2020 Selection Committee
Melanie Colosimo, Director/Curator, Anna Leonowens Gallery Systems, NSCAD University
Melanie Colosimo is the Director/Curator of the Anna Leonowens Gallery Systems at NSCAD University where she facilitates over 200 exhibitions and events annually by NSCAD visiting artists and graduating students. She has organized exhibitions and projects by artists such as Robert Frank, Ray Fenwick, Melanie Authier, Carol Condé & Karl Beveridge, Dara Birnbaum, Patrick Cruz, and Meryl McMaster amongst others. In 2016 she was responsible for developing and piloting the Art Bar+Projects: NSCAD’s venue for performance art, events and happenings. Other notable projects include the bi-annual indoor/outdoor exhibition //RESPONSIVE: International Light Art Projects Halifax and the newly revived NSCAD Lithography Workshop: Contemporary Editions. Colosimo is also a visual artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries internationally and across Canada at including AKA Gallery (SK) the Art Gallery of Windsor (ON), Grenfell Art Gallery (NL) and Mount Saint Vincent University Gallery (NS), the Guangdong Museum of Art, (Guangzhou) and the He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen. She was long listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2017.
Francisco-Fernando Granados, artist and educator
Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Toronto-based artist and educator. His multidisciplinary critical practice spans drawing, performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites since 2005. These venues include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, Art Gallery of York University, NuitBlanche (Toronto), Vancouver Art Gallery, MAI—Montreal, arts interculturels, Darling Foundry (Montreal), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Art Gallery of Peterborough, MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie), Neutral Ground (Regina), Third Space (St. John) Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts at Ramapo College (NJ), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and Theatre Academy/University of the Arts (Helsinki). Awards and honours include grants from the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Governor General’s Silver Medal for academic achievement upon graduating from Emily Carr University in 2010. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012 and currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University.
Marie-Eve Beaupré, Curator, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, QC
Marie-Eve Beaupré is the curator of the collection at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Since 2016, she has curated Pictures for an Exhibition, an evolving cycle of exhibitions based on works from the collection. From 2014 to 2016, she held the position of Curator of Contemporary Quebec and Canadian Art (from 1945 to the present) at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). Over the past fifteen years, she has been Curator of Contemporary Art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and a member of the jury for the Sobey Art Award (2014), published over 45 texts on art and worked on several publication projects. She worked as a project manager for the Galerie de l’UQAM from 2004 to 2012 and has conducted inventories of the studios of Guido Molinari, Edmund Alleyn and Betty Goodwin, among others.
cheyanne turions, Curator, SFU Galleries
cheyanne turions is a curator, cultural worker and writer based in Vancouver. She holds a master’s degree in Visual Studies from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto. Her work positions exhibitions and criticism as social gestures, where she responds to artistic practices by linking aesthetics and politics through discourse. Recent projects include Relations of Responsibility at Audain Gallery (Vancouver, BC), which featured works by Raven Chacon, Gabi Dao and Lou Sheppard; a solo exhibition of the work of Nep Sidhu at the Esker Foundation (Calgary, AB) entitled Divine of Form, Formed in the Divine (Medicine for a Nightmare); and Life of a Craphead’s Entertaining Every Second, co-curated with Su-Ying Lee, at AKA (Saskatoon, SK). Recent writing projects include Unceded Territory: Historicizing Vancouver with Sepake Angiama and Vincent Tao, published in …And Other Such Stories, the catalogue of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Currently, turions is the Curator at SFU Galleries and sits on the Board of Directors at 221A. She has previously held positions at Art Metropole, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, SBC galerie d’art contemporain, Trinity Square Video and the Vancouver Art Gallery.