OCAD University’s RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers is excited to announce the recipient of the 2026 Toronto Outdoor Art Fair Call for Artists & Makers Career Launchers!
Congratulations to Archana Sundararajan, Derek Berry, Meelana Kravchenko, Freda Tan, Zahra Mansuri, Bree Rosberg, Mackenzie Iuliano, Nadine Alexeev, Rina Chen and Xijia (Romee) Lai! They will be participating in this year's Toronto Outdoor Art Fair from July 10-12 at Nathan Phillips Square.
Since 1961, TOAF has been instrumental in launching artists’ careers and bringing art into people’s everyday lives. TOAF is passionate about supporting artists and exceptional talents through awards, special programs and opportunities. With 150,000 annual visitors to Nathan Phillips Square, 100,000 website visitors, and 1 million annual page views, TOAF’s loyal community of art lovers continues to grow.
RECIPIENTS:
- Archana Sundararajan (b.1985) lives and works in Toronto. Her practice draws on Hindu culture, rural life, and spirituality, exploring ritual as a transformative, embodied experience. She firmly believes that it is the stories we tell ourselves, and the language in which they are told, that shape our lives and reality. Hence, she would like to draw upon her culture and epics to express her traditions. Hence, apart from self-expression, she aspires to bring to life stories from her tradition and to bring her mother tongue, Tamil, into the limelight through painting. She mainly uses acrylic and oil as her primary media.
Website
- Derek Berry is a multidisciplinary artist based in Orangeville, Ontario who works in varying printmaking mediums alongside installation. He specializes in intaglio, relief and serigraphy printmaking techniques. Currently Derek is completing his undergraduate studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) majoring in printmaking and publications and holds a 3-year diploma from Georgian College for fine arts. Derek has exhibited predominantly in the greater Toronto area and southern Ontario, has co-founded the PRNT Collective (Print, Research, Network, Teach) in Barrie, and has previously been awarded an emerging artist’s residency in Atlanta, Georgia. Derek’s current work is the tangible construction and demonstration of his intrusive thoughts after developing obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Website
Instagram
- Meelana Kravchenko: I am a painter and illustrator. For my display at TOAF, I have created a series of oil paintings to explore feelings of the inhabited space, especially ones that arise with familiarity. In my general practice, I use repetitive imagery and simplistic composition to create insulated environments with distinct moods. Some recurring themes in my painting and illustration work are solitude, mystery, and human-animal relation.
Website
Instagram
- Freda Tan is a Toronto-based painter who works primarily with oil paints. Her work visualizes flux sentience – the understanding that all matter, awareness, and being exist in a perpetual state of becoming. Her paintings capture charged moments of elemental transition in ways that are at once organic and abstracted. Working with a soft handling of paint, her brushwork allows forms to breathe into one another, letting light and gestural lines carry energy across the surface. Encountering her paintings, viewers are invited to sense the vibrating energy of matter in motion and to feel the openness of possibility within every moment of becoming.
Website
Instagram
- Zahra Mansuri is an emerging Artist and Goldsmith completing her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at OCAD University. She draws inspiration for her work through organic patterns, forms, and lines found in nature. Zahra's work ranges in abstraction, showcasing evident motifs or implying naturalistic forms.
Website
Instagram
- Bree Rosberg is a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design University studying Integrated Media with a minor in Photography. Her practice focuses on childhood memories and self-reflection through the medium of performative self-portraiture in both photo and video form. Through performance, her artistic practice functions to heal herself from the pieces of her past that she would have to otherwise let go. The way in which Rosberg creates her work relies heavily on concept and intention with a strong will to perpetuate the importance of text and dialogue in relation to physical art. This translates into Rosberg's use of textiles and children's crafts transformed into sculpture installations where titles and statements are an essential aspect of the pieces.
Website
Instagram
- Mackenzie Iuliano is an emerging multidisciplinary artist based in Vaughan, Ontario, working primarily in painting and illustration. Her practice explores the relationship between beauty and discomfort through distorted figures, close-up compositions, and a bold use of colour. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University. Her work has been exhibited in OCAD University’s GradEx 111 (2026), the Springboard Exhibition at OCAD University (2025), Women’s Voices: Part II at the Women’s Art Association of Canada (2026), and vendor events at Parkdale Hall (2025).
Instagram
- Nadine Alexeev is a contemporary artist based in Toronto, graduating from OCAD University in 2026 with a BFA in Drawing & Painting. Working primarily in oil paint, she explores sites of warped reality in a post-internet era through portraiture and distorted representation. Her current work navigates metaphysical questioning within the domination of virtual realms and simulacra. Her work plays in the space between the perceived self and the other, as we filter through digital identities, false reflections, and the transformation of our own bodies.
Website
Instagram
- Rina Chen: I am a generative (not artificial intelligence) artist working with code and risograph as my primary medium. Using open-source visual coding tools such as p5.js, I write algorithms that translate mathematical logic into visual form. My risograph prints explore moiré, geometry, traces, pixels, and image manipulation, bridging the digital and the material. Through this process, I investigate how computation becomes texture, ink, and physical presence.
Website
Instagram
- Xijia (Romee) Lai (b. 1995, China) is a Christian artist based in Toronto. She is currently completing a BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University. Prior to her visual arts studies, she earned a degree in Dance Choreography from Liaoning Normal University and later studied Hospitality and Tourism Management at Cape Breton University. She will begin a Master of Theological Studies at Tyndale University.
Working primarily with watercolor, Romee explores the relationship between faith, personal experience, and contemporary painting practice. Her work has been presented in group exhibitions in Toronto, including two appearances at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair. She has also curated two exhibitions focused on the intersection of faith and art, reflecting her interest in creating spaces for dialogue, reflection, and community engagement.
Website
Instagram
Learn more about our Career Launchers at: https://careerlaunchers.format.com
