkaronto (Toronto), Mowry is currently based in Treaty 4 (Regina), where she lives with her family.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts
Brenda Draney
Brenda Draney (b. 1976, member of Sawridge First Nation, Treaty 8; lives/works: Edmonton) uses figurative painting to explore themes of memory, identity, and the complexities of relationships. Dreamlike, her paintings present a tension between representational specificity and the space of unpainted canvas. Sparse brushstrokes allude to uneasy domestic scenes, tent cities, and environmental disasters, drawn from sources that are simultaneously remembered, inherited, and imagined. Marked by stretches of void canvas, her works portray fragmented narratives from her communities in Slave Lake and Northern Alberta. What remains is both ambiguous and ambivalent, offering a “doorway or entry point for a viewer to come and bring their own stories to bear and enter the work on their terms.” Rather than simply represent what has been seen, she renders that which is left unsaid or what is unable to be articulated.
Draney’s recent solo exhibitions include Ortuzar, New York (2025); Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (2025); The Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2024, 2013); The Arts Club of Chicago (2023); The Power Plant, Toronto (2023); Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver (2023, 2022); McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg (2020); and Fogo Island Arts (2019). Recent group exhibitions include McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg (2026); Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City (2024); Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2023, 2022, 2018, 2015) NS Dokumentationszentrum, Münich (2019); Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2019); Oakville Galleries (2018); Kitchener-Waterloo Gallery (2018); Audain Gallery, Vancouver (2017); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2016); Esker Foundation, Calgary (2015); and Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon (2013). She received her Master of Applied Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2010), and her BFA from the University of Alberta (2006). Draney was the recipient of the 2014 Eldon and Anne Foote Visual Arts Prize, and was winner of the 2009 RBC Painting Competition.
Tau Lewis
Tau Lewis creates theatrical installations from found materials and objects; each sculpture is conceived as a character in part of the artist’s ongoing world-building project, taking narrative inspiration from myth, literature, poetry, music, and spirituality. Lewis begins the process of creating work by collecting used fabrics and materials from her surroundings and housing them in her studio—such as worn clothes and fabrics, leather, photographs, and elemental forms including driftwood and shells—absorbing their animistic qualities and memories to develop a relationship with them over time, before she utilizes them in her work. She transforms these simple materials into elaborate soft sculptures, masks, and other assemblages, hand-sewing, carving, and using other analogue forms of making.
Tau Lewis was born in 1993 in Toronto, Canada, and lives and works between Brooklyn, New York and London, UK. Solo exhibitions include newly commissioned work for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2024-2025; Sadie Coles, London, 2025; David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2025; 52 Walker Street, New York, 2022-2023; and National Gallery of Canada, 2021-2022. Group exhibitions and projects include presentations with Public Art Fund, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; New Museum, New York; Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK; Tate Modern, London; and SFMoMa, San Francisco. Lewis was included in the Venice Biennale, 2022, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani and Prospect.5 Yesterday we said tomorrow in New Orleans, 2021-2022. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include Brandts Museum, Odense, Denmark, 2026 and Tramway, Glasgow, 2027.
Howie Tsui
Howie Tsui (徐浩恩, b. 1978, Hong Kong) is based on unceded Coast Salish territories. His multi-disciplinary practice spans ink brush painting, sound sculpture, lenticular light box and installation. Tsui constructs tense, fictive environments that undermine revered art forms and narrative genres, often stemming from the Chinese literati tradition. He employs a stylized form of derisive and exaggerated imagery as a way to satirize and disarm broadening regimes and their hegemonic cultural programs. The most notable branch of his practice involves the use of algorithmic animation sequences to raise questions around order, chaos and the potential of social harmony through self-organized societies. Tsui synthesizes diverging socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, surveillance and the “abject other” through a distinctly outsider lens to cast light onto diasporic experiences.
Select solo exhibitions include: Patel Brown, Toronto (2025), Hanart TZ, Hong Kong (2024); Glenbow Museum (2023); Art Windsor-Essex (2022); Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2021); The Power Plant, Toronto (2020); Ringling Museum of Art, US (2020); Ottawa Art Gallery (2019); OCAT Museum, Xi’an (2018) and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2017).
Select group exhibitions: Macao International Art Biennale (2023); Art Gallery of New South Wales (2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary; Hong Kong (2021), Para Site, Hong Kong (2014); and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2013).
Public collections: National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Canada Council Art Bank, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Ottawa Art Gallery, City of Ottawa, Global Affairs Canada, RBC Collection, Centre d'exposition de Baie-Saint-Paul and M+ Museum of Visual Culture.
Tsui received Canada Council's Joseph Stauffer Prize (2005), longlisted for Sobey Art Award (2018) and shortlisted for the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award (2024). He holds a BFA from the University of Waterloo.
Catherine Telford Keough
Catherine Telford Keogh (b. Toronto, Canada; lives and works in New York) is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, and contingent materials. Drawn to materials and ideas that provoke curiosity and a sense of unknowing, Telford Keogh examines how matter is held, crushed, preserved, and dissolved within systems of extraction and circulation, tracing the ways materials resist and rewrite the orders imposed upon them. Her work is a means of thinking with materials across incompatible scales and disjunctive temporal registers, allowing geological deep time and industrial acceleration to collide within a single material field.
Selected exhibitions include Cradlers, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY (2025); Carriers (Gravity-Fed), Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2024); Shelf Life, Helena Anrather, New York (2023); and Nervous System, Helena Anrather, New York (2020). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at ILY2, New York; HESSE FLATOW, Amagansett, New York; Galeria Fidelidade Arte, Lisbon; Franz Kaka, Toronto; Public Gallery, London; the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; Someday Gallery, New York; the Bronx Museum, New York; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal; the Seattle Art Museum; Thkio Ppalies, Cyprus; and Interstate Projects, New York, among others.
Telford Keogh is the inaugural recipient of the Jack Galef Visual Arts Award from the Guggenheim and a 2026 Creative Capital awardee; she was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2020. She holds an M.F.A. in Sculpture and an M.A.R. in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, both from Yale University.
Slick Keeper, 2026 (detail), salvaged onyx, Vaseline®, stainless steel, landfilled tablecloth, loose change, 13.4 × 28.3 × 52.6 in. Documentation: Michael Assiff.
Zadie Xa
Zadie Xa has developed an expansive practice that addresses the nature of diasporic identities, global histories, familial legacies and interspecies communication. She explores these themes through immersive installations that appeal to the sensory experience of the viewer, often incorporating painting, sculpture, textile, sound and performance elements. Born in Vancouver, Canada and now based in London, Xa draws upon her Korean heritage as she seeks to elevate narratives that have been hidden or repressed. For her, art offers a means to analyse socio-political conditions and cultural behaviours through a lens of masquerade, play, costuming and storytelling. Embracing a highly collaborative mode of working, she has developed ongoing exchanges with dancers and musicians and has worked closely with the artist Benito Mayor Vallejo since 2006.
Solo exhibitions of Xa’s work have been presented at international institutions including Whitechapel Gallery, London; Space K, Seoul; The Box, Plymouth; Leeds Art Gallery; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea; Tramway, Glasgow; Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku; and Pump House Gallery, London.
Upcoming projects include a touring exhibition at Esker Foundation; Calgary, The Power Plant: Toronto, and PHI; Montreal, alongside a commissioned solo presentation at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in the fall of 2026.
In 2019, Xa was invited to contribute to the performance programme curated by Ralph Rugoff and Aaron Cezar for the 58th Venice Biennale. She has also participated in the Jeju Biennale, the 13th Shanghai Biennale, and Sharjah Biennial 16, for which she was nominated for the Turner Prize. Xa earned a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MA in Painting from Royal College of Art.
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The Hnatyshyn Foundation is thrilled, for the first time in the twenty years since these awards’ inception, to reveal the artists and curators longlisted by the juries. By doing so, The Hnatyshyn Foundation is proud to acknowledge and celebrate the accomplishments of an even greater number of deserving Canadian artists and curators.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts: LONG LIST
From top left to bottom right: Joi T. Arcand (photo: Tracey Lynne Photography, courtesy of Joi Arcand) | Charles Campbell | Brenda Draney (photo: Amber Bracken, courtesy of Brenda Draney, Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver), and Ortuzar (New York)) | Emily Hermant (photo: BP Photography, courtesy of Emily Hermant and Monte Clark Gallery) | Kapwani Kiwanga (photo: Angela Scamarcio, courtesy of Kapwani Kiwanga and the Goodman Gallery) | Tau Lewis (photo: Lluna Falgas, courtesy of Tau Lewis) | Esmaa Mohamoud (photo: Jeremy Clemente, courtesy of Esmaa Mohamoud) | Lisa Myers (photo: Dana Prieto, courtesy of Lisa Myers) | Lou Sheppard (photo: Nathalie Chollet, courtesy of Lou Sheppard) | Sanaz Sohrabi (photo: Philippa Langley for Vie des arts, courtesy of Sanaz Sohrabi) | Catherine Telford-Keogh (photo: Sarah Bodri, courtesy of Catherine Telford-Keogh) | Howie Tsui (photo: Rémi Thériault, courtesy of Howie Tsui) | Zadie Xa (photo: Artifacts Copy, courtesy of Zadie Xa) | Jinny Yu (photo: Craig Boyko © AGO, courtesy of Jinny Yu and the AGO).
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence: LONG LIST
From top left to bottom right: Melissa Bennett (courtesy of Melissa Bennett) | Pamela Edmonds (photo: Steven Farmer, courtesy of Pamela Edmonds) | Mireille Eagan (photo: lvimagery, courtesy of Mireille Eagan) | Mona Filip (photo: Victoria Cimolini, courtesy of Mona Filip) | Diane Gistal (photo: Orphée Okito, courtesy of Diane Gistal) | Sophie Hackett (photo: Luis Mora, courtesy of Sophie Jackett) | Ji-Yoon Han (courtesy of Ji-Yoon Han) | Liz Ikiriko (photo: Clay Stang, courtesy of Liz Ikiriko) | Camille Larivée (photo: Katya Konioukhova, courtesy of MAI and Camille Larivée) | Crystal Mowry (photo: Carey Shaw, courtesy of Crystal Mowry) | Taqralik Partridge (courtesy of Taqralik Partridge) | Kirsty Robertson (courtesy of Kirsty Robertson) | Cheryl Sim (photo: Guillaume Simoneau, courtesy of Cheryl Sim) | Toleen Touq (photo: Hussam Hassan, courtesy of Toleen Touq).
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2026
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts
Corrie Jackson, RBC Senior Curator
Joy Xiang, Editor, C Magazine
Catherine Sinclair, Director, Exhibitions and Collections Care, National Gallery of Canada
Richard Hill, Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art, Vancouver Art Gallery
Elliott Ramsey, Curator, The Polygon Gallery
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence
Séamus Gallagher, Artist and laureate of a 2024 William and Meredith Saunderson Prize for Emerging Visual Artists
Dr. Léuli Eshrāghi (Tagata Sāmoa), Artist and Curator of Indigenous Practices, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal
Michèle Pearson Clarke, Visual Artist and Assistant Professor of Photography, Toronto Metropolitan University
Sandra Dyck, Executive Director, The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, BC
Karen Tam, Artist shortlisted for the 2025 Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts and Adjunct Curator, Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver
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Both prizes are awarded annually and can only be received once. The eligible disciplines for the visual arts prize include, but are not limited to, painting, drawing, engraving, sculpture, photography, sculptural installations, and multimedia installations.
Artists and curators cannot apply for these awards. A selection committee of arts professionals from across the country draws up the list of candidates and chooses the award recipients. Candidates must be Canadian citizens or permanent residents.
Candidates for the artists’ award are identified on the basis of excellence in a substantial body of work as reflected in peer group assessments, significant acquisitions and solo exhibitions in professional exhibition facilities.
Candidates for the curators’ award will have demonstrated exceptional support for innovative artistic expression through the creation of a significant number of important exhibitions which, through their vision, presentation, and documentation, advance Canadians’ awareness and appreciation of contemporary visual art. Independent curators, as well as those working within an institutional context, are eligible.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation defines a mid-career artist or curator as an artist or curator of any age who began working professionally or began gaining peer recognition in the last 8-20 years, who has demonstrated excellence and innovation in their body of work, and who shows promise of outstanding artistic or curatorial achievement in the years ahead. If there is ambiguity about an artist or curator’s eligibility for a mid-career award, the Foundation defers the decision to the selection committee responsible for determining the prize winner.
