Visiting Artists

Fall 2025

Shawn Serfas is an Associate Professor of Visual Art and Head of the Creative Studies Department, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. His research interests include contemporary painting concerning relational abstraction, environmental aesthetics, religion, the landscape, as well as issues bordering abstraction and representation.

Andreas Rutkauskas was born in Winnipeg (Treaty 1 territory, the ancestral and traditional homeland of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation) and currently resides on the unceded traditional territory of the syilx (Okanagan Valley, BC). His projects involve photography and video, often focusing on landscapes that have changed due to a range of technologies; examples include surveillance along the Canada/U.S. border, cycles of industrialization & deindustrialization in Canada’s oil patch, and most recently, the aftermath and regeneration following wildfires in Western Canada.

Emily Geen’s work navigates our relationships to images: as portals, as surfaces, as archives, and as objects. Her hybrid artistic processes have included personal image collections, scanning, found/readymade objects, casting, image transfers, video, reflections, laser engraving, cross stitch, stained glass, bookmaking, painting, text and sound. Embodied inquiries of nostalgia, temporality, phenomenology and architecture are prevalent in her work. Emily completed her BFA at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (2012), followed by her MFA at the University of Victoria (2015).

Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist/curator whose research intersects with land-based art practices. An Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBCO in Syilx territories (Kelowna, BC Canada), her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities.

John Hall received his formal training in the 1960s at the Alberta College of Art in Calgary and the Instituto Allende in Mexico. Since completing his studies in 1966, he has lived and worked in Calgary, Alberta; Delaware, Ohio; New York, New York; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; and, most recently, West Kelowna, British Columbia.

Nasim Pirhadi is a multidisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded, traditional territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation in Kelowna, BC. Her practice spans video, sound, olfactory elements, performance, and sculpture, forming multisensory installations where each component is interwoven. She activates space with scent, sculpture, and moving image, inviting audiences into direct sensory interaction and embodied presence. Nasim completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (2023).

Samuel Roy-Bois (Quebec city, 1973) is an award-winning artist and Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Laval University in 1996 and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 2001. Roy-Bois’ practice encompasses installation, sculpture, and photography, focusing on the built environment, vernacular practices, and art as an emergent phenomenon.

Winter 2025

Myron Campbell is an educator, media artist, and designer based in Kelowna, BC. He currently teaches digital media courses in the BFA and BMS programs at UBC Okanagan. As an art director in Vancouver, Myron co-created interactive installations for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics with Switch United. He has also worked with Nixon Hospitality, branding several of their restaurants, including Bernie’s Supper Club, Skinny Duke’s Glorious Emporium, and the newly established Hello Darlin’.

 Mia Rushton & Eric Moschopedis are an award winning interdisciplinary artist team from Calgary, Canada. We bring together elements of craft, performance, and multi-species ethnography to create site-specific and socially-engaged art works. Thematically our practice deals with interspecies relationships, biodiversity and place-based knowledge production in cities, small towns, and rural spaces.

Tara Nicholson is an artist who explores ecological activism through a more-than-human lens. Her photo-based and installation practice has investigated Arctic extinction and permafrost research for the past ten years. She has exhibited and attended residencies across Canada and internationally while receiving funding from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council.

Rina Garcia Chua (she/her/siya) is a creative and critical scholar from the Philippines. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of Net awards, and have been previously published in numerous magazines and journals, some of which are World Literature Today, Asteri(x), g u e s t, The Hopper, The Global South, Elemental, The Polyglot, and more. She is completing her poetry collection, “A Geography of (Un)Natural Hazards” (forthcoming with Sampaguita Press in 2025), which is a visual and poetic response to environmental and social injustice in migrant cultures and liminal spaces.

Joanne Gervais and Shauna Oddleifson collaborated to create works based on their intersecting interest in nostalgia, and their desire to combine their different mediums as a means of further investigating the impact of memory and imagination. They have collaborated on four different animation and augmented reality projects.

Connor MacKinnon’s artistic practice operates through a framework of imagination, potential, and questioning. Examining the unique qualities in objects as specific markers of material culture, his work explores the physical and conceptual reconstruction of objects using generative algorithmic 3D modeling.

Alexandra Bischoff (she/they) is a prairie-born performance artist and writer of settler descent. Her art practice is based in durational performance and installation; labour, precarious living, and the intimacy of archives are some of their primary artistic concerns. Bischoff holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from Concordia University. Currently, Bischoff lives on the ancestral, unceded territories of the Syilx-Okanagan First Nations in Keremeos.

Denise Kenney is Co-Founder of The Eco Art Incubator, a research project designed to foster eco art in the Okanagan valley and Inner Fish Performance Co., a performance company that challenges the boundaries of live performance and cultivates connection and belonging. Denise is a theatre and film professor at UBC Okanagan. She has worked as a theatre performer, creator, and director all over the world and has written, directed and produced narrative and documentary film and television

Dr. Gao Yujie is a media artist, performer, and researcher who uses time as an artistic material to create site-specific performances, interactive installations, and data visualizations. Her generative participatory performance work investigates the materiality of duration and explores the elasticity of space and time in rule-based interactive environments. Her work has been exhibited and performed internationally in Canada, China, and Italy. Dr. Gao holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia in the Digital Arts and Humanities program and is a Sessional Lecturer in Creative and Media Studies.

David and Jorden Doody’s studio practice is highly inclusive and eagerly employs a vast array of traditional fabrication techniques in tandem with new media replication and production technologies. The variety and scope of the materials and methodologies reflect the dynamic encounters and exchanges of a restless, media saturated, cosmopolitan experience. Through mixed method and mixed media assemblage, our research explores a dizzying vista that spills out over and down into an abyss of convergence and endless recombination.

Briar Craig received a BFA from Queen’s University in 1984 and an MFA in printmaking from the University of Alberta in 1987.  He has been teaching in the BFA program at UBCO since 1991. His work has been exhibited around the world in over twenty-five solo and almost four-hundred juried group exhibitions/biennials/triennials.

Fall 2024

Jordan Hill is a Coast Salish (T’Sou-ke Nation) new media artist from Vancouver Island whose work alludes to the blurred line between fact and fiction within contemporary culture. Hill questions how we navigate a spatially manipulated world where truth is incredibly difficult to locate both physically and virtually.

Daniel Barrow uses simple (often antiquated) technologies to present pictorial narratives by merging the methods of cinema, comics, animation, and magic lantern shows. They are best known for adapting comic book narratives to “manual” forms of animation by manipulating drawings on an overhead projector.

Winter 2024

Briar Craig is a Professor in the Department of Creative Studies at UBCO. Briar Craig’s studio practice and art making interests focus almost exclusively in the area of screenprinting.

Puppets Forsaken is a sculpture/sound collaboration between Natali Leduc and David Gifford formed in 2019. Originally inspired by the intonarumori of Futurist Luigi Russolo, author of the manifesto“Art of Noises”(1913), they construct acoustic noise generators, and perform for old growth trees that are no longer there, theory symposiums, live radio and noise shows.They sold two copies of their first album, Greatest Hits. They also entered a telekinesis competition, which they lost.

Judith K. Schwarz is a practicing artist and art educator, nationally recognized for her sculpture and public artwork.  Over a 30-year career she has developed projects through Artist Residencies including the Paris Studio, France, Open Studio Print Shop, Toronto, the McIntyre Ranch in Southern Alberta, Artscape in Sydney Australia and recently, the Leighton Artist Studios at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Miles Thorogood (Assistant Professor, Department of Creative Studies, UBCO) is sound artist and audio engineer at the University of British Columbia. He is the Principal Researcher at the SPIRAL Lab conducting research in the practice and theory of performance and sound arts.

Erin Scott (she/they) is a time-based, interdisciplinary artist who lives on the unceded territory of the Syilx/Okanagan Peoples (Kelowna, BC). Erin is a founding member of Inspired Word Café, a literary and performing arts non-profit.

Katherine Pickering is based in Kelowna, British Columbia, on Okanagan-Syilx territory, where she is a Lecturer in painting and drawing in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. Pickering’s artistic practice investigates the language of abstract painting through assemblages and other sculptural gestures. Pickering received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus in 2006 and a Master in Fine Arts in Studio Art from Concordia University, Montréal, QC in 2009.

Samuel Roy-Bois was born and raised in Quebec City. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Laval University in 1996 and an MFA from Concordia University in 2000. In 2013, he joined the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, where he currently serves as an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. Roy-Bois’ artistic practice encompasses installation, sculpture, and photography, focusing on the built environment, vernacular practices, and art as an emergent phenomenon.

Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation and settler heritage, is an artist, curator and assistant professor in visual arts at UBC Okanagan, Syilx territories. Her work as a curator and artist has been shown nationally with curated exhibitions of note, at Vancouver Art Gallery, Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-2014), at the Museum of Anthropology UBC, Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun and Landmarks 2017 in National Parks across Turtle Island.

Michaela Bridgemohan is an interdisciplinary artist of Jamaican and Australian descent who spent her formative years in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary, and now gratefully resides on Syilx territory, Kelowna, B.C. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of British Columbia—Okanagan and received her BFA in Drawing (with Distinction) from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017.

Mat Glenn is an emerging artist from Kelowna BC, specializing in sculpture, installation, printmaking and digital media.

Lucas Glenn is an emerging artist working in installation, digital media, and drawing. Glenn’s work proposes alternative models for human-nonhuman kinship, speculating in the context of climate collapse.

Shawn Serfas is an Associate Professor of Visual Art and Head of the Creative Studies Department, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. His research interests include contemporary painting concerning relational abstraction, environmental aesthetics, religion, the landscape, as well as issues bordering abstraction and representation.

Fall 2023

Dick Averns is an internationally exhibited sculptor and award-winning artist, Dick Averns has established a vibrant, socially engaged art practice. The content of his mulyi-disciplinary oeuvre recalibrates the commodification of space: probing how mental and physical spaces are valued, bought, sold, exchanged, and contested. Since being deployed as an official war artist with Canadian troops in the Middle East, Averns’ work has toured nationally and been featured in numerous publications. In addition to exhibiting at museums and galleries, he also maintains an active presence through public art.

Donald Lawrence uses combinations of photography, sculpture, drawing, and installation to explore the meeting place of urban and wilderness culture. Several on-water projects, such as the Underwater Pinhole Photography Project (since 1997), Kepler’s Klepper (2011), and the Coastal Cameras Obscura (since 2014), connect Lawrence’s interests in sea kayaking and the ocean environment to a long-standing fascination with early and prephotographic optical apparatuses.

Winter 2023

Wanda Lock’s practice is based in painting and expands into drawing, collage, and installation. Her works often plays with themes of domesticity, nostalgia, and banality. She also has a curatorial practice and has been working as the curator of the Lake Country Art Gallery since 2015.

Austin Clay Willis’s works are inspired by temporary construction, DIY structures, childish forts, East Vancouver alleyways littered with broken cabinets and forgotten bed frames, industrial dumpsters filled with debris from construction sites, and the sorting bins at city recycling dumps. The installation deals with ideas of industrial and personal waste through the collection, recycling, and upcycling of common industrial material. The incorporation of these concepts becomes a source for reimagining and recontextualizing derelict and deteriorating debris. By referencing the processes of building and (inevitably of decaying), the use of found, reclaimed, and recycled material gives opportunity for new life to perhaps forgotten objects.

Hanss Lujan Torres’ research and curatorial practice consider subjugated archives, queer temporalities, and alternative futures in contemporary art. Hanss is the research coordinator for the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. In addition, he has worked with several arts organizations in British Columbia, including Oxygen Art Centre, the Lake Country Art Gallery, Two Rivers Gallery, the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Terrance Houle (Niitsitapi/ Saulteaux) is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary media artist and a member of the Kainai Nation/ Blood Tribe. Involved with Aboriginal communities all his life, he has travelled to reservations throughout North America participating in Powwow dancing along with his native ceremonies.

Artists David & Jorden Doody hosted a walking tour of the Uptown Mural Project. The Uptown Mural Project is an inclusive and educative urban art initiative held in Rutland BC that is supported by the Uptown Rutland Business Association.

JJ Levine is an image-based artist living in Tiohti:áke/Montreal, known for his compelling body of work in portraiture. Represented by ELLEPHANT (Montreal), Levine’s artwork has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally. A major retrospective of his work, JJ Levine: Queer Photographs, was recently on view at the McCord Museum (Montreal).

Lindsay Kirker’s paintings take their cue from the rapid expansion of the urban landscape; surveying a curiosity and fascination with the built environment and a concern for the nature that surrounds us. By utilizing the tools of perspective Kirker reflects on our relationship with nature.

Fall 2022

Julian Yi-Zhong Hou (b. 1980) is a multidisciplinary artist that currently resides in Vernon, on the unceded land of the Syilx peoples of the Okanagan Nation. His work centres around contemporary mystical themes including consciousness, divination, and symbology.

Hannah Rickards’ interdisciplinary practice explores the non-linear dynamic between site, gesture, staging and recording, integrating the language of performance, film, drawing and installation. Rickards has held solo exhibitions at The Polygon Gallery, Modern Art Oxford, the Fogo Island Gallery, Artspeak, The Whitechapel Gallery and The Showroom Gallery, London.

Christine Howard Sandoval is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations and is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC).

Amy Fung, Divya Mehra, Kim Ngugen, Asian Brain Trust was founded in 2014 by Amy Fung (Scorpio), Divya Mehra (Scorpio), and Kim Nguyen (Cancer) as an arts research collective. Together they have lectured and presented in international conferences on the topics of race, power, violence, and performance in contemporary visual arts.

RYAN! Elizabeth Feddersen specializes in creating interactive murals, site-specific installations, and immersive public artworks that invite audience engagement.

Ericka Walker’s print works and site-specific murals subvert the propagandistic function of nostalgia in contemporary culture, disputing the civilizing influence and assumed moral authority of nation building in North America.

Diane Borsato (BFA York University, MFA Concordia University, MA Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) was awarded the Victor Martyn-Lynch Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts, and was twice nominated for the Sobey Art Award.

Lisa Myers (Beausoleil First Nation, born in Oakville, ON, Canada; lives in Port Severn and Toronto, ON, Canada) is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Natalie Ball, “I make art as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed and consumed narrative and identity without absolutes.”

Nicholas Galanin, who’s work offers perspective rooted in connection to land and an intentionally broad engagement with contemporary culture.

Hellen Reed and Hannah Jickling, who’s collaborative projects take shape as public installations, social situations, and events that circulate as photographs, videos, printed matter, and artists’ multiples.

Krista Belle Stewart, who works with video, land, performance, photography, textiles, and sound, drawing out personal and political narratives inherent in archival materials while questioning their articulation in institutional histories.

Derya Akay, who approaches everyday objects, materials and experiences as rich sites of knowledge and meaning.

Brenda Draney, who’s work visually represents the moment when vulnerability is exposed, while encouraging the viewer to reject the notion to dominate the void where horror, poignancy, or powerful moments exist.

Cedric Bomford’s work often focuses on the power dynamics established by constructed spaces and takes the form of large-scale rambling ad hoc architectural installations.

Tsema Igharas is an interdisciplinary artist and a member of the Tahltan First Nation. She uses Potlatch methodology to create conceptual artwork and teachings influenced by her mentorship in Northwest Coast Formline Design at K’saan (2005/06), her studies in visual culture and time in the mountains.

Mia Feuer is an interdisciplinary sculptor born in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She received her MFA from the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Ian Johnston’s current work Fine Line has switched attention from consumer culture to the obsessive-compulsive behavior that appear to epitomize it.

Patrik Andersson, Associate Professor in Critical + Cultural Studies. He teaches contemporary art and ideas which are informed by his freelance activities as an art critic and curator with interests ranging from conceptual art to design disciplines.

Colleen Heslin, explores medium crossovers between painting, sculpture, fibers and photography.

Liz Magor, one of Canada’s most important contemporary sculptors.

Myfanwy MacLeod, who’s work is trademarked by her wry sense of humour, and her layered referencing of consumer and popular culture..

Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, artist, filmmaker, writer, and designer who explores the resonance of genetic cultural memory through the mystical and the mundane.

Carol Sawyer, a visual artist and singer who works with photography, installation, video, performance, and improvised music.

Brian Jungen, a significant Canadian sculptor and multidisciplinary artist who simultaneously explore traditional and contemporary approaches to art making.

Christian Nicolay, his diverse body of work employs a wide range of media and techniques including drawing, painting, sculpture, video, sound, performance and installation.

Paul Wong, a media-maestro making art for site-specific spaces and screens of all sizes.

James Nizam, who’s art practice investigates photography within an expanded field of operations that consider the relationship between performance, sculpture, and architecture.

Jennifer Stillwell who primarily works with sculpture and installation.

David Kang, who’s work plays with languages – visual, written, and spoken to seek out moments of miscegenation and mistranslation

Althea Thauberger, who’s film/video and performance projects often invoke provocative reflections of social, political, institutional, and aesthetic power relations.

Adam Kuby, who’s work engages the built and natural worlds to foster a sense of connectedness in our increasingly fractured environments.

Raymond Boisjoly works with photographic and video images, text and objects.

Elizabeth McIntosh’s work reveals itself through the multiplicity of visual interpretations and understandings, shying away from aesthetic resolution.

Sarah  Burwash, who works in narrative drawing, watercolor, and illustrational drawing, she is also active in video, animation, ‘zines and artist book works.

Damian Moppett, multi-media artist using photography, sculpture, drawing, video and painting.