STUDENTS
Second Year Students
Rebecca Baird
My work reflects my identity as a mixed Cree/Métis woman who has chosen to live within an urban environment. Over the course of 27 years of visual studies and artistic practice, I’ve explored such themes as history, identity and culture in a variety of media, including sculpture, installation, painting and printmaking. I have received a number of significant awards and grants, and have exhibited in Canada and abroad. I was included in the inaugural exhibit From Sea to Shining Sea at the Power Plant, and in 1992, Heartland, a collaborative piece I produced with my brother, Kenny Baird, was exhibited in the major national group show Indigena at the Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec. My works are in the collections of the Canada Council’s Art Bank, the Museum of Civilization, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Canadian Embassy in Geneva. I was artist in residence at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the University of Toronto in 1993 and at the McMichael Art Gallery in 2004. In 1996, I was commissioned to create a mural The Great Mystery for the Queen Street West Community Health Centre in Toronto, and in 2001 was awarded a commission Open Sky for the new terminal at the Lester B. Pearson International airport in Toronto. Through the Interdisciplinary Art, Media & Design Master's program I am planning to work towards expanding my research on the dialogues of text, literacy, language, voice, land, dislocation and memory.
Lisa Binnie
Lisa records and explores the passage of time, and the interplay between human and natural processes in her surrounding environments. Her artistic process involves collecting discarded materials and repeated photographic documentation of specific locations. With these raw sculptural and photographic materials she creates dramatic images and large-scale metal sculptures at her off-the-grid studio, Deer Apple Forge, located near Algonquin Park. Lisa teaches creative approaches to photography at the Haliburton School of the Arts, and at Toronto Image Works (TIW) where she is also the buyer and special projects manager working with international artists producing their exhibitions at the lab. Lisa is in the Master of Fine Arts program at OCAD U. She graduated from the unique adult art program at the Central Technical School Art Centre, studied cinema history and theory at the University of Toronto and theatrical production at Ryerson University.
Gloria Caballero
Gloria was born in Monterrey, Mexico. Before immigrating to Canada she attended Universidad Regiomontana and completed a degree in Graphic Design. She moved to Montreal in 2006 and enrolled in the Fine Arts program at Concordia University with a portfolio of images that she had collected while travelling in Asia, Europe and Latin America. In 2009 she graduated with Distinction and now holds a BFA with a Major in Photography. Currently residing in Toronto, her work explores the concept of memory through family and identity. Her photographs evoke memories of the past and feelings of nostalgia.
Susan Campbell
I have been a graphic designer for nearly 20 years. For the past 12 years I have run a successful graphic design and consultancy business (Orphisme Design) in Ireland. Previous clients have included the Royal Bank of Canada, Kawasaki and Kraft Foods. I hold an Honours Degree in Design for Multimedia, and I have recently completed a Postgrad Diploma in Digital Media. My portfolio covers a wide range of print and web-based media. In the world of graphic design, deadlines and concepts are very often predefined. The idea is preconceived before the ink hits the page. Over the years, this has become part of my working process to such a degree that it can be difficult to learn new creative methodologies. I see this master’s as an opportunity to challenge the fixed notions which I have built up over two decades as a designer, and rediscover how new methodologies result in different outcomes. I hope to initiate this process by combining printmaking with digital media. Using a cross-section of mark-making processes, I intend to explore how these two very different disciplines might complement or enhance each other.
Pedro Castro
Pedro is a writer and photographer with a BA in Communications and Advertising from Pontifical Catholic University of Parana in Brazil. Soon after graduating he co-founded the first digital audiobook production and distribution company in the country. He worked for five years at the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology on various science popularization projects, such as national media campaigns, publications and events around the country. His main interest is in art, media and design, their relation to science, technology and education, and how to use innovative approaches to express complex and interesting ideas to a wider audience. He is passionate about using science as an inspiration for art and advancing scientific understanding and appreciation through popular culture, be it in art installations, books, games, film, TV, multimedia web experiences and mobile platforms.
Fareena Chanda
A photographer, designer and mixed media artist, Fareena graduated from the University of Washington with a BFA in Photography and a BA in Communication in 2007. After graduating, she worked in multimedia production for Seattle-based Gigantic Planet, designing content for live events and managing the production of educational DVDs for persons with disabilities. In 2008, Fareena moved back to her hometown of Karachi (Pakistan) where she was actively involved in the non-profit, art and media communities. Her photographic work has been published in a pioneering photo-essay book K’Architecture which documents the architecture of Karachi. Fareena also curated part of an interactive children’s exhibition for the Citizens Archive of Pakistan. Most recently, Fareena developed the first photography post-graduate diploma program in Pakistan for the leading art college IVS. Born in France, Fareena has travelled extensively and her collective experiences in Asia, Europe, Africa and North America continue to inspire her interest in social change through the power of design and media.
Anya Chudnovtseva
Anya attended the Webster University School of Art and received a BFA diploma with an emphasis in Painting. During that time she has been working as a commissioned artist and as an art teacher in Saint Louis, MO. Over the years Anya has held both solo and group shows. Her work has been shown in Saint Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson, etc.. Other visual performances include the Saint Louis Contemporary Art Museum and Dada Ball. Two years ago, Anya completed a summer art seminar, where she taught and studied with well respected artists. Anya Chudnovtseva continues exploring and working with different media in art.
Po Chun Lau
Po, a graduate of Fine Arts (2004) from OCAD U, is a painter and sculptor. Her interest in nature and human connections is evident throughout her work on wood, canvas and sculptures. Po’s work has continued to evolve and grow, influenced greatly over the past four years by the unique landscape and culture of Newfoundland. From paintings of the forever changing skies and dissipated fences, to sculptures of the rugged shorelines and icebergs, a common thread of impermanence weaves through them. Art and communication are inseparable. It is important for Po to continue to explore new context and technique for her own work to respond to the ongoing change and diversity in our world.
David Clarkson
David graduated from the Photo-Electric Art program at OCAD U in 1979. Since then he has exhibited at the 18th Sao Paulo Biennial, P. S. 1, and The Drawing Center, as well as many other galleries and museums in England, Germany, Canada and the United States. He has held solo exhibitions at YYZ, S.L. Simpson Gallery, Derek Eller Gallery, White Columns among other venues. His writing on art has appeared in Parachute, Flash Art, Bomb, M5V and Canadian Art. Clarkson was a founding Director of YYZ and the Director of the OCAD U gallery from 1980 to 1987. He moved to New York in 1992, and for the past 15 years has been the Exhibition Manager at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.
Keith Cole
A graduate of York University’s Fine Arts Program, Keith Cole is a performer and filmmaker. His main interests lie in unique performance locations along with the interdisciplinary art forms of theatre/dance/film/performance/installation and the intersections that they create. He has completed 17 film works to date and is a regular performer on Toronto stages and in the city’s vibrant cabaret scene. He has received several awards for his performances and filmmaking achievements and for his long-standing commitment to Toronto’s queer community. Highlights include participating in documenta 12 (2007) as a performer and receiving a Dora Award nomination (2008) for his unique performance style. Along with his artistic practice, Keith Cole was a front-runner mayoral candidate for Toronto’s 2010 municipal election. He is looking forward to his OCAD U years with a concentrated focus on installation, performance, curation and moving from low-tech to high-tech. http://www.keithcole.ca
Philip Cote
Moose Deer Point First Nation, First Nations Affiliation: Shawnee, Lakota, Potawatomi and Ojibway. A graduate of OCAD U, Cote has been at the forefront of a group of artists who are exploring new ways to imbue sculpture and painting with traditional spiritual perspectives. His work is available at a number of galleries across Canada and the United States. In 1994 he was in a two-person exhibition with Norval Morriseau at the Maslek Gallery in Sante Fe, New Mexico. He was commissioned in 2002 to create a 1,000 square foot mural Kiinwin Dabaadjmowin (Our Story) Mural for the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation. As part of the Planet Indigenous 2004 festival he was artist in residence at the McMichael Art Gallery, and in 2005 Cote created a large-scale mural, Niinwin Dabaadjmowin – (We Are Talking), a 20-panel, 80-foot mural depicting the rich history of the Anishnaabe people with the First Nations street level youth and community members. Cote’s great-grandfather is the great-grandson of Tecumseh, and Philip is engaged in exploring the importance of the Shawnee leader's life and spirit.
Benjamin Edelberg
Benjamin Edelberg is a multimedia artist and filmmaker who experiments with restructuring 'found' images and footage into collage projects. He is attracted to what might be termed "remoldable narratives," namely how stories can be told by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated fragments. In 2008, he won the HSBC Filmmaker’s Award for his film editing. benedelberg.tumblr.com
Julian Higuerey Nunez
He was born in London, England, but grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. There he studied physics but midway through it switched universities and started from scratch in art school. His work has been showed in International Performance Festivals in Mexico, Poland and Venezuela, and in Important Young Latin-American shows in Cuba and Venezuela. His practice uses performativity as a tool for research into the nature of time, transit and the everyday. It proceeds in a way that combines a scientific approach with a celebration of the absurd.
Rita Kamacho
Rita is a visual artist who works on performance-based projects. Through her practice she examines how social, political and economic operations, as well as global and local scales, generate the multiple ways of reading events. With open-ended methods of collaboration and interplay, Kamacho creates situations that incorporate a relationship with the audience to think about the paradoxes of our society, associated with ideas of borders and boundaries between disciplines, places and spaces. Born in Mexico, Kamacho has a Bachelor of Graphic Design from Universidad del Valle de Mexico. Her projects have been included in exhibitions, festivals and on the street, including Visualeyez in Edmonton and Nuit Blanche in Toronto where her exhibition Thundering Paw was shown at the Women's Art Resource Centre. www.ritakamacho.com
Nermin Moufti
A corporate brand designer by day – experimental graphic designer by night, Nermin has developed a wealth of experience in branding and design fields. A graduate of the American University of Sharjah (UAE), Nermin has spent the years since living and working in Dubai, Toronto and New York. Now part of a Western conglomerate with predominantly Middle Eastern projects, her worldly experiences have shown her the importance and need for greater cultural sensitivity and understanding. This has led to various self-initiated projects and collaborations, which aim to encourage the unmitigated communication between the Middle Eastern world and its surroundings. When she's not busy working on her design projects, Nermin is found typing away on her vintage Royal 1950s typewriter and collecting Arabic letters that she stumbles upon during her Middle East visits.
Rachel Pulfer
Rachel is an NGO worker, journalist, painter and writer. An odd combination of idealist and realist, she's interested in media, portraiture, animation and the points at which they intersect. A practicing painter, she has also worked as a journalist for many years, most recently for a national business magazine where she specialized in the writing of profiles. She has a Toronto present, an international past, and is excited about the immediate future.
Frank Tsonis
Frank is an new media artist currently living in Toronto. He is a graduate of Concordia University's Computation Arts (BFA) program. In the past, he has worked as a researcher for Jason Lewis at OBX Labs and has conducted programming/technical support for various Toronto-based artists. He currently works as a Digital Media Technician at York University. His artwork focuses on the creation of playful installation spaces that summon existential inquiries through user interaction. Specializing in Interaction Design, his installations range from kinetic sculpture to audiovisual software. His most recent project, Well Then, Once More, is an interactive audiovisual installation exploring the nature of nihilism.
Christine Walker
Christine has been a visual arts teacher with the Toronto District School Board for several years. She graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design with a BFA, and studied Graphic Design before completing Majors in Sculpture and Painting. She also attended several other universities, including the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Her work deals with the idea of Displacement, and the animals that should exist in our cities but are rarely seen due to the influx of people and the disruption of their habitat. She experiments with the juxtaposition of two- and three-dimensional images, both literal and implied. She has been working as a commissioned artist and is very involved in the school art community. Christine is looking forward to expanding her painting practice to include more photo-based and sculptural media.
Marian Wihak
Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Marian trained as a theatre designer and also studied visual art at the University of Regina, Dalhousie University, The Banff Centre, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, OCAD U and Studio Arts Centre International in Florence, Italy. She completed a Creative Residency at Banff in 2009, and was the recipient of a 2008 Canada Council Grant for Research & Creation in addition to being a Central Canada Finalist in the 2001 RBC New Canadian Painting. Her work is in many corporate and private collections across North America. In December 2009, Wihak’s solo show Boundless: Sublime Maelstrom opened at the Art Gallery of Regina, a panoramic and immersive installation of large-scale oil paintings. The exhibition saw her beginning to integrate her painting practice with her extensive experience in creating 3-dimensional environments for theatre and film. Wihak’s design work has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Gemini nomination for Gordon Pinsent’s Heyday in 2007, a Dora Mavor Moore nomination for The Leisure Society at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, and the Gemini Award for Best Production Design for both September Songs: the Music of Kurt Weil produced by Rhombus Media, and Pit Pony, set in Cape Breton, 1900. She is currently designing an operatic, political satire television feature for Rhombus, as well as the premiere of Bethune Imagined at the Factory in November. Marian is excited to be part of the Interdisciplinary MFA program where she anticipates working with alternative modes of materialization to expand the possibilities of immersive and experiential environments. She also looks forward to meeting and collaborating with the wide range of artists and designers within the program.
Brittany Wray
Britt holds a degree in biology from Queen's University, where she quickly learned that traditional scientific practice would not make her happy if she were to follow it. She spent a lot of time during those years thinking about creative expressions of science in documentary and art, and started a science radio show to explore those budding interests. She followed her biology degree with a Graduate Diploma in Communication from Concordia University, and is now working to find innovative modes of science media production through hybridizing artistic and scientific practices in experimental media art projects. She's worked in Amsterdam, Montreal and Kingston, Ont., on these ideas and now in Toronto her research and creation interests include synthetic biology, evolutionary ecology, psychology, biomedical ethics, animation and sound.
First Year Students
Karen Abel
Karen Abel is a Toronto artist and naturalist. Drawing from a background in conservation, she creates place-based public art and site-sensitive installation works that consider, engage and accommodate 21st century urban ecology and biodiversity. Karen completed a graduate degree in environmental studies at York University in 2006 with an interdisciplinary focus in visual art. She has been awarded several grants in support of contemporary ecological art projects including community-based and collaborative initiatives with the Walpole Island First Nation and the Ontario Science Centre. www.karenabel.ca
Alexis Boyle
Raised by a pack of wolves in southern Ontario, Boyle learned at an early age to appreciate good company and conversation around other family's dinner tables. Naturally nomadic, she hitchhiked and gallivanted across the country until the luster of the service industry faded. She moved to Montreal and studied studio arts at Concordia University where she developed her interdisciplinary practice. Boyle mashes up the personal and public through subway and sidewalk installations and performances. She creates and performs wearable works that are meant to bridge the relationship between artist and community, allowing people to be confronted by art within their hustle and bustle. Boyle's paintings and public works question the place of art in society and often strike viewers as simultaneously festive and macabre. Her practice is marked by the struggles and celebrations of daily life and is heavily influenced by dreams and fluke encounters.
Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea
Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist. He works in animation, painting, drawing and sculpture. He migrated to Canada in 2002. He has a BA in Visual Arts from Brock University and graduated from the Computer Animation program at Sheridan College. He currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. His work has been exhibited in Canada and Colombia, and has been featured in the Bravo!FACT short films The Runner and the Juno-nominated video for Metric’s Collect Call. His interests are eclectic and include Latin American histories, forgotten religions, genetics, forgeries, the absurd, the monstrous, the sublime and the point where they all collide.
John Deal
Jason Dyck
Coming from a mechanical engineering background, Jason's approach to art relies heavily on physicality and spatial interaction. He is interested in the dynamic relationship between art and the audience, particularly in our technology-saturated culture. Jason is Alberta raised and Ontario educated, but he learnt the most while exploring the wide world.
Andy Fabo
Andy Fabo is an artist, art critic, independent curator and art educator. In 2005 he was given a retrospective at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, an exhibition that featured his work over 30 years in a diverse range of media. The art ranged from the first mixed media paintings that he showed in his 1979 A Space exhibition that was a landmark for Queer Art in Toronto, to the work he was making as a founding member of the influential ChromaZone Gallery (1981-85), to his collaborative videos work created with Michael Balser, to his current evolution into the digital media. Their early collaboration, Survival of the Delirious (1988), won numerous awards including Best New Narrative at the Atlanta Film Festival and Kijkhuis Festival in Holland and it is included in the Art Against AIDS anthology that VTape and Video Data Bank in Chicago co-produced. Of late, he has shifted the content of his work lately to create series that document art communities (Hamilton, North Bay) and the tangle of friendships within those communities. Working in collaboration with Kevin O’Byrne, a friend of 20 years, the series will be shown at b contemporary in Hamilton and Skew Gallery in Calgary.
Calliope Gazetas
Calliope recently relocated from San Francisco to Toronto. In SF, her clients over the last four years have included a range of non-profits and creatives, most notably Burning Man. Originally from Vancouver, where she holds a BFA from UBC (photography and printmaking) and a BDes (interaction and typography) from Emily Carr, she brings with her an unceasing curiosity and desire for learning. Combined with her broad experiences in publishing, project management, print and digital design, her intent with her studies at OCAD is to explore current and possible connections between design and natural sciences, to further our interactions with the natural world.
Martha Griffith
Martha Griffith earned a BFA in Film Animation at Concordia University in Montreal, and a BEd from York University in Toronto. She has since produced two short films with assistance from the National Film Board of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. The traditionally animated shorts explore layers, communication and highlight the gap between intention and understanding. Martha is continually shifting between mediums, including: sculpture, photography and animation. Most recently she combined the choreography of Busby Berkeley with various urban infrastructures and waterways in Toronto to create images of manicured Mother Nature. She is currently exploring this idea in a collaborative work called Meeting Ground for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. Martha has been teaching art at the secondary level in the York Region District School Board for the past six years. www.marthagriffith.com
Alexandra Haagaard
Alex graduated from the University of Toronto in 2010 with a B.Sc. in Pathobiology. During her undergraduate studies, Alex realized that although she appreciated the logic and analytical rigour of scientific research, she was unhappy with the impersonality of the field and with the disjunction between researchers, the work they produce and the clinical outcomes of that work. Consequently, she became interested in establishing a design practice that would marry the scientific process with the personal focus of user-centered design by reenvisioning the roles of scientist-researcher as artist-maker (and vice versa) and of the patient-subject as consumer. Her thesis studies will focus on adapting medical assistive devices as outlets for the self-expression of individuals with disabilities.
Melanie Janisse
Considering the fractal nature of a human life, I propose a small excerpt of my life experience that brings me to this juncture. I was educated at both Concordia University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Communications and Visual Arts respectively. As a response to the nature of this graduate program I would offer that my formal education begins a conversation in regards to the nature of my learning, my thinking and my practices. I am an individual that thrives in a more circular, open learning environment that welcomes freneticism, as well as a wandering in and through whatever works as a medium to explore larger ideas. I tend to be irreverent to the constraints of any given modality. I have been known to use photography, painting, poetics, critical writing, movement, leather, buildings, businesses, food, graphic design, fashion and fashion history and oration as a complex series of systems in which I attempt to explore and describe my human experience. What I have not tried, I look forward to being confronted with. Currently, I am regularly published as a poet and literary critic, my leather designs are highly sought after articulations of classic native leatherwork and contemporary fashion and can be purchased in boutiques throughout Toronto and my visual works are displayed in some of Toronto’s galleries and in the private collections of individuals around the world. Until recently, I was the proud owner of a small and confusing café that boasted beautiful food on a strange collection of found china, and a small shop that highlights both design history and contemporary textile and jewelry design. I also recently restored a small commercial building that I rescued from the ether of this city, happily restoring its old fireplaces and plaster cove moldings. It is my hope to be able to function within the mediums of both photography painting and creative writing while maintaining a strong anchoring in critical theory which focuses on notions of art making, civic and situational spaces of art making, and the spaces wherein creative articulations and business practices collide.
Tahireh Lal
Born in 1986 in Delhi, for the last seven years Tahireh Lal has lived and worked in Bangalore. Her works are primarily experimental narratives in video through which she explores identity, spiritual & physical energies and awareness. Much of her artistic focus stems from external manifestations of inward concern and the webbing of interpersonal interactions, which shape the social narrative of our time. Raised Catholic in a predominantly Hindu country, the diversity in her own ethnic roots has inspired her to deal with many questions regarding identity. Her explorations also deal with the convergence of seemingly disparate ideas where each narrative lead is stripped to its bare minimum both in content and aesthetic. Naturally occurring systems, mathematics, mythologies and magic realism, often influence the framework in which these ideas are then synthesized. Her works are primarily experimental narratives in video through which she explores identity, spiritual & physical energies and awareness.
Raenel Leppky
Raenel was born and raised in Canada’s prairies and came to Toronto first in 2001 and then again in 2005. While pursuing her undergraduate degree in Interior Design at Ryerson University, Raenel’s designs became increasingly focused on concepts driven by the tactile nature of materials, the essence of memory, the familiar texture of home, and the impact of relocation on the individual and on families. She has a great love for the design process and, where possible, uses manual and sculptural techniques to articulate her ideas and designs. She likens the design process to her yoga practice; an active process that involves the entire body and that requires stamina, strong will and deep inner focus.
Julia Mensink
The intersection of English literature and art has inspired Julia’s work since she graduated from Queen’s University’s Concurrent Education program with a B.A. (Hons.) and a B.Ed. In 2006, Julia moved to Toronto, where she began playing synthesizer in a rock n’ roll band and teaching English. She has self-published small books of poetry and exhibited performances and installation-based work around Ontario. Pedagogy and autobiography, archaeology, experimental music, contemporary literature and garbage comprise her research interests; she is also exploring the visual and aural properties of language using new media and the dissection of form, content and structure. Other things that bring Julia joy include music, swimming in the ocean, drawing, singing, creative problem solving and spending time with her students while discussing literature.
Diana Meredith
Diana is a digital artist and teacher. Her own practice includes mixing traditional media – acrylic paints, sumi-e brushwork & graphite – with many layers of digital painting and manipulation and then printing on unusual substrates– metal, film and textured pellon. Diana has been teaching digital art at Humber College in Toronto for the last 8 years. As Humber develops a new BFA digital and traditional arts program, Diana has been writing curriculum for the digital sections. In 1974 Diana graduated from Sheridan College School of Design and Crafts. She has been a potter, a cook, a social worker, a feminist performance artist, an Outward Bound instructor, an English teacher and a web designer. Discovering Photoshop in the early 90s changed her art practice and her way of life. She is currently interested in finding visual expression for the odd experience of middle age. www.dianameredith.com
Heather Nicol
Heather Nicol is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her practice includes creating hybrid audio-sculptures, sound and light installation works, as well as independent curating. She has worked as an arts educator in museums and in public and alternative schools and has developed curricula and training for teachers. An underlying interest in communication and connection link all of these threads. Nicol’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the US and France. She will have a solo show at KWT Contemporary, Toronto, in October 2011. Her recent curatorial practice has involved seizing unoccupied urban spaces in Toronto for large scale, temporary interventions, including MakingROOM (2006) and Art School {Dismissed},(2010), featuring scores of site specific works. For over twenty years, Nicol lived in New York City. She obtained her BFA (honours) from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her Masters in Art Education from New York University. www.heathernicol.ca www.artschooldismissed.com
Nicholas Sweetman
Nick has been drawing and painting his whole life. He was born and has lived most of his life in Toronto, and graduated in 2008 with an Honours BA from University of Toronto where he studied semiotics and learned to analyze, discuss and appreciate the different ways meaning and culture are expressed in the arts. Then he took off to Asia to teach English and see a bit of the world. With a slightly broader understanding of how he fits into “Earth,” he has returned to regular creative production and worked last year as a freelance visual artist, doing painting and design commissions for private and corporate clients and building his portfolio around an interest in the beauty of the accidental – the ways, both chaotic and ordered, in which natural and societal factors contribute to the individual and one’s sense of self. Now, he is suddenly a student again and very excited to incorporate new influences and semiotic discourse into his practice, possibly moving beyond purely two-dimensional work. www.nicksweetman.ca
Borzu Talaie
Borzu Talaie is an award-winning designer who has been in the field since 1993. His area of practice ranges from typography and traditional print to new-media, time-based communications and user experience design. Borzu is the founder/principal of Borxu Design, a multi-disciplinary studio where architects, designers, artists and programmers constantly challenge the fundamental theories of function and aesthetics to deliver distinctive solutions to their collaborative projects. While continuing his studies at the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program at OCAD University, Borzu contributes to the discipline as an instructor at both OCAD U and York University.
Andrew Zealley
Exploring the spatial as well as musical possibilities of sound, Andrew Zealley's practice occupies the liminal areas between audio art and composition – a duality which distinguishes his work as sound artist. His scores and audio environments for AA Bronson, Dara Gellman, Luis Jacob, Chrysanne Stathacos and Scott Treleaven blur the lines between contemporary art and shamanistic ritual. A thematic focus on HIV/AIDS and healing was initiated in 1990 through collaborations with artist Robert Flack. Since then, Zealley has advanced this signature with observations on cycles of nature, divination and the roles and influences of sound in social, political and spiritual spheres. His audio installation, Nature: This Is A Recording (2006), is in the permanent collection of The National Gallery of Canada. His film and television credits include the Genie-nominated score for John Greyson's feature, The Law of Enclosures (2001); and "Spunk," the theme to the US series Queer As Folk. As PSBEUYS, he has remixed tracks for Black Sun Productions, Kids On TV, Queen Lear, Times Neue Roman, and Ultra-red. At a time when there is an urgent need for more holistic understandings of health and serenity, Andrew Zealley is eager to explore the creative possibilities within OCAD U's interdisciplinary community. http://www.andrewzealley.com
Last Modified:2/7/2012 8:57:01 AM
GRADUATE PROGRAMS
