OCAD U celebrates 2025-26 Teaching Award recipients
Image (left to right): Kate Hartman, Parantap Bhatt, Aisha Ali, Provost Dr. Sandra Gabriele, SJ Okemow and Dr. Nabil Harfoush. Absent from photo: Judith Librach and Veronika Szkudlarek.
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From inclusive teaching practices to innovative approaches to learning, the 2025–26 Teaching Awards recognize the faculty, instructors and teaching assistants who contributed to shaping students’ experiences at OCAD University. The recipients were celebrated on September 2 at OCAD U’s Academic Year Welcome event.
Vice-President, Academic and Provost Dr. Sandra Gabriele congratulated the award recipients on their passion and commitment, while also recognizing the contributions of all those who were nominated.
Veronika Szkudlarek teaches primarily in the Experimental Animation program. Her teaching is grounded in community, collaboration and care, creating an inclusive environment where students are supported as emerging artists and collaborators.
Szkudlarek approaches teaching as an evolving practice that responds to students’ creative aspirations, lived experiences and diverse perspectives. Through roundtable discussions, mentorship, reflective exchange and initiatives such as “Teatime with Veronika,” she encourages open dialogue and rethinks traditional classroom hierarchies.
Her pedagogy embraces play, experimentation and creative risk-taking, including the thoughtful use of emerging technologies. Through her work with the Digital Learning Hub and OCAD U’s AI Advisory Board, she brings this same spirit of inquiry and critical engagement to her teaching. Students describe her approach as “inclusive, generous and transformative,” with one noting that her class “quickly evolved into an art community.”
Drawing on her experiences of immigration and adaptation, Szkudlarek sees innovation and flexibility as strengths and individual stories as essential to collective creative practice.
Image left to right: Dr. Gabriele with Dr. Nabil Harfoush.
Dr. Nabil Harfoush is a co-founding faculty member of OCAD U’s Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) graduate program. His teaching emphasizes critical judgment, helping students integrate diverse frameworks, methodologies and tools to address complex real-world challenges.
Through experiential, studio-based learning and his Business Innovation Initiative (BII), Dr. Harfoush connects students with authentic projects across the public, non-profit and private sectors, fostering collaboration, adaptability and interdisciplinary thinking.
His teaching is distinguished by intentional team diversity, sustained mentorship and course development shaped by student feedback and emerging practices. He creates learning environments that support students as whole people while encouraging critical thinking, purposeful action and respectful engagement with communities.
His educational leadership includes introducing the Diversity by Design method to SFI’s admissions process, which received recognition from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, and developing BII as a model for extending studio-based learning across the program. Colleagues and students praise his innovative, socially engaged approach to learning.
SJ Okemow is a Nehiyaw and Eastern European interdisciplinary artist from Bigstone Cree Nation (Treaty 8), raised in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Treaty 7) and now living in Tkaronto (Toronto, Treaty 13). She teaches in the Experimental Animation program.
Grounded in decolonial art practice and pedagogy, Okemow’s teaching emphasizes care, collaboration and community. She views teaching as a mutual process of knowledge-making, creating inclusive classrooms where diverse cultures, identities and ways of knowing are welcomed and hierarchical learning structures are challenged. Students are encouraged to experiment, take creative risks, learn from setbacks and support one another. They consistently praise her mentorship, generosity and commitment to their growth and well-being, including the time she devotes to supporting their development beyond the classroom. She also helped establish OCAD U’s Women in Animation branch and has supported its growth by mentoring students as they plan activities and events.
Image left to right: Dr. Gabriele with Parantap Bhatt.
Parantap Bhatt brings a student-centred, inclusive and future-oriented approach to design education. His teaching is grounded in his “Augmented Design Cognition” framework, which positions design learning as a dynamic relationship between human intuition, cultural perspectives and emerging technologies.
Through studio-based learning, interdisciplinary mentorship and real-world design inquiry, Bhatt encourages students to develop critical judgment, creative confidence and the ability to engage thoughtfully with complex social, technological and environmental challenges. His courses emphasize collaboration, experimentation, accessibility and student agency, while connecting design education to issues including AI, sustainability, systems thinking and emerging technologies.
His mentorship extends beyond the classroom through graduate supervision, research guidance, portfolio development, GradEx support and professional opportunities. Students and colleagues describe him as approachable and generous and recognize his commitment to creating an inclusive sense of community while helping students develop as confident, thoughtful and responsible designers.
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Faculty of Arts and Science and School of Graduate Studies Teaching Award
Kate Hartman, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science
Image left to right: Dr. Gabriele with Kate Hartman.
Kate Hartman teaches across the undergraduate and graduate Digital Futures programs. Drawing on her own experience as a graduate student in an emerging technology program where fast-paced instruction, technical jargon and limited support often made learning feel inaccessible, she has developed a teaching approach grounded in empathy, inclusion, reciprocity and learner-centred support.
Hartman creates classroom environments where students feel comfortable asking questions, working through complex ideas at their own pace and experimenting with different ways of learning. Her teaching combines hands-on, embodied and material-based activities with step-by-step demonstrations, flexible creative constraints and responsive course materials, helping students build technical skills while developing confidence and curiosity.
Her mentorship extends beyond the classroom, supporting students in publishing research, exhibiting their work and pursuing professional opportunities, including patent applications. Colleagues and students recognize Hartman’s ability to balance thoughtful structure with creative freedom, and her commitment to fostering peer learning and a strong sense of community.
Judith Librach is an artist, educator, and community organizer whose practice brings these roles into meaningful dialogue. A recent graduate of OCAD U’s Drawing & Painting program (BFA 2024), she also holds an MEd in Community and Transformative Learning and a BEd from OISE, University of Toronto.
Librach’s experience spans teaching, arts programming, museum education and community advocacy, including founding the Mature Student Collective and developing initiatives to support older emerging artists after graduation. Her teaching philosophy is grounded in an inclusive, learner-centred approach that views learning as a holistic and transformative process.
In her roles as Teaching Assistant and Tutorial Leader, she creates supportive and accessible learning environments through thoughtful course design, flexible teaching practices and sustained dialogue that helps students connect course concepts to their own lived experiences and creative practices. Her approach emphasizes relationship-building, individualized support and advocacy for diverse learners. She is recognized as a dedicated and compassionate educator whose teaching supports students in becoming confident, independent, reflective and socially engaged lifelong learners.
Aisha Ali, a textile artist specializing in slow processes of textile and garment construction such as hand sewing, teaches sewing courses at the School of Continuing Studies. Their work emphasizes craftsmanship and collaborative processes and often makes use of convenient materials, including repurposing existing garments and using the fur of animals that they live with. They work as a wig alteration and repair specialist and with the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees for costume. They received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design from OCAD U.
