Congratulations to the 2024-25 recipients of the OCAD University Medal!
Each year, the University selects one student from each undergraduate program in recognition of their creativity, innovation, mastery of technique and high academic achievement.
The 16 artists, designers and digital media makers will be recognized at a reception on May 7, prior to the public opening of GradEx 110 at 6:15 p.m., which includes an outdoor party in Butterfield Park.
GradEx 110 is Toronto’s largest free art and design exhibition, featuring work by more than 800 emerging artists, designers and digital media creators. Work by the medal recipients will be on display in the Great Hall, second floor, at 100 McCaul St. The exhibition is open to the public from May 7 to 11.
This year’s presenting sponsors are Hullmark and BentallGreenOak, along with opening night sponsors 13th Street Winery, Collective Arts and media sponsor blogTO.
Join us in celebrating the OCAD U Medal recipients and learn more about their work below!
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS
Advertising
Sarah Jiwoo Chung is a Korean Canadian creative. Much of her work stems from hosting social events where conversations lead to meticulously executed projects. As an art director and copywriter, she brings to light the hidden corners and unspoken habits of everyday life. Her most recent project, fond, encompasses the importance of curating family-like bonds for young people over a shared meal. The idea is driven by the need for real-world connections. fond consists of a website which acts as a central housing unit embracing the beliefs of web 1.0, and the in-person actions and community work carried out by the target audience.
Creative Writing
Gus Lederman is a writer and theatre performer who haswritten theatre reviews for Intermission Magazine and articles for Cannopy Magazine. Lederman is passionate about writing plays, community-building and climate justice. They have created mycomimic, a play about looking to mycelium networks to build more interconnected communities, centring on themes of social biomimicry and the deconstruction of the individual. An installation mimicking a mycelium web and featuring one of the play’s characters, the veiled lady puppet, is on view at GradEx 110.
Criticism and Curatorial Practice
Cait Toenjes is an emerging curator and interdisciplinary artist based in Gananoque, Ontario. She is currently the gallery and artistic relations manager at Frameworks Canada, where she curates monthly exhibitions showcasing the work of established local artists. Informed by her recent experiences as a cancer patient, Toenjes’s artistic practice reflects on the complex and often contradictory relationship between illness and creativity. Her current series, on view at GradEx 110, explores themes of duration, interruption and using art as a therapeutic process to navigate treatment, recovery and survivorship.
Cross-Disciplinary Art: Life Studies
Aysia Tse is an interdisciplinary artist, arts worker and community organizer whose practice includes movement-based work, performance and multimedia installations that engage themes relating to madness, queerness and her mixed diasporic identity. Her work, BODY, GRATE AND TILE: The Politics of Pool, Sport and Space, is a multimedia installation and research project that investigates swimming pools and aesthetic-based sport systems as sites of political tension and embodied inquiry. Drawing from lived experiences, feminist theory, and the histories of synchronized swimming and public pools in North America, Tse examines how artistic swimming facilitates the gendering of young female, trans and queer athletic bodies.
Digital Futures
Justine Magbitang is a Filipino Canadian multidisciplinary artist and designer. Currently exploring game design and motion design, she enjoys challenging herself with how to simulate real-life experiences or emotions through digital interactions and animations. In Surround Screen, she built a virtual installation within a game engine that reflects her struggles with distraction and time while navigating online school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Magbitang brings forth a full-circle moment to reflect on the relationship she developed with technology as both a means for creation and productivity and as a source of anxiety and distraction.
Drawing and Painting
Cherie Leung is a multimedia storyteller who works in textiles, crafting material, and found objects. Leung is a second-generation Chinese Canadian and mother of three whose work reflects her parenting, values and the things that have shaped her while navigating life between Eastern and Western thinking. Her past careers in public policy, law and business prioritized precision and accuracy. Leung’s art pushes back against this way of thinking by prioritizing experimentation and intuition. In September 2025, she will begin a Master of Art in Textiles at the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom.
Environmental Design
Kris Ahn is an aspiring architect who constantly reflects on what makes good architecture. Through various projects and experimentation, he has concluded that when architecture fosters a mutual exchange of love and care with people, it can become beautiful, technologically advanced and sustainable. His work STAY, on view at GradEx 110, proposes a strategy to improve aging apartment buildings in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood without demolition, aiming to prevent renovictions. STAY is designed to be universal and scalable, applicable to aging apartments beyond a single complex.
Experimental Animation
Xinyi Tian is an emerging animator, character designer and illustrator. She specializes in 2D animation, with a focus on morphing and character animation. She has also explores mediums such as puppet stop-motion and cut-paper animation. Tian aims to create more narrative animations and expand her practice by integrating interactive technology in digital media, discovering new ways to present both narrative and experimental animations. She is exhibiting STRIDE & SHINE! at GradEx 110, an experimental animation exploring the idea of immersing oneself in an ideal, supportive world. Each frame of the animation was created through a mixed-media process combining digital and traditional methods.
Graphic Design
Noura Khaki is an Iranian designer whose practice is rooted in curiosity and a deep engagement with the imagination. Central to her work is the question “What if?”, a prompt that allows her to reimagine the familiar and construct speculative narratives that challenge conventional understandings of reality. Through storytelling, visual design and the creation of fabricated artifacts, Khaki constructs alternative worlds that interrogate dominant narratives and encourage critical reflection on what is real, remembered or possible. She is exhibiting her work Ghebleh-ye Alam (قبلهی عالم) at GradEx 110.
Illustration
Shamika Pierre is an artist who sees illustration as a form of storytelling. She focuses on the experiences of her community, using the beauty and richness of ink and watercolour to let the stories unfold. Pierre has created The American Dream, a conceptual illustration series that unveils the unsettling experiences of Black diaspora in North America. By exposing the illusion of the dream, her work reveals the eerie realities that exist in contrast to its promises.
Industrial Design
Esteban Poblano-Zenil is an industrial designer passionate about creating thoughtful, impactful work through social innovation, clean aesthetics and user-centred thinking. His projects range from furniture and product design to socially driven solutions that respond to real-world needs. His project, Water on the Route: A Water Filter With Life-saving Purposes, considers how we can provide migrants with safe, accessible resources to filter water during their journeys through remote and neglected areas. The concept is to create a paper-based water filtration tool that is lightweight, accessible and cost-effective.
Integrated Media
Sohyun Yoon is an artist who explores forms, images and sounds through media installations, video works and object design. Yoon's practice emphasizes iterative reproduction while dismantling traditional conventions. Focusing on documenting objects deemed redundant in society, she employs deconstruction, enumeration and repetition to reveal the absurdities in human-made structures. Her Remnant Project imagines abandoned objects in their prime, fulfilling a purpose, now reflecting a state of neglect and decay that hints at their past significance.
Material Art and Design
MinSeo Whee (May) is a Korean metalsmith and emerging jewelry artist. With a background in fine art, she brings painterly sensitivity into her jewelry through thoughtful use of color, texture and form. Her work combines traditional Korean metal techniques with contemporary digital tools such as 3D scanning and CAD modelling. Her collection Collecting Times conveys the human habit of collecting things that matter to us and turning them into memory capsules that hold our stories across time. Collecting Times captures the emotional landscape the artist has navigated since moving to Canada from Korea.
Photography
Manny Wood Lynes-Ford is an Indigenous photographer from Gitxaala, British Columbia. He works primarily in analog photography with a range of mediums, with everything from Cyanotypes to Chromogenic prints in the darkroom. Working with themes of decolonization and the Indigenous experience, he draws inspiration from artists like Fred Herzog and Carl Beam. He is exhibiting After They Leave, which documents the town of historic mining and logging town of Wells, B.C. It serves as a reminder of our responsibility to protect what we have and ensure there is something left for future generations, just as our ancestors did for us.
Printmaking and Publications
Sarah Walker Ann Gifford is a printmaker and zine maker. Their work explores the documentation of memory, understanding of community and its relation to the body. Pulling inspiration from folk art and historical quilts, Gifford’s work explores representations of identity through motifs and illustrative symbolism. Her Understanding series seeks to engage with trauma and the divided parts of the self, attempting to uncover and communicate through storytelling and visual expression. This is done through exploring memories of home, relationships and connection to the body.
Sculpture/Installation
Jason Mendiola is an interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, modular systems and motion. His practice blends metalwork, emergent technology and sonic elements to build responsive environments that explore perception, proximity and relational space. Mendiola is exhibiting Caesura, a kinetic sculpture exploring modularity, motion and sonic resonance. Through randomized movement and mechanical rhythm, it creates a shifting space of perception — where proximity, uncertainty and presence unfold in dialogue with machine and viewer.
