2025 Nominees
The 2025 Scotiabank Photography Award Nominees represent the result of an annual Canada-wide search for excellence. The Scotiabank Photography Award is peer-reviewed at every stage of the nomination and adjudication process and nominees must meet eligibility criteria.
Barbara Astman
Barbara Astman belongs to a visionary group of artists who have continued to radicalize visual culture since the early 1970s by defining new ways of seeing. Over four decades, she has explored a wide range of photo-based media and produced work, which has received national and international recognition. She is represented in important public, corporate and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Art Gallery of Ontario, Deutche Bank, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
As a Professor Emerita at OCAD University, Toronto, she has been instrumental in inspiring generations of emerging artists. Active in the Toronto arts community, Astman has served on numerous boards and advisory committees. In 2024, Astman was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Nominated by Georgiana Uhlyarik
Nour Bishouty
Nour Bishouty is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, sculpture, works on paper,digital images, and writing. Broadly concerned with gaps in archival memory and the Western production of knowledge and fantasy, her practice explores notions of permission and articulation in cultural narratives overwritten by dispossession and displacement. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Art Jameel (’24), La biennale de Québec (’24); Cooper Cole (’24) Gallery44 (’22); GTA21, MOCA (’21) all in Toronto; Darat AlFunun, Amman (2017); Casa Arabe, Madrid (2016); Mosaic Rooms, London (’15); and Beirut Art Centre (2014). Forthcoming exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial (’25) and Museo del Chopo, Mexico City (solo, ’25).
Nominated by Muriel Kahwagi
Thaddeus Holownia
For over fifty years, Thaddeus Holownia has approached his art form with a gentle but persistent nudge to be mindful of our imprint on the land. He is known for his long-term projects, transformed over periods, cycles, and seasons, in which he researches the natural processes of life and the inevitability of change. A keen observer of the environment, his work expresses a deep concern for nature. His reflections are poetic and subtle, meant to call our attention to how we are transformed by ideas, compromises, and ethics. He returns to a subject over years, even decades, and creates a photographic register of the transformation.
He is a Research Professor in the Pierre Lassonde School of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University, where he taught for over four decades.
Nominated by Ray Cronin
Emmanuelle Léonard
Born in 1971 in Montreal where she resides and practices, Emmanuelle Léonard holds a bachelor’s degree from Concordia University (1997) and a master’s degree from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2002). The artist has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, notably at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, OPTICA gallery, VOX gallery, Mois de la Photo, Montreal, at Le Fresnoy, France, Kunsthaus Dresden and at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Germany, in South Korea during the Daegu Photo Biennale; the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto at Mercer Union and at Gallery 44, Toronto; Glassbox, Paris; L’OEil de poisson, Quebec City, at Centre VU, Quebec City, etc. In 2019, she presented a solo exhibition at Galerie de l'UQAM, under the curation of Louise Déry, accompanied by a catalogue. In 2023 The Deployment was presented as a solo exhibition at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris.
She did artist residencies at the Villa Arson, France, the Christoph Merian Foundation, Switzerland, and at the Finnish Artist Residency Foundation. In 2018, she completed an artist residency in Bogota, Colombia, and one in Resolute Bay in the High Arctic, with the Canadian Forces Artists Program. She was awarded the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2005. In 2012, she exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto as part of the International Grange Prize for which she was a nominee. In 2020, she was one of three finalists for the Scotiabank Photography Award. She is represented by the Ellephant gallery, Montreal.
Her work is exhibited at the Collection Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Art Gallery of Ontario Collection, Collection Loto-Québec, Collection Desjardins d’oeuvres d'art, Collection d’oeuvres d’art de l’UQAM, Collection Caisse de dépôt du Québec, Collection de la Ville de Montréal, Collection Prêt d’oeuvres d’art, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Nominated by Anne-Marie St Jean Aubre
Dawit L. Petros
Dawit L. Petros is an artist and educator whose works span photographic installations, moving images, sculptural objects, and sound. Petros holds an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, and a BFA in History from the University of Saskatchewan. He also completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.
Nominated by Pamela Edmonds
Ned Pratt
Ned Pratt (b. 1964) lives on the island of Newfoundland, where he was born and has spent most of his life. He holds a BFA in photography from NSCAD University (1990) and a BA in art history from Acadia University (1986).
He began his career as an editorial photographer but quickly moved on to his own practice as a freelancer. In that capacity, he concentrated on food, industrial and environmental portraiture as well as keeping a relationship with magazine and newspaper work.
In 1991 he began showing his work professionally with Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s, NL. The earliest works were a series of intimate black and white silver gelatin portraits of disappearing local businesses and the people who owned them. Later, it was the combination of architecture and the environment that finally made Pratt focus on a direction. In 2001 he took a seminal photograph Red Shed, St. Vincent’s, a large format photograph, 48 × 63″, in an edition of one. Its strong centered composition would remain at the heart of much of his work.
Ned Pratt mounted his first solo exhibition of large format photographs in 2008 in a solo exhibition titled New Photography with Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s, NL. Throughout the 2000s, solo exhibitions were mounted with Christina Parker Gallery and in 2016 Ned Pratt was invited into Nicholas Metivier Gallery as a gallery artist.
His photography has been exhibited at the former Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, PREFIX Photo, the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, and in Oh, Canada at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (touring from 2012–16).
In 2018, Pratt’s first touring survey exhibition, One Wave, curated by Mireille Eagan, opened at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (September 2018 – February 2019). The exhibition was accompanied with a major publication and toured to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, NB (September 2019 – February 2020), The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (October 2020 – February 2021) and to Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery, Sarnia ON (March 4 – September 10, 2022).
Pratt holds the 2017 Large Year Award from Visual Artists Newfoundland and Labrador for Excellence in the Visual Arts. His work has been written about in various publications, including Canadian Art, CBC Arts, Momus, and Mason Journal. Pratt’s photographs are held in major public and corporate collections across Canada, the United States, Europe, and Australia. He is represented by Christina Parker Gallery in St. John’s, and Nicholas Metivier Gallery in Toronto.
Nominated by David Diviney
Andreas Rutkauskas
Andreas Rutkauskas’s practice relies heavily on fieldwork, and he is most excited by the production phase of any project, which sees him experimenting with a range of photographic techniques on the land, in a forest, or on a mountainside.
Rutkauskas was the inaugural artist in residence at the Grantham Foundation for the Arts and the Environment. He has been a Research Fellow with the Canadian Photography
Institute and a finalist for the Gabriele Basilico International Prize in Architecture and Landscape. His work is held in private and public collections, including the Canadian War Museum, the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery and the Kelowna Art Gallery. Andreas Rutkauskas teaches photography at UBC’s Okanagan campus, on unceded syilx territory.
Nominated by Mary Bradshaw
Greg Staats
Greg Staats is Skarù:reˀ [Tuscarora] / Kanien’kehá:ka [Mohawk], Hodinöhsö:ni’. b. 1963, Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. A Toronto based artist whose Hodinöhsö:ni restorative aesthetic employs mnemonics of condolence, articulated in visual forms that hold body and place including: oral transmission, text works, embodied wampum, photographic, sculpture, installation and video. Staats exists in the liminal space of transistion inherent with the body, land, and memory. Staats' practice conceptualizes Land as monument embodied within a continuum of relational placemaking with his on-reserve lived experience, trauma, and the explorations of ceremonial orality.
Staats’ lens based language documents cycles of return towards a complete Onkwehón:we neha [our original ways] positionality, reciprocity and worldview.
Staats, active as an artist since 1981, studied Applied Photography at Sheridan College. He is the recipient of the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. Staats’ works are held in public, private, and corporate collections. Residencies include: AGO, Open Studio, the Banff Centre, AGYU, TSV, and University of Waterloo Longhouse Labs Staats has been awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Inaugural Indigenous Artist Award (2021), and the 2024 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Nominated by Melissa Bennett
Paul Wong
Paul Wong b. 1954 Prince Rupert, BC, Lives in Vancouver, BC
A pioneer of Canadian lens-based art, Paul Wong has created ground-breaking, large-scale public art installations that challenge stereotypes and our notions of belonging. With a career spanning over five decades, Wong has continuously pushed the boundaries of storytelling and photographic convention while embracing new technology. He is an award-winning artist and curator and founder of several artist-run organizations, and organizer of events, festivals, conferences, and public interventions since the 1970s. National recognition includes: Reel Asian Fire Horse Award (2024); Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts (2016); and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art (2005). He is currently UBC Artist in Residence (2024-2025).
Nominated by Charo Neville