Revealing the 2026 Mid-Career Awards’ shortlists!
July 15, 2026
The Hnatyshyn Foundation is thrilled to unveil the ten Canadian artists and curators who have been shortlisted for the 2026 Mid-Career Awards for Excellence in Visual Arts and Curatorial Excellence!
From the previously announced longlist of 28 total candidates, the selection committee has gone through the difficult process of narrowing the pool to two shortlists. Faced with a longlist of incredible talent, the selection committee recognized these five artists and five curators as being particularly deserving of recognition at this point in their careers. Throughout deliberations, members of the selection committees shared their conviction that each of the shortlisted artists and curators have generated new ways of making and thinking about art in Canada, and in doing so, strengthened the Canadian arts landscape.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation is proud to provide critical financial support to the arts ecosystem in Canada through its grants and awards. The Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts ($30,000) and the Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence ($20,000) provide career-shifting support and recognition to exceptional Canadian artists and curators.
Shortlist: The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence
From top left to bottom right: Cheryl Sim (photo: Guillaume Simoneau, courtesy of Cheryl Sim) | Mona Filip (photo: Victoria Cimolini, courtesy of Mona Filip) | Mireille Eagan (photo: lvimagery, courtesy of Mireille Eagan) | Taqralik Partridge (courtesy of Taqralik Partridge) | Crystal Mowry (photo: Carey Shaw, courtesy of Crystal Mowry)
The selection committee for the curatorial award expressed that this year’s shortlisted curators share an inspiring generosity of spirit and a commitment to the communities and artists they serve. As demonstrated by the creativity and thoughtfulness of their approaches, they stand out as key visionaries in the Canadian arts landscape.
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.
Shortlist: The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts
From top left to bottom right: Brenda Draney (photo: Amber Bracken, courtesy of Brenda Draney, Catriona Jeffries (Vancouver), and Ortuzar (New York)) | Tau Lewis (photo: Lluna Falgas, courtesy of Tau Lewis) | Howie Tsui (photo: Rémi Thériault, courtesy of Howie Tsui) | Catherine Telford Keogh (photo: Sarah Bodri, courtesy of Catherine Telford Keogh) | Zadie Xa (photo: Artifacts Copy, courtesy of Zadie Xa)
The selection committee for the visuals arts award expressed that each of the artists on the shortlist has made a significant contribution to Canadian art with their compelling voices and uniquely inventive practices. These artists have established themselves as forerunners in their field, and their inclusion on the shortlist reflects the selection committee’s belief that they will continue to challenge and shape visual arts in Canada.
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.
Brenda Draney, Breach, 2025, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in. (122 x 152 cm). Photo: Steven Probert. Courtesy Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver and Ortuzar, New York
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.
Installation view of ‘Spirit Level’ , 2025, at David Zwirner Los Angeles Photo: Elon Schoenholz. © Tau Lewis. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Los Angeles
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.
Howie Tsui, Radial Palms, 2023, paint pigment and ink on mulberry paper mounted on silk, 74.3 x 106 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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.
Schedule of announcements
We look forward to unveiling the laureates, as well as the members of the juries, on August 15th.
About the Mid-Career Awards
The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Mid-Career Awards are awarded annually to Canadian artists and curators in recognition of their outstanding work in their respective fields and in anticipation of their future contributions to the legacy of Canadian art.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts, of $30,000, is awarded to a 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, is awarded to a mid-career curator of contemporary visual art in recognition of their contribution to the advancement of the contemporary visual arts in Canada.
Juries
For each award, a selection committee of arts professionals from across Canada draws up the list of candidates and narrows it down through a series of votes and deliberations.
Guidelines, past laureates & past jurors: https://www.rjhf.com/current-programs/mid-career.
On behalf of the Hnatyshyn Foundation, congratulations to the deserving artists and curators recognized on the shortlists!
