TOAF60 Judges

Flavio Belli

Murray & Marvelle Koffler Founder's Award

Flavio Belli is an artist, curator, art consultant and art collector with a broad range of experience in the Canadian cultural community. He is the current Chair of the Al Green Sculpture Studio and School in Toronto. His artworks have been shown in over 50 solo and group exhibitions and form part of public and private collections including the National Gallery of Canada. Flavio served on the Board of the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition for 10 years and during that time was also a member of the Sculpture Selection Committee for the McMurtry Gardens of Justice. He was appointed by the Governor in Council to the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board in Ottawa from 2005 to 2012. Flavio was Director and Curator of the Carrier Gallery in the Italian community’s Columbus Centre from 1990 to 2005 and during that time he volunteered as an on-camera Arts Reporter on “Toronto Living”, for Rogers Television.

Neil Brochu

Mayor's Purchase Award

Neil Brochu is the curator of the City of Toronto Art Collection, which is displayed in public buildings across the city.  The collection began in the 1850s and has since grown to include over 3000 art works. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Guelph and a Masters of Museum Studies from the University of Toronto. A keen student of local history, material culture and fine art, Neil has worked with the City's art and artifact collections since 2004. He has steered numerous curatorial projects at the City's history museums; most recently Toronto through the Eyes of Women Artists – an exhibition at the Market Gallery exploring depictions of Toronto by women artists drawn from the City's collection.

Joséphine Denis

The Power Plant Emerging Artist Award
Artscape Emerging Artist Award

Joséphine Denis was born in Haiti, raised between Port-au-Prince and New York, and currently resides in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She is a curator and writer whose practice addresses the creation and narration of BIPOC spaces. Denis is an advocate of Black diasporic art, critical engagement, and institutional transformations through which artists and public can co-create affective networks of radical change. She is currently the TD Curator of Education and Outreach Fellow at the Power Plant in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her writing has been published in RELATIONS: Diaspora and Painting (Phi, Hirmer, 2020), Ada x, and the upcoming issue of Brooklyn Rail. Denis previously worked at Serpentine Galleries, London, UK; Faurschou Foundation, Beijing, China; Lehmann Maupin, New York, USA: and SBC Gallery of Contemporary art and Places des Arts, in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. 

Daniel Faria

Best of Painting Award
Painting - Honourable Mention

Daniel Faria received a B.F.A from the University of Waterloo in 1999 and an M.A. in Art History from York University in 2003. He has worked at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, interned at Mercer Union before going on to become director of Monte Clark Gallery Toronto for several years. In October 2011, Daniel Faria opened his eponymous gallery on St. Helens Ave. Gallery artists Faria represents include: Shannon Bool, Douglas Coupland, Iris Häussler, Mark Lewis, Kristine Moran and Derek Liddington.

Maria Hupfield

Best of 3D Works Award

Maria Hupfield is a Toronto-based transdisciplinary artist working in performance art. She is an inaugural Borderlands Fellow (2020-22) with the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics, The New School in New York, and the Center for the Imagination, Arizona State University. and was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist (2018), Her solo Nine Years Towards The Sun at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, (2019-20) focused on display strategies for performance art as living culture and follows The One Who Keeps on Giving, a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, her first major touring institutional solo exhibition in Canada. Her work has shown in NYC at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016) and travelled nationally in Canada with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14); recent performances include the National Gallery of Canada. Hupfield is an off-rez Anishinaabe of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, the Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts, and Director / Lead Artist of the Indigenous Creation Studio at the University of Toronto in Mississauga. Together with her husband Jason Lujan she co-owns Native Art Department International.

Nancy Jacobi

Best of Paper Award

Nancy Jacobi is the Founder of The Japanese Paper Place in Toronto, a company she began 40 years ago to encourage creativity through the special qualities of washi.-Japanese paper. In that quest she has collaborated with many arts organizations like The Ontario Society of Artists, The Japan Foundation, Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Propeller Gallery, OCADU, and York University to present exhibitions, workshops and special events like the World Washi Summit in 2008 which involved hundreds of artists and 40 venues. The collection of the Japanese Paper Place includes works on washi by prominent Canadian artists, many of whom have taken and still take part in the TOAF. This year, she was honoured to receive the Foreign Minister’s Commendation Award, given by the Consul-General of Japan in Toronto.

Anique Jordan

Best of Photography & Digital Media Award
Honourable Mention - Photography & Digital Media

Anique Jordan is an artist, writer and curator who looks to answer the question of possibility in everything she creates. As an artist, Jordan works in photography, sculpture and performance often employing the theory of hauntology to challenge historical or dominant narratives and creating, what she calls, impossible images. Jordan has lectured on her artistic and community engaged curatorial practice as a 2017 Canada Seminar speaker at Harvard University and in numerous institutions across the Americas. In 2017 she co-curated the exhibition Every. Now. Then: Reframing Nationhood at the Art Gallery of Ontario. As an artist, she has exhibited in galleries such as Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Art Gallery of Guelph, Doris McCarthy Gallery, the Wedge Collection, Art Gallery of Windsor, Gallery 44, and Y+ Contemporary. She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships and in 2017 was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist of the Year award. Jordan completed a residency at the University of the West Indies (Trinidad and Tobago), was the 2018-19 Artist-in-Residence at Osgoode Hall Law School and the most recent recipient of the Hnatyshyn Emerging Artist award. Her work appears in public and private collections nationally.

Tiana Koffler Boyman

Murray & Marvelle Koffler Founder's Award

Tiana Koffler Boyman is Co-Chair of the Koffler Centre of the Arts, a prominent Toronto based Jewish contemporary cultural organization. The Koffler presents a cross-disciplinary arts program that promotes inter-cultural dialogue through a diverse range of programs in literature, theatre, visual arts and public engagement. Tiana has served the Koffler Centre in many capacities since 2001 including as a member of the Governance, Nominations, Fundraising, and Strategic Planning Committees as well as the Koffler Gallery Advisory Board.

Ms. Koffler Boyman is involved in the philanthropic community for over 30 years providing her focus on health, science, and arts related organizations. She has sat on numerous boards of charitable organizations including the Canadian Friends of the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel, the Board of Sterling Hall School (creating with her husband, Marc Boyman, the Boyman Student Art Gallery), and the Marvelle Koffler Breast Centre at the Mount Sinai Hospital. Through her continued association with the Marvelle Koffler Breast Centre, Ms. Koffler Boyman remains as an advisor and currently is Co-Chair of the Breast Cancer Philanthropic Advisory Board as well as the Donor Relations and Stewardship Committee at Mt Sinai Hospital. Tiana Koffler Boyman is the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Jennifer Rudder

Catherine Bratty Award for Best of Art Fair

Jennifer Rudder is an independent curator and Assistant Professor of Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCADU. Jennifer has worked in the Visual Arts in Toronto, Canada as Scheduler of Touring Exhibitions at the Royal Ontario Museum, Director of YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Executive Director of the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition and Editor of MIX magazine. She served as contributing editor for the art publications Canadian Art, Fuse and Lola. Rudder was Editor of the monograph Ordinary Marvel: Susan Kealey, published by YYZ Books in 2003. She graduated from the Masters of Visual Studies: Curatorial Studies program at the University of Toronto in 2010. Her graduate exhibition NATURAL HISTORY showed at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto and toured to Gallery Stratford in 2010. As an independent, Rudder has curated numerous exhibitions including Crime and Punishment for the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario which toured to Gallery 44 in Toronto and the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon.

In 2014, her exhibition Glam North: Doris McCarthy and her New Contemporaries, opened at the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. The exhibition Le Rêve aux Loups: New Work by Mary Anne Barkhouse, was shown at the Koffler Gallery, Toronto and toured to the Esker Foundation, in Calgary, and to the Foreman Gallery, at Bishop’s University, in Sherbrooke, QC. Rudder taught at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in the Criticism and Curatorial Department from 2010 to 2018.

Simone Elizabeth Saunders

Best of Craft & Design Award
Best of Jewellery Award 
Ceramics Excellence Award

Simone Elizabeth Saunders (she/her) is a textile artist based in Calgary, Alberta. She recently received a B.F.A. from the Alberta University of Arts. Her textiles are hand tufted in the medium of rug-making. Saunders explores themes of the diaspora, ancestorship and Black womanhood. Her colourful textiles highlight motifs and iconography from her Jamaican heritage and engage with socio-cultural factors reclaiming power from oppressive ideologies.

Simone was named the National Winner for the Bank of Montreal's 1st Art Competition for 2020. Simone has been internationally featured, select media credits include: Create Magazine, Canada's House&Home Magazine, CBC Arts, CBCq, Boooooom, Uppercase Magazine, Pom-Pom Magazine (England), FairLady (South Africa), Surface Design Journal, Colossal and DesignMilk (USA). Most recent exhibitions include the Alberta Craft Council for the Arts and Art Museum University of Toronto. www.simoneelizabeth.ca, @simoneelizabethtextiles

Karen Tam

Best of 2D Works Award
Honourable Mention - 2D Works

Karen Tam is a Montréal artist whose research focuses on the constructions and imaginations of ‘ethnic’ spaces through installations in which she recreates Chinese restaurants, karaoke lounges, opium dens, curio shops and other sites of cultural encounters. Since 2000, she has exhibited her work and participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and China, including Victoria and Albert Museum, He Xiangning Art Museum, and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts du Québec, and Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada. Tam was a finalist for the 2017 Prix Louis-Comtois, a finalist for the 2016 Prix en art actuel from the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec, and long-listed for the 2010 and 2016 Sobey Art Awards.

Tam holds a MFA in Sculpture (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and a PhD in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths, University of London). Her work is in museum and corporate collections like the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Collection Hydro-Québec, Collection Royal Bank of Canada, Microsoft Art Collection, and in private collections in Canada, United States, and United Kingdom. She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau in Montreal.

Stanzie Tooth

Best of Student Award
Most Innovative Use of Material Award

Stanzie Tooth is a Canadian artist who works primarily in painting, her practice also diverges into sculpture, collage and installation.
Tooth holds a BFA from the OCAD University (2007) and an MFA from the University of Ottawa (2015). Stanzie was the 2015 recipient of the Joseph Plaskett Award for Painting, through which she spent time traveling and creating new work, completing residencies in Berlin and Iceland, as well as self-directed research in Greece and Italy. Her work is included in the collections of The Royal Bank, Toronto Dominion Bank, A.T. Tolley Collection and numerous private collections. She currently lives and works in Toronto. She is represented by General Hardware Contemporary in Toronto.