Current students
Miriam Cummings
M.F.A Interdisciplinary Studies
Miriam Cummings is an interdisciplinary artist whose poetry, playwriting, and performance articulates emotional nuance. Based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) for 14 years, Miriam co-founded Hopegrown Productions. With Hopegrown, she has developed, produced, and toured 4 new plays within Canada and internationally, including her award-winning solo show: The One. Miriam has taught acting and devising to hundreds of adults independently and as an Instructor with Concordia’s Theatre Department. Her curiosity about psychological safety within creative processes led Miriam to facilitate the Actor Safety Research Lab: a two-year project which applied trauma-informed practices to actor training. In partnership with Drama Therapist Anne Eitzen, Miriam guided 6 multidisciplinary artists through a devising process that drew on Moment Work (Tectonic Theater Project, NYC), Laban Movement Analysis, and Linklater Voice. Miriam and Anne demonstrated their approach at the 2022 ATHE Conference in Detroit, MI.
Ronan Fraser
M.F.A Interdisciplinary Studies
Ronan Fraser (They/He/She) is a Scottish interdisciplinary artist whose work dips across digital media, live performance, written worlds, and visual art. With a HND in Acting and Performance and a BA in Dance and Drama, they are a trained performer, maker, and facilitator interested in exploring surreal or absurd versions of worlds we almost know. After graduating in 2021, they collaborated with Moot Point Collective and Framework Theatre as an animator and director before moving to Kelowna to pursue their MFA in Creative Writing. Their research investigates a theory of recognition and relative identity as a counter to fatalism, currently taking the form of a novel. The story they are shaping is about how we create histories and how we tell stories themselves, even if they aren’t always true ones.
Annie furman
M.F.A Interdisciplinary Studies
Annie Furman (she/her) is a theatre maker and environmental educator whose most frequent co-workers/performance partners are horses, pigeons, and sturgeon. Her current creative research explores applications of multispecies storytelling in environmental education curriculums. Recent work includes the short play “Duet” for Climate Change Theatre Action 2023 and contributions to (Be)longing: Tiny Stories for Radical Futures.
Caolan Leander
M.F.A Creative Writing
Caolan Leander is a writer and graduate student exploring the interstices of material culture and hauntological ethics. He holds a BA in Creative Writing with a double minor in Art History and Film Studies from Concordia University. Merging his background in storytelling and interdisciplinary analysis with a zeal for the environmental humanities, Leander’s current research focuses on the posthuman entanglements of technology, ecological futures, and deep time. His creative project will examine processes of ruination and re/worlding in the temporal landscapes of rural Quebec.
Tom Leveen
M.F.A Creative Writing
Tom is a novelist and graphic novel writer, as well as a former early literacy specialist, with more than ten years of experience in public library work and 22 years of experience as an actor and director in live theatre. He is originally from the state of Arizona, where he spent 16 years as an artistic director of an independent theatre company and a mixed-use arts venue.
Justin Madu
M.F.A Creative Writing
Justin graduated with an English BA from UNBC in his hometown of Prince George back in 2020. He spent a year as a radio and web journalist before deciding to pursue an MFA. He has also worked as a part time stand-up comedian, which has heavily influenced his writing style.
Claire Miller-Harder
M.F.A Creative Writing
Claire Miller-Harder is a writer and MFA student from Abbotsford, BC. In 2021, she graduated with a BA in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Her current research interests include folklore, Mennonite literature, and gothic fiction. You can find her work in Room magazine and filling Station. Most recently, her poem “Dishwashing” was listed as a notable poem in Best Canadian Poetry 2020.
Eviah Shimshon Obadia
M.F.A Interdisciplinary Studies
Eviah Shimshon Obadia is an interdisciplinary artist and activist who’s work uses the practice of self-advocacy soft activism to engage the communities their intersectional identity as a queer identified trans-non-binary, autistic neurodiverse, mixed person of colour ties them to and defines them by. Their research explores how this practice can be used to envision a more optimistic future for those who have been systemically disadvantaged and historically prevented from accessing popular creative modes of seeing themselves in such futures. Specifically, they interrogate this question through the disciplines of Creative Writing and Digital Media Art, within the framework of the field of Creative Activism. They do this with a focus on narrative storytelling and audio media in a community-based application. Obadia approaches this from the perspective of intersectional minority identity points of view such as their own. Thus their research operates as a social justice act of racial imagination.
Andisha Sabri
M.F.A Creative Writing
Andisha Sabri is an Australian writer who has also lived in Israel, England, and the Czech Republic. She now lives in Canada where she is working on a historical novel set around the turn-of-the-century in England. Her current work borrows from both the social satire and gothic themes of her nineteenth-century literary influences, and explores how a child is socialized to conform to the expectations of her social class and gender as well as how a more critical view of imperialism impacts how we interpret the past. Andisha also has an MA in English and a BA in English and Ancient History. She has always been interested in exploring how our past, present, and future are interpreted in fiction and her research is often preoccupied with liminal spaces between genres, between eras, and between the real and the unreal. In addition to prose fiction she also writes poetry on both similar themes and more personal subject matter.
Roland Samuel Ugo
M.F.A Visual Arts
Roland Samuel Ugo graduated from Olabisi Onabanjo University in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in fine and applied arts, specializing in sculpture. While in school, he won the 2018/2019 best class representative award for academic excellence, leadership, and discipline. Roland has executed several sculptures and murals across various states in Nigeria, including working with a team to create the traditional stage setting for the popular Nollywood movie King of thieves (ògúndábède) by Femi Adebayo, working directly with Adeleke Adewale. “As a sculptor, I love writing and creating sculptural pieces that talk about traditional African settings because it gives me a glimpse of history unfolding. Interpreting the African traditional lifestyle is a niche I have carved for myself because it reminds me of the strength and will of the African people, often connects me to our way of life, and creates a flow into their peaceful and creative lifestyle.”
Jessie Emilie Schmode
M.F.A Visual Arts
Jessie Emilie Schmode graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2022 and is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus. Her creative research confronts personal experience with mental health, body image issues, and religious sexual shame. She captures intimate moments of honest vulnerability by revealing subjects in exposed physical and mental states, often deep in thought or relaxation alone or in relation to other bodies. Using oil paint as the main medium, Jessie emphasizes the artistic and social historical significance of the male gaze and reclining nude through the creation of her own bared, sexualized gaze. Depicting raw, unabashed poses of subjects in relatable settings she creates connection, while often obscuring the scene by placing objects in positions meant to provoke questions of the viewer.
Victoria Verge
M.F.A Visual Arts
Victoria Verge is a multi-medium artist whose current practice is based in sculpture, installation, and painting. She obtained her BFA in Visual Arts from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2015. Her creative endeavours are deeply informed by her personal history. Guided by the recurrent theme of relocation, stemming from her father’s military service, Verge’s work is actively navigating the multifaceted construct of ‘home’. Her upbringing, marked by frequent moves during her formative years, has afforded her a familiarity with the emotional dynamics of displacement and the persistent yearning for stability. Verge’s work examines this nuanced interplay intrinsic to housing and relocation. Employing a diverse range of materials and techniques, she captures the tension between emotional vulnerability and resilience, thereby illuminating the intricate relationship between human sentiment, the spaces we inhabit, and the communities that we build.
Alumni
Michaela Bridgemohan
M.F.A. Visual Arts
Michaela Bridgemohan is a multidisciplinary artist of Jamaican and Australian descent who grew up in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary, located on the traditional territories of Treaty 7 Land. After receiving her BFA (with Distinction) from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017, Bridgemohan continued her artistic research confronting criticism and concepts of Black biracial subjectivity. Her work engages personal mythology as a way to access cultural memory and examines Caribbean folklore, horror, and the Transatlantic slave trade, to navigate racial ambiguity. By using her body as a duppy, a malevolent entity, she attempts to mimic occupying two worlds at once. These shape-shifters inhabit a liminal, in-between space that pronounces bodily shedding, transformation, and subjugation as to confront ideas of shame, identity, racism, cultural erasure, and trauma. By blending photography, sculpture, and drawing, she seeks to contextualize the Black biracial woman’s experience.
Xiao Xuan / Sherry Huang
M.F.A Creative Writing
Xiao Xuan / Sherry Huang is a poet. In her work, she considers love, (peri-) performativity, and intimate traces. She believes poetry is both a technology for tenderness as well as a critically rigorous discipline, something with world-making potential. Her first full-length publication, Love Speech, (Metatron Press 2019,) is an intersection between poetry and epistolary auto-theory.
Her roots are connected to the city of Shanghai, where she was born, as well as to various artist-run venues around a small-town in Ontario, where she grew up as an immigrant-settler. The contours of these places extend into her poetic practice, informing the way she treats poetry simultaneously as a tangible art object and as a happening with a time and place. As such, she values independent, ephemeral, and experimental ways of producing creative culture (tapes, zines, broadsides, shows,) alongside traditional practices of printing and publishing.
Nasim Pirhadi
M.F.A Visual Arts
Nasim Pirhadi is a graduate of painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran (BA, 2013) and Azad University (MA 2017). She makes works that are mainly a compilation of spatial installations, video art, sound, and drawing. She is interested in creating interactive experiences to facilitate narratives in her works. Her research-oriented practice engages with feminist approaches on female identity and subjectivity and gender performativity. Another theme in her works is the instability in society. She has presented at festivals and artist residencies across Iran and internationally including Germany, Austria, Greece, the USA, England and Sri Lanka. Nasim won the selected award of the third contemporary drawing Festival in Iran in 2011 and has been shortlisted as eight finalists of the Behnam Bakhtiar Award in Monaco, in 2017. nasimpirhadi.wixsite.com/myportfolio
Larissa Piva
M.F.A Creative Writing
Larissa is an avid traveller, sports enthusiast, woodworker, amateur photographer, and food fanatic. Originally from the Okanagan, she is excited to return for a new adventure.
Larissa completed her undergrad at the University of Vicotria in 2018, obtaining a double major in Writing and Sociology with a minor in Italian Studies. Afterward, she began training for a career in the Human Services sector and took a hiatus from writing. While that career path was rewarding in many ways, Larissa found herself fulfilled most when she returned to writing. During her graduate program at UBCO, Larissa will focus her research on stories written from multiple perspectives. She finds tales shown in multiple lenses fascinating and believes literary fiction could utilize this more often. Larissa also aspires to explore blending literary and genre fiction an interesting topic to delve into while completing her Master’s program.
Natalie Rice
M.F.A Creative Writing
Natalie Rice is a poet. She is interested in creating a poetics that generates a non-linguistic knowing of the natural world and does this challengingly and paradoxically through the use of language. Her current work operates within the narrative of ecological crisis, specific to the Okanagan valley. Natalie holds a BA in Creative Writing from The University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She has been published by Gaspereau Press: Devil’s Whim Chapbook Series (26 Visions of Light, 2020), The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, Event Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, The Malahat Review, Contemporary Verse Two, and Lake: Journal of Arts and Environment.
Andrea Routley
M.F.A Creative Writing
Andrea Routley is the author of two books of fiction, Midden (forthcoming, 2022) and Jane and the Whales (Caitlin Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction. Her fiction and non-fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Fiddlehead Review, Room, and Geist, and in 2020 she was shortlisted for the Malahat Review Novella Prize. Her research-creation thesis, a novel titled Field Guide to Bats and Other Damage, seeks to discover how queerness and disability might be envisioned as central to ecological narratives of survival, and the implications of such a revision in our understanding of–and relationship to–nature. Andrea was born and raised on BC’s south coast, primarily in Kwantlen territory, in Fort Langley.
Umar Turaki
M.F.A Creative Writing
Umar Turaki is a writer and filmmaker from Jos, Nigeria who now calls Kelowna home. His thesis, a novel, aims to explore masculinity (toxic and otherwise), familial and sibling relationships (a recurring theme in his work), the interaction between identity and disability, climate change, and how these intersect against the backdrop of history and historicity. His first novel is SUCH A BEAUTIFUL THING TO BEHOLD (Little A, 2022). His work can be found on his website, www.umarturaki.com.
Mandy Wallace
M.F.A Creative Writing
Mandy Wallace is a poet and fiction writer from California with work in Plath Poetry Project, Writer’s Digest, and Hobart after Dark. She shares writing resources through her website, Write or Die (mandywallace.com), which grew to 60k readers in its first three months and was named one of the 100 Best Websites for Writers. It’s also where she taught her signature course, Blog Your Way to a Writing Career, to beginning writers—one of whom became a NYT-bestselling author. Her workbook for new writers, Landing Your First Publication, is a textbook in college creative writing courses and includes writing prompts, worksheets, and submissions strategies. In 2021, she was selected for a competitive poetry mentorship through Association of Writers and Writing Programs and is an MFA candidate at University British Columbia Okanagan. She has an honors BA in English from CSUB and studied German language and literature at Universität Tübingen in Germany.
