Sobey Art Award – Jury
All 2023 nominations have been reviewed by the curatorial jury panel, chaired by the National Gallery of Canada’s Director, Curatorial Initiatives, Jonathan Shaughnessy.
The panel is composed of one distinguished representative from each of Canada’s five regions: the Atlantic Provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies and the North, and the West Coast and Yukon, and also includes one international juror. They review all nominations and establish the long and short lists as well as the winner of the award.
CHAIR
Jonathan Shaughnessy
Director, Curatorial Initiatives
National Gallery of Canada
Photo: Sara Gouda
ATLANTIC
Pamela Edmonds
Director and Curator
Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax
Pamela Edmonds is a curator and writer who began her career in the arts in K’jipuktuk/Halifax in the late 1990s. She has held positions at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, the Anna Leonowens Gallery (at NSCAD University), and the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, to name a few. In Eastern Canada, she worked most recently as Senior Curator at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario.
Informed by critical dialogues related to cross-cultural curating and social practice, her work often explores the impact of Black diasporic cultures in Canadian art. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University in Montréal and is the current Director and Curator at Dalhousie University Art Gallery.
Photo: Courtesy of Eve-Lyne Beaudry
QUEBEC
Eve-Lyne Beaudry
Curator of Contemporary Art
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
Eve-Lyne Beaudry has degrees in Art History and Museology, and has been the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec since 2010. Her work focuses primarily on the study and dissemination of contemporary art within a museum context, with a particular interest in Quebec art practices from the 1960s to the present day.
Since 2003, she has collaborated on numerous exhibitions and publications. Artists include Jennifer Angus, Ed Pien, Diane Landry, Marie-Josée Laframboise, Gisele Amantea, Stéphane Gilot, Irene F. Whittome, Alfred Pellan, Marcel Barbeau, Serge Lemoyne and many collectives, for institutions such as the Galerie de l’UQAM; EXPRESSION, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe; the Musée régional de Rimouski; Vox, centre de l’image contemporaine; and the Musée d’art de Joliette, where she was Curator of Contemporary Art from 2006 to 2010.
Photo: Courtesy of Wanda Nanibush
ONTARIO
Wanda Nanibush
Curator, Indigenous Art
Toronto, Ontario
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-Kee curator based in Toronto, and image and word warrior, from Beausoleil First Nation. She is also the founder of aabaakwad (“it clears after a storm”): a yearly gathering of international Indigenous artists, curators and writers, which most recently took place at the Venice Biennale, in support of the Samí Pavilion.
Her latest exhibition is Robert Houle: Red is Beautiful, on view at the NMAI Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., until June 2, 2024. Nanibush has also published widely on Indigenous art, politics and history. Her most recent publication, Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO, covers decolonization and Indigenization work at the AGO.
Photo: Courtesy of Haema Sivanesan
PRAIRIES AND NORTH
Haema Sivanesan
Director, Leighton Studios and Program Partnerships
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff
Haema Sivanesan is a curator, researcher and art writer with extensive experience in Canada and abroad. She has held leadership and curatorial positions at public art galleries, artist-run centres and festivals, both nationally and internationally.
Her research typically focuses on Asian and Asian-diasporic transnational and transcultural art histories. In 2018, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation (New York) for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship, and in 2016 received a multi-year Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation (Hong Kong) for the project In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art and Social Practice (2022). She is the newly appointed Director, Leighton Studios and Program Partnerships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Hyland
WEST COAST AND YUKON
Matthew Hyland
Director
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
Matthew Hyland is Executive Director of the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), Vancouver, where his recent projects include Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My, Tanya Lukin Linklater: My mind is with the weather and Abbas Akhavan: cast for a folly (all 2022). Prior to his appointment at CAG in 2020, he served as Director/Curator at Oakville Galleries for ten years, organizing exhibitions with artists such as Valérie Blass, Sara Cwynar, Lotus Laurie Kang, Gabriel Kuri, Tau Lewis, Sojourner Truth Parsons, and Judith Scott.
Photo: Liz Ligon/Courtesy the High Line
INTERNATIONAL
Cecilia Alemani
Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art
High Line, New York City
Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program for the High Line in New York.
Internationally, in 2022 Alemani was curator for the 59th International Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia with the theme, The Milk of Dreams. In 2018, she served as Artistic Director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires, and in 2017, she curated the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.