News Releases - 2011
Seven artists share $105,000 in Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards
Ottawa, June 22, 2011 – Theatre producer
Naomi Campbell, visual artist Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo, dancer and choreographer Yvonne Chartrand, media artist Diane Morin, interdisciplinary artist Nadine Sures, composer Paul Steenhuisen and writer Duncan Thornton are the winners of the 2011 Victor Martyn Lynch‑Staunton Awards administered by the Canada Council for the Arts.
The annual awards, worth $15,000 each, recognize outstanding
mid-career artists in the seven disciplines funded by the Canada Council: theatre, visual arts, dance, media arts, integrated arts, music, and writing and publishing. The prizes were created using funds from a generous bequest made by the late Victor Martyn Lynch‑Staunton to the Canada Council. The winners are chosen from the pool of applicants from the Grants to Professional Artists programs during the 2010‑11 fiscal year.
The work of these mid-career artists generates enjoyment, lifetime learning opportunities and contributes to a vibrant culture for all Canadians.
Download images of the winners and their works.
Naomi Campbell – Theatre
Naomi Campbell is an award-winning producer of over 60 new Canadian performance works with various Toronto companies and numerous celebrated independent artists. She began as a performer with the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa in the 1980s and has since worked in most aspects of theatre production. She has produced national and international tours, was Industry Series Producer Magnetic North Theatre Festival from 2008 to 2010 and is presently the Company Manager for the 2011 Luminato Festival in Toronto, where she now lives.
Naomi Campbell has received Dora Mavor Moore Awards for set design and production, a 2005 Vital People Award from the Toronto Community Foundation, the 2009 Leonard McHardy and John Harvey Award and the 2010 Mallory Gilbert Leadership Award for her contributions to the national theatre community.
Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo – Visual Arts
Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo’s work is engaged with collective and personal memories of loss and violence that marked El Salvador during the civil war in the 1980s. His work and research delves into Latin American mythology, folklore and aspects of North American iconography derived from pop culture, all intertwined through a personal lexicon of imagery that is constantly being developed and revised over time.
Mr. Castillo holds a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University and is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design. He has had exhibitions in venues such as the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Galerie Push in Montreal, the International Print Center in New York, and the 2007 Beyond Western New York Biennial in Buffalo. He lives and works in Montreal.
Yvonne Chartrand – Dance
Yvonne Chartrand is a contemporary choreographer and dancer as well as a national award-winning master Métis jigger and instructor. Her ancestors come from the Métis community of St. Laurent, Manitoba. She is Artistic Director of the Vancouver based contemporary and Métis dance company, Compaigni V’ni Dansi where the Louis Riel Métis Dancers perform traditional Métis dance and selected contemporary works.
In 1999, Ms. Chartrand created Marguerite, a solo performance honouring Métis women. The company has since produced A Poet And Prophet; Gabriel’s Crossing and The Crossing, celebrating the first annual Louis Riel Day in 2006. The Crossing, produced in collaboration with Métis writer Maria Campbell, inspired two community projects including performances at the Batoche National Historical Site of Canada. In 2008, the Batoche project received a Tourism Saskatchewan award for creative excellence. Ms. Chartrand’s most recent solo contemporary work Stories from St. Laurent premiered in Vancouver, where she currently resides. Cooking it up Métis is in development and is set to premiere in March 2012.
Diane Morin – Media Arts
Diane Morin has been creating installations since 1998, joining her work with kinetic art and new media by using a wide range of material and expressions. She works with light, sound, drawings and robotics to create site-specific installations that experiment with kinetic, sonic and luminous effects. She uses various techniques to preserve traces of these art events: recording their traces on photographic paper, drawing their repetitive movements on walls, letting them cast their own shadows on surfaces, amplifying and recording the sound they produced while moving.
Her work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Montreal and elsewhere in Canada, Sweden and Finland. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Open Media from Concordia University. Originally from Kamouraska, she lives and works in Montreal.
Nadine Sures – Integrated Arts
Nadine Sures is an interdisciplinary artist and performer currently living and working in Montreal and Beirut. After obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alberta and a brief collaboration with Les Wacs physical theatre troupe in Paris, she moved to Montreal where she co-founded the Quebec Interdisciplinary Arts Network with a group of local artists and cultural workers. Her own creations have been presented in Canada, Europe and the Middle East.
She has been showcased in the solo The Wild Girl of Champagne by Deborah Dunn in Montreal, Halifax, Regina and Minneapolis. In 2009 she presented her critically acclaimed interactive performance and video installation Stitches and Bitches to a vast audience in Beirut. Her latest solo Vita Brevis was produced at the M.A.I. in Montreal in 2010. She is currently working on the research and creation of her newest interdisciplinary performance project The Bossara in collaboration with Italian performance artist Romina De Novellis.
Paul Steenhuisen – Music
Vancouver composer Paul Steenhuisen writes music for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, voice and orchestra, including pieces with live/fixed electronics. Mr. Steenhuisen has been a laureate of numerous national and international awards, including four in the CBC Young Composers Competition, seven in the PROCAN/SOCAN Competition, first prize in the Vancouver New Music Competition, and the Governor General of Canada Gold Medal as the outstanding student in all faculties (UBC, 1990).
Mr. Steenhuisen was Composer in Residence with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Alberta until 2007. In early 2009, Mr. Steenhuisen’s book Sonic Mosaics: Conversations with Composers was published by the
U of A Press. He also contributes all audio content and programming to the Hyposurface interactive installation project based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More information available at: www.artmusicpromotion.org.
Duncan Thornton – Writing and Publishing
Duncan Thornton’s first book, Kalifax (Coteau, 1999), a Young Adult fantasy novel inspired by the search for the Northwest Passage, was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Children’s Literature - Text. He described Kalifax as the beginning of an attempt to create an imaginary world that was still essentially Canadian. Other books set in that world followed: Captain Jenny (2001) and
The Star-Glass (2003). In 2008, Annick Press published Thornton’s Shadow-Town, a fantasy novel of a darker kind which he calls a
“bad-dream version” of childhood holidays in Manitoba’s Carberry Hills.
Although Thornton dropped out of school after grade eight, at the age of 20 he entered the University of Saskatchewan as a mature student. He now lives in Winnipeg, where he graduated from the University of Winnipeg with a Gold Medal in honours History.
General information
The role of the Canada Council for the Arts is to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. To fulfill this mandate, the Council offers a broad range of grants and services to professional Canadian artists and arts organizations in dance, integrated art, media arts, music, theatre, visual arts, and writing and publishing. It also promotes public awareness of the arts through its communications, research and arts promotion activities.