2025 Jurors
World-renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky is the chair of a panel of three expert jury members for the 2025 Scotiabank Photography Award. This year’s jury includes: Stéphane Aquin Mireille Eagan and Andrea Kunard.
Edward Burtynsky
Edward Burtynsky is regarded as one of the world's most accomplished contemporary photographers. His remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes represent over 40 years of his dedication to bearing witness to the impact of human industry on the planet. Burtynsky's photographs are included in the collections of over 80 major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid; the Tate Modern in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.
Mireille Eagan
Mireille Eagan is Curator of Contemporary Art at The Rooms. Previously, she was curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, PEI, where she was a founding member of that province’s artist-run collective This Town Is Small. Eagan has curated more than 100 exhibitions, individually or as co-curator, including the nationally touring retrospective Mary Pratt and Mary Pratt: This Little Painting at the National Gallery of Canada (that institution’s first solo exhibition of an Atlantic Canadian woman artist), as well as the Terra Nova Art Foundation’s Collateral Project at the 55th Venice Biennale. She received a Digital Publishing Awards’ Gold Medal in 2018 and the Critical Eye Award from VANL-CARFAC in 2017 and 2022. Eagan was the project lead, editor and author for “Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador,” winner of the 2022 Atlantic Book Awards Best Atlantic-Published Book and Honourable Mention for Outstanding Research from the Canadian Museums Association and Melva J. Dwyer Award. “Future Possible” was subsequently the theme for an Atlantic-wide arts conference, for which Eagan was keynote speaker. She currently holds the position of President of the Atlantic Provinces Art Gallery Association. Eagan has written for publications including Border Crossings, C Magazine, Canadian Art, The Globe and Mail, and Inuit Art Quarterly and has lectured nationally and internationally.
Andrea Kunard
Senior Curator, Photographs, National Gallery of Canada
Andrea Kunard curates, researches and publishes on historical and contemporary photography. Exhibitions include Shifting Sites (2000), Susan McEachern: Structures of Meaning (2004), Steeling the Gaze (2008), Clash: Conflict and Its Consequences (2012), Michel Campeau: Icons of Obsolescence (2013), Photography in Canada 1960-2000 (2017); Anthropocene (2018) with Sophie Hackett and Urs Stahel; Moyra Davey: The Faithful (2020), and Kan Azuma: A Matter of Place (2024) with Assistant Curator Euijung McGillis. Kunard has taught photo history, Canadian art and cultural theory at Carleton and Queen's Universities. She has also published in the National Gallery of Canada Review, (U of T Press), The Journal of Canadian Art History, the International Journal of Canadian Studies, and Early Popular Visual Culture.
Stéphane Aquin
Museum Director
Stéphane Aquin became Director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) in November 2020, after having served as Chief Curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. from 2015 to 2020. Prior to that, Aquin was Curator of Contemporary art at the MMFA (1998 to 2015), and an art critic for Voir magazine (1992 to 1998). Throughout his career as curator, he has organized numerous exhibitions of Canadian and international artists. As the MMFA’s Director, he is now turning his focus to leading the institution into the next chapter of its long history.