2025 Nominators
To ensure that the Scotiabank Photography Award is a Canada-wide peer driven search, nominators have been selected from a national sweep of experts in the fields of contemporary art, inclusive of art gallery directors, curators, practicing artists, professors, writers and critics.
They each nominate one candidate. The nominees will be adjudicated by three jurors with Edward Burtynsky as jury chair.
Melissa Bennett
Melissa Bennett is Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario. She received an MA in Art History and Graduate Diploma in Curatorial Studies at York University and a BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. She has taught contemporary Canadian art history at the Ontario College of Art and Design, in addition to giving regular public lectures and university guest lectures on various topics of contemporary art and artists. Her current projects, in addition to the internationally-touring retrospective Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch, include solo exhibitions of the works of Greg Staats, and a retrospective-in-planning for Camille Turner. She has curated recent major solo exhibitions by Duane Linklater, Jan Wade (co-curated with Siobhan McCracken Nixon for AGH), Melissa General, Alex Jacobs-Blum, Michèle Pearson Clarke, Nathan Eugene Carson, and Kareem-Anthony Ferreira with his father Roger Ferreira. She has written or edited over 15 art exhibition catalogues, and has been recognized for her exhibition work in the annual awards of Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries (GOG), most recently with the Exhibition of the Year, Art Publication and Major Curatorial Writing, 2024, for Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch.
Nominated Greg Staats
Mary Bradshaw
Mary Bradshaw (Settler/Scottish descent) is the Director of Visual Arts at the Yukon Arts Centre, where uplifting a greater diversity of art and communicating these stories in modern and accessible ways is the heart of our work. Her enthusiasm for, and training in, art education and museum studies has led to various cultural leadership and curatorial roles in northern Canada including the Yukon Prize, 2022 Arctic Arts Summit, Yukon Permanent Art Collection, and a past member of Sobey Art Award Curatorial Jury. She has an MA in Museum/Gallery Studies from the University of Newcastle, UK and interned at Tate Britain.
Nominated Andreas Rutkauskas
Ray Cronin
Ray Cronin is a writer and curator living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the traditional unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq and the Wəlastəkewiyik (Maliseet) Peoples. In 2023 he was named the Curator of Canadian Art at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.
From 2001 to 2015 he worked at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as Curator and as Director and CEO. He is the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award and the author of fourteen books on Canadian art, including Alan Syliboy: Culture is Our Medicine, (Gaspereau Press) Our Maud: The Life, Art and Legacy of Maud Lewis (Art Gallery of Nova Scotia) Halifax Art & Artists: An Illustrated History (Art Canada Institute), and Nova Scotia Folk Art: An Illustrated Guide (Nimbus Publishing).
He is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Bachelor of Fine Arts), the University of Windsor (Master of Fine Arts) and the Getty Museum Leadership Institute.
Nominated Thaddeus Holownia
David Diviney
David Diviney is the chief curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. His interest in the expanded histories and legacies of conceptual art has led to several exhibitions, such as David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East (2011), The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978 (2016), and Close to the edge... The Work of Gerald Ferguson (2018). Upcoming projects include Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II and Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler: No More Boring Art. His writing on the art of the 1960s and ’70s, contemporary art, and visual culture has been published widely in journals and catalogues. He recently edited Exclusive Memory: A Perceptual History of the Future, a compendium of descriptive, speculative prose and text-image works by Tom Sherman.
Nominated Ned Pratt
Pamela Edmonds
Pamela Edmonds is a curator and writer based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She began her curatorial career in the Maritimes in late 1990s, holding positions at the Anna Leonowens Gallery (NSCAD University), Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, and the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, among others. Beyond Nova Scotia, she has served as a curator at A Space Gallery in Toronto, the Art Gallery of Peterborough, and the Thames Art Gallery in Chatham, Ontario, and was Senior Curator at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton.
A dedicated advocate for cultural equity in curatorial practices, Edmonds has contributed to initiatives such as Third Space Art Projects, a collective focused on intercultural programming, and the inaugural Black Curators Forum in 2019. She has authored numerous exhibition publications, with her writing featured in Canadian Art, Prefix Photo, Arts Atlantic, M.I.C.E. Magazine, RACAR, and C Magazine.
Edmonds holds a BFA in Studio Art and Art History and an MA in Art History from Concordia University in Montreal. She is currently the Director and Curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery.
Nominated Dawit L. Petros
Muriel Kahwagi
Muriel N. Kahwagi is a writer and curator, working primarily across publishing and programming. Her research is centered on the politics of collecting and archiving the performative; and the act of listening as a form of preservation in and of itself. In 2023, she was the TD Curatorial Fellow at Art Windsor-Essex, and a curator as part of Vtape’s Curatorial Incubator, v.19. Her writing has been published in Sociology Lens, Artists Alliance Inc., and Rusted Radishes. She is currently the Associate Curator at Contemporary Calgary, and a member of the board of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center (CFMDC).
Nominated Nour Bishouty
Charo Neville
Charo Neville is Curator at the Kamloops Art Gallery, where she has developed exhibitions and publications since 2011. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree in Critical Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia in 2006. Neville has held positions as Curatorial Assistant at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Associate Director at Catriona Jeffries Gallery and Interim Curator/Director at Artspeak. Neville also served on the Board of Directors at the Western Front artist run centre from 2006 to 2010. Her curatorial practice supports artists who engage with the social and political potential of art. Through projects like the outdoor video projection biennale Luminocity, which Neville launched in Kamloops in 2014, she is interested in creating opportunities for public art that shift our relationship with urban spaces and expand access to contemporary art. Neville has contributed to publications such as Fillip, Yishu, West Coast Line and Blackflash and participated on visual art juries, including the 2013 Sobey Art Award.
Nominated Paul Wong
Anne-Marie St Jean Aubre
Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre is the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator of Québec and Canadian Contemporary Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to joining this team, she worked for almost seven years as Contemporary Art Curator at the Musée d’art de Joliette, where she was in charge of programming the exhibitions in contemporary art, organizing the circulation of exhibitions in Canada and internationally, and the performance and dance residencies. In that position, she has realized projects with artists such as Kapwani Kiwanga, Shannon Bool, Monique Régimbald-Zeiber, Jin-me Yoon and Chloë Lum and Yannick Desranleau. She has contributed to diverse magazines and publications, including ESSE, Ciel Variable, Revue IF, Espace and JEU and worked as Independant Curator. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts and French Literature from the University of Ottawa and a Master’s degree in Art History from the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her research explores how identities are constructed at the intersections of several discourses, including culture, gender, sex, race.
Nominated Emmanuelle Léonard
Georgiana Uhlyarik
Georgiana Uhlyarik is Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, and co-lead of the Indigenous+ Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada. Prior to joining the AGO, Uhlyarik held roles at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, The Power Plant, Mercer Union and the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation. An award-winning curator and author, Uhlyarik works collaboratively with artists, scholars and curators from across the Americas and Europe with a focus on women artists. Projects include: Jinny Yu: at once; Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody (The Broad, Los Angeles); Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO; Magnetic North: Imagining Canada in Painting 1910-1940 (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt); Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak; Rita Letendre: Fire & Light; Georgia O’Keeffe (Tate Modern), Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry (Jewish Museum, NY); Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic (Terra Foundation for American Art and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo); and Introducing Suzy Lake. In 2023, she was awarded the Toronto Book Award for co-editing Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO (Goose Lane Editions). Uhlyarik is adjunct faculty in Art, York University and University of Toronto. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.
Nominated Barbara Astman