STUDENTS
First Year Degree Students
Harjot Bal
An HBSc student from the University of Toronto with majors in CCIT and Psychology, Harjot is a graphic and web designer with keen interests in cognitive and intuitive user experience design. Harjot greatly believes in academia lending support to creative hands-on projects, especially where technology plays a pivotal role. He hopes to pursue higher education so that he may earn a place as a contributor of content in the field of digital design. Harjot believes that human-centered design can be used effectively to improve the standard of living for the general population. Harjot wishes to employ human-centered design in situations that suffer from unilateral communication of information.
Shuting Chang
Cathy Chen
Cathy Chen received her B.A. from the University of Toronto, specializing in Visual Culture and Communication. She enjoys and has experience in storytelling through various media: animation, film (both traditional and interactive), reading, verbal, drawing and photography. She especially appreciates reading children's literature, both narrative and poetic, complemented by intriguing pictures. She loves traveling and scribbling. Her travel experiences influence and provide her more insight, understanding and beliefs to her goal. Her most recent work, as a resident of the Canadian Film Centre's IAEP program, is an interactive musical drumming device that helps autistic children work to develop their collaboration skills.
Maayan Cohen
Maayan Cohen is a transmedia producer who has been working in the media industry for the past six years. She is an artist and an entrepreneur at heart who continually seeks to build connections between narrative, creative expression and innovative technology.
In 2008 she founded Spring Water Media; a production company with a devoted passion for the advancement of transmedia. Since then, Maayan was named one of Canada’s “10 to Watch” by Bell Global Media. Her work has been showcased in Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, The New York Television Festival and the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. The latest project she managed, ‘Love Letters to the Future’, won a Gemini Award, two Webby Awards and was nominated to the prestigious Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in June, 2010.
In addition to her work at Spring Water Media, Maayan is teaching Digital Media at Ryerson University and is looking forward to be apart of the Digital Future Masters Program at OCAD U.
Elizabeth Coleman
Elizabeth Coleman is an integrated media artist working in audio production and book-arts. She is a community educator and activist (having taught at Spy Hop Productions and the SLCC Community Writing Center) and DJ (creator and host of The LadyBug Lounge—Salt Lake City’s only Funk, Soul, Hip Hop and Downtempo radio program running from 2003-2011). She co-founded Truth Be Told Productions, whose first community art project, “Voices: Stories From Survivors of Sexual Violence,” was a traveling counter-narrative audio installation. Her most recent work is a book-arts and audio project titled "The Language of Language" which explores language as violence, loss, memory, the other woman, the real, time, magic and privacy: a comment on the rhetoric of language and intimacy. The book is an interactive physical hypertext with an online read-along component backed by ambient sound, instrumentals and captured sound clips to create a third-level engagement between the reader/listener and language/sound.
Marc De Pape
I have been nomadic for most of my life. Born in Winnipeg, but I grew up around Ontario, briefly in Memphis, and finally in Calgary. My university years were equally scattered, with three schools covering a variety programs. However, I did eventually complete my BFA at Concordia in 2006. Since graduation, Toronto has been home. These past five years represent the longest single period of time spent in one city since I was a teenager. I worked primarily as a Video Producer for the ROM, but I also accepted many freelance directing and editing opportunities. When I began seriously thinking about returning to school, staying in Toronto seemed equally obvious and counter-intuitive. Ultimately, studying in the city I permanently live in would be a new experience for me, and since arriving, I have grown more interested in the creative possibilities found in designing local experiences.
Connor Dickie
Before coming to OCAD University Connor studied Film and Human Computer Interaction at the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., Media Arts and Science at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge MA., and completed Singularity University's Graduate Studies Program at NASA Ames.
His work explores the edge of human-machine communication and has produced a number of novel mobile, wearable and architectural computing platforms that augment and share human memory and maximize attention.
Connor is also Founder of the award winning Kameraflage Inc., a company he built to commercialize a new type of patent-pending display technology he invented specifically to address the emerging cyborg and camera cultures.
Connor’s artistic and scientific projects have been featured in Wired Magazine, Wired NextFext, Shanghai MoCA Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Gadgetoff, BoingBoing, Engadget, Gizmodo, Siggraph, The Guardian, ScienceWorld, Scientific American, Google TechTalks, BBC and CNN.
Fayssal Itani
Growing up in Beirut, Fayssal quickly formed an idea of what career path he would take. Following his graduation in 2006 with a B.S. in Graphic Design, he moved to Dubai to start his professional career in a place where innovation was prime. After gaining a comprehensive knowledge and experience in print design, he returned to his hometown and immersed himself in digital media where he joined a leading team of web designers. Fascinated by the web and the impact of social media, Fayssal later decided to venture in a freelancing career and work closely with companies that wanted to establish and expand their web presence. He notably collaborated with Tashkeil a company that aspires towards reintroducing designers in the Middle East as active creative stakeholders in the global arena.
Thuy Linh Do
Linh Do is a multi-media designer from Hanoi, Vietnam. In 2010, she graduated from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) with a Distinction Bachelor of Design in Multimedia Systems. Her professional career begun in New York City working in advertising design for GB65 before relocating to Toronto, Ont., Canada to pursue her Master of Fine Arts at OCAD University in August 2011.
In her spare time, she likes to watch Woody Allen’s old movies, travel with a camera, draw and make new friends. She’s often inspired by interesting artwork/design by others and her objective is to be able to inspire people with her works.
Cathy Fang
I was a designer as well as a design teacher. These two characters provide me a further comprehension about design and my future career. Base on my work experience and professional background in the fields of graphic design and industrial design. I would like to combine the design methods of digital media design with those to field of design. It’s a good way to expand the idea of digital media design and enhance the aesthetic of visual media design. I regard design-related work as lifetime job. I would like to build up a design corporation in the future, and I will continue my design education career. In my opinion, the two works are mutually reinforcing, as design education cannot be divorced from the design practice, and more and more innovative design concept and idea can be come up during the research process of design education.
Navaneethan Sivabalaviknarajah
Born in Sri Lanka but raised and schooled his entire life in Mississauga, Navaneethan is a vector-based artist and user interface designer specializing in human computer interaction. Graduating with a BSc from the joint CCIT program between University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College Oakville, he has utilized his strong digital practice and basic research skills to take a highly iterative and user centered approach to designing digital experiences. He has recently worked as a UI researcher for the Sheridan Elder Research Centre and has completed multiple co-op terms for Research In Motion’s Advanced Ergonomics Team as a conceptual UI designer. Working in highly collaborative multi-disciplinary rapid prototyping teams has motivated Navaneethan to explore how pushing levels of inclusiveness, accessibility, and personalization affect the design process. www.nirun.ca
Anne Stevens
A professional architect by training and practice, Anne is entering the Digital Futures program to pursue her interests in digital design and technology and move her work from something very bricks-and-mortar to something a little more 21st century. Specific interests include mapping, data visualization, the relationship between the technologies we use and the designs that result, the city, appropriate technologies for different cultures and contexts.
Her architectural work ranged from commercial design for household name companies and institutions to tree houses for eight year olds. Her Building Blocks Homes design won the Archetype Sustainable Homes Competition, a national competition to design and build the greenest house in Canada.
She holds a BA (Humanities) from York University and an Architecture Diploma from the Architectural Association in London, England.
Mark Thoburn
Before enrolling in the DF program, Mark directed documentaries for Société Radio-Canada, exploring subjects from GPS technologies, to biofuels, to creativity and economy in Montreal. He also directed a series of documentaries for a World Music series that reinterpreted Dvorak's 9th through the eyes and instruments of Canadian new immigrant musicians. He was a resident at the Canadian Film Centre's Media Lab, and writes both non-fiction and fiction for youth.
Che Yan
First Year Diploma Students
Lloyd Gray
Jessica Knox
Jessica graduated from the University of California, Riverside in 2006 with a M.Sc. in Biochemistry, and also holds a B.Sc. from McGill. She now leads a team of training & development consultants and instructional designers at Metrix Group, a consulting firm in Toronto. Jessica has been involved with the design, development and implementation of global eLearning programs and currently sits on the eLearning Committee at Interactive Ontario.
Heather Phenix
Lynn Ridley
Ryan Rizzo
Last Modified:2/8/2012 12:40:22 PM
GRADUATE PROGRAMS
