Current students, faculty, and staff
OCAD University President and Vice-Chancellor Ana Serrano is among the latest cohort of Senior Fellows appointed by Massey College.
She joins a community of scholars, leaders and engaged citizens whose contributions, expertise and commitment to public service will enrich the intellectual and social life of Massey College in 2025-26.
“I am deeply honoured to be among such a distinguished community of scholars and thought-leaders. I look forward to engaging in dialogue on critical issues facing our society today and co-creating solutions,” says President Serrano.
Massey College also announced 2025-26 Visiting Scholars, which include three OCAD U faculty members: Professor Isabel Meirelles, Associate Professor Ilene Sova and Associate Professor Derek Sullivan.
ABOUT ANA SERRANO
President Serrano, who assumed the position of OCAD U’s president and vice-chancellor in July 2020, is an award-winning leader with more than 25 years of experience in transforming organizations, creating award-winning digital products and cultural experiences, and designing cutting-edge programs to strengthen creative sectors and industries.
Now entering her second five-year term at the helm of Canada’s oldest and largest art, design and media university, President Serrano leads and supports innovative initiatives to facilitate and nurture the growth and success of the country’s next-generation of arts and culture leaders, and to position the University as an impactful leader in art and design education.
The recipient of numerous awards from the digital, media, film and theatre industries in Canada and the United States, she received the prestigious King Charles III Coronation Medal earlier this year in recognition of her dedication to digital innovation, arts education and cultural leadership.
President Serrano is co-chair of the Open Democracy Project, co-founder of Canada’s annual democracy conference (DemocracyXChange Summit), a former board member of the Toronto Arts Council, former trustee of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and a member of various boards, including the National Film Board and Atkinson Foundation.
ABOUT THE OCAD U MASSEY COLLEGE VISITING SCHOLARS
Isabel Meirelles
Isabel Meirelles is an information designer and professor in OCAD U’s Faculty of Design. Her research focuses on the role of data visualization in society, culture and education. She has organized numerous conferences and exhibitions on the topic, including Information+, and Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks symposia at NetSci.
The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed experimental approaches to data visualization that were influential in current practices, including new computational techniques, aesthetic experiences, and critical interrogation of data. Yet, many projects are no longer available to us due to changes in technology, creating an information gap that prevents younger generations from fully understanding these early digital explorations. Meirelles’ current research critically examines this period to provide a broad overview that contextualises these practices and discusses their legacies.
The author of Design for Information: An Introduction to the Histories, Theories, and Best Practices Behind Effective Information Visualizations (Rockport, 2013), Meirelles is currently completing a new book provisionally titled, A Data Visualization Odyssey: Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg Collaborations 2003-2023 (CRC/Routledge).
Ilene Sova
Ilene Sova is an artist and associate professor in the Contemporary Drawing and Painting program at OCAD U. With extensive solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, Sova’s work has most notably been shown at the Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Department of Canadian Heritage, and Mutuo Centro de Arte in Barcelona.
She is passionate about designing and instituting curricula focused on diversity, equity, sustainability, and decolonization while engaging students and teachers with stimulating inquiry models and creativity capacity building.
She founded Blank Canvases in partnership with the Toronto District School Board while working with local parents to improve arts education in her neighbourhood. She has been invited to speak nationally and internationally at conferences on new and emergent arts pedagogies, focusing on student-centred learning and studio processes, and to train faculty at institutions such as Pratt Institute for the Arts, Harbourfront Centre, University of the Bahamas, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Her innovative curriculum has been featured on national news platforms such as the CBC, Globe and Mail, and National Post. Most recently, Sova was awarded a sabbatical because she was invited by Lived Places Publishing in New York to write a text for studio and art history courses on decolonial art practices in the Americas entitled Art, Land and Ancestral Stories. She co-curated the exhibition, Too Much Fashion, with Byron Armstrong, now on view at United Contemporary until Aug. 30.
Derek Sullivan
Associate Professor Derek Sullivan is chair of the Integrated Media and Sculpture/Installation programs in the Faculty of Art at OCAD U. His multidisciplinary practice employs drawing, sculpture, book words and installation to engage with the legacy of modernist art and design. He questions familiar forms and genres, often to examine the links between one discipline and the next. Books and the act of reading have consistently been central to Sullivan’s practice.
Most recently, his work was the subject of the solo exhibition, Field Notes, at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. His work is in the permanent collections of several museums, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.