Learn more about the 2021 artists in residence through their own words

The Ontario Heritage Trust is committed to respecting how artists choose to identify themselves and recognizes these as deeply personal decisions. These artist bios are written by the artists in their own words.

Shahrzad Amin – interdisciplinary artist, Oakville

Shahrzad Amin is an Iranian-Canadian award-winning interdisciplinary artist with more than 12 years of diverse experiences as a sculptor, multimedia and installation artist, model designer, stop-motion artist and potter. Her interest in fundamental social issues – such as democracy, human rights, equality and migration – has informed an art practice that examines social and cultural issues through different artistic mediums. Her body of work includes filmmaking, architectural elements and the use of language. Amin obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Tehran University of Art in 2010 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from OCAD University in 2020. She has three public sculptures, more than 20 group exhibitions, and three solo sculpture exhibitions in her professional background.

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Aaron Jones – visual and multimedia artist, Pickering

Aaron Jones is a multi-disciplinary visual artist based in Toronto. His practice surrounds ideas of self-reflection and character-building as a way of finding peace. Often using found images, videos and lens-based media, Jones works with different forms of collage to build characters and spaces that reflect on the nuances of his own upbringing, as well as current life and the environment. Jones graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from OCAD University in 2018 and is an active, co-founding member of the BAU Collective. His work is included in the collections of the Ryerson Image Centre, Wedge Curatorial Projects and numerous private collections. He was awarded the 2020 Gattuso Prize for his solo exhibition titled “Closed Fist, Open Palm” at Zalucky Contemporary. His recent shows include exhibitions at the Doris McCarthy Gallery (2020), NIA Centre for the Arts (2019) and Mercer Union (2018). Jones’ upcoming exhibitions in 2021 include a site-specific project at Howard365 for Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver and video projection for Nuit Blanche in Toronto.

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Cassandra Myers – poet and writer, Toronto

Cassandra Myers (they/she) is a queer, trans, crip, mad South Asian-Italian poet, performer, educator and social worker from Toronto. She has performed poetry across the United States and Canada. Her work primarily focuses on performance poetry within histories of oral storytelling, incorporating sonics, choreography and embodied form. Recently, Myers has begun moving towards print for her poetry. Her work often critiques systems of power and incorporates movies and television, facts about the natural world and uncommon histories. A Master of Social Work candidate at York University, Myers is also a crisis intervention counsellor and youth worker, specializing in care for sexual violence survivors and the QTBIPOC community. She is also a Pink Door Fellow and her work can be found in publications such as Overheard, The Shortline Review, UncommonYOU and elsewhere. Her debut collection, “Smash the Headlights,” is forthcoming from Write Bloody North Publishing in 2022.

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Alize Zorlutuna – interdisciplinary artist and curator, Toronto

Alize Zorlutuna is a queer interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator whose work explores relationships to land, culture and the more-than-human, while thinking through settler-colonialism, history and solidarity. Having moved between Tkarón:to (Toronto) and Anatolia (present-day Turkey) both physically and culturally throughout her life has informed her practice – making her attentive to spaces of encounter. She enlists poetics and a sensitivity to materials in works that span video, installation, printed matter, performance and sculpture. The body and its sensorial capacities are central to her work. Zorlutuna has presented her work across Turtle Island (North America) and internationally. She is currently based in Tkarón:to.

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Luce Dumont – visual artist and printmaker, Saint-Fabien, Quebec

Luce Dumont, visual artist and printmaker, lives near Rimouski, Quebec. Formerly trained as a botanist, she holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts (from Laval University), and a master’s short program in the study of the artistic practice (from the University of Quebec at Rimouski). Driven by a sense of challenge and curiosity, she resorts to representations of nature as metaphors of human realities. Her practice in drawing and etching embodies her ecological as well as esthetical considerations, and focuses on such notions as duality between life/death, and silence/revolt. Her work has been presented in solo or group exhibitions in Quebec, Manitoba, New Brunswick and Scotland. www.lucedumont.com

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Sameer Farooq – interdisciplinary artist, Toronto

Sameer Farooq is a Canadian artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. His interdisciplinary practice investigates tactics of representation and enlists the tools of sculpture, installation, photography, documentary filmmaking, writing and the methods of anthropology to explore various forms of collecting, interpreting and displaying. The result is often a collaborative work that counterbalances how dominant institutions speak about our lives: a counter-archive, new addition to a museum collection, or a buried history made visible. With exhibitions at institutions around the world – including the Aga Khan Museum (Toronto), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), The British Library (London), the Institute of Islamic Culture (Paris), the Lilley Museum (Reno), the Vicki Myhren Gallery (Denver), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Maquis Projects, (Izmir), Trankat (Tétouan, Morocco), the Sol Koffler Gallery (Providence), Artellewa (Cairo), and Sanat Limani (Istanbul) – Farooq has received several awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Europe Media Fund, as well the President’s Scholarship at the Rhode Island School of Design. Reviews and essays dedicated to his work have been included in Canadian Art, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, Hyperallergic, Artnet, The Huffington Post, C Magazine, and others. He was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017 and 2018. www.sameerfarooq.com

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Gabrielle Moser – art historian, writer and curator, Toronto

Gabrielle Moser is an art historian, writer and curator. She is the author of Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019) and her writing appears in publications such as Artforum, Canadian Art, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography and Culture, and Prefix Photo. Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, the Ryerson Image Centre, and the University of British Columbia, and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017. A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, Moser holds a PhD from the art history and visual culture program at York University in Toronto and is an Assistant Professor in art history at OCAD University. gabriellemoser.com

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Gita Hashemi – artist, curator and writer, Toronto

Artist, curator and writer Gita Hashemi’s experimental transmedia practice spans over 30 years, encompassing work that draws on visual, media, performance, site-specific and live art strategies. Exploring social relations and the interconnections of language and culture, Hashemi’s work centres on marginalized histories and contemporary politics. She has received many art grants, and her work has been exhibited at festivals, galleries and museums nationally and internationally, reviewed extensively, and won local and international awards. Most recently, her project Grounding, produced during an Open Space Lab residency at the Carlton University Art Gallery, was selected as the best exhibition of the year in 2017 by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. http://gitaha.net

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Please note: Terms such as "queer," “crip” and “mad” originated as pejoratives, but are being reclaimed by some members of LGBTQ+ communities, persons with disabilities and by people with mental illnesses. The Trust respects and supports these deeply personal decisions.