A showcase of new work by the finalists of the Philip B. Lind Prize for Emerging Artists. Established in 2016, this honour is awarded biennially to an emerging BC-based artist working in mediums of photography, film, or video. Artists are nominated for the prize by arts professionals from institutions, organisations, and post-secondary programs across the province. In 2024, thanks to a generous donation from the Lind family, the prize amount increased to $25,000, making it one of the country’s largest accolades dedicated to supporting visual artists.

This year's exhibiting finalists are: Bagua Artist Association, Alejandro A. Barbosa, Dana Qaddah, Pegah Tabassinejad, and Ximena Velázquez. They were selected from a longlist of more than 60 nominees by a panel of esteemed international jurors: critically acclaimed artist Stan Douglas; Candice Hopkins, executive director of Forge Project in Taghkanic, New York; and Susanne Pfeffer, director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany.

The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on January 21, 2027. Previous Lind Prize winners are: Casey Wei (2025), Simranpreet Anand (2023), Charlotte Zhang (2021), Laura Gildner (2020), Jessica Johnson (2019), Christopher Lacroix (2018), Marisa Kriangwiwat Holmes (2017), and Vilhelm Sundin (2016).

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$1M endowment transforms Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize into Canada’s largest award for emerging artists

About the artists

Bagua Artist Association is a two-person artist collective founded in 2018, consisting of Katharine Meng-Yuan Yi (b. 1991, Beijing) and Sean Cao (b. 1992, Tianjin). Yi holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia, and Cao holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Rooted in migration and deeply embedded in Vancouver’s Chinatown, the collective’s multidisciplinary practice integrates lens-based approaches within a research-driven and socially engaged framework. Their name, Bagua 八卦 – a double entendre that invokes both the ancestral cosmological trigrams of Chinese divination and modern slang for gossip – encapsulates their interest in cultural traditions and expressions, folk art, pop media, social phenomena, and the everyday.

Bagua has recently exhibited in Dream Factory: Cantopop Mandopop 1980s-2000, Chinese Canadian Museum, Vancouver (2025-2026); The Prop House: A Collection of One Million Objects, Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver (2024); Curator's Sauna, Canton-sardine, Vancouver (2023); and Through the Riptides As a Canoe, Hexiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen (2023). Their public works have been commissioned by the City of Vancouver and the City of Richmond. Their community-engaged work has been covered by outlets including the Vancouver Sun, Global News, Omni Television, and CBC.

Alejandro A. Barbosa (b. 1986, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a queer Latinx visual artist, educator and curator whose practice focuses on lens-based media and investigates the flaws of representation, queer lived experience, and the politics of looking. They hold an MFA in Visual Art from the University of British Columbia, and a BFA in Studio Arts (Photography) from Concordia University. They are a non-regular faculty member at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and a sessional lecturer at the University of British Columbia.

Barbosa’s curatorial work includes Valentina Cao’s "Hallar Incidir Ceder Brotar" at Pionera Galería (Pinamar, Buenos Aires) and, in 2023, Richelle Greabeiel’s "metsänpeitto" at Gallery 881 (Vancouver, BC). In 2025, Barbosa presented their projects I Got Us the Moon at The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver; and Unsavoury Witness at SUM Gallery, Vancouver. Their work has been exhibited and collected in Canada, Argentina, Peru, and the United States. Barbosa is currently developing a project on the politics of silence in relation to queer memorialization and homophobic violence for which they received an Individual Arts Award from the BC Arts Council.

Dana Qaddah (b. 1996, Beirut, Lebanon) is an interdisciplinary artist and organiser whose work centres themes of building from, and through, colonial legacies, environmental and economic deterioration, and the condition of being abstracted from the sense of self and place.

Qaddah is currently pursuing an MFA at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (New York) and holds a BFA from Emily Carr University (Vancouver). Recent exhibitions include Never One Thing Alone at Gallery TPW (Toronto) and Another Green World at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Vancouver). Qaddah recently published Disclosure, towards liberation with the support of Peripheral Review and the Burnaby Art Gallery. Notable collections include Burnaby Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

Pegah Tabassinejad (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Tabassinejad's practice primarily revolves around the construction of digital and live performances, film, and video installations. Her practice acts as an interrogation of themes that include the impact of digital and surveillance culture on identity, virtual and physical presences and absences, and the forces that structure and shape the movement and perception of people and their bodies in private and public space.

Tabassinejad holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Simon Fraser University and a BA in Stage Direction from the Tehran University of Art. She also studied Visual Art at Azad University in Tehran. She was the recipient of the Phil Lind Multicultural Artist Residency at UBC in 2023–2024. Her projects have been shown locally and internationally. Her latest eight-channel video installation, Entropic Fields of Displacement, premiered in Vancouver at VIVO Media Arts and in Amsterdam at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2024, and won the DFA Award in digital storytelling.

Ximena Velázquez (b. 1989, Villahermosa, Mexico) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the body, image, sound, and textiles to explore identity, desire, and memory from a queer perspective that moves across geographic territories. Velázquez has presented her work in independent cultural spaces and galleries across Latin America, Europe, and Canada, including The Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City; and Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond. Her pieces have also been part of screenings in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Chile, and Mexico. Additionally, she produces events and workshops as La PosmoBaby that support Latin American and dissident artistic communities.

Velázquez’s work emerges from emotion and embodiment. It is rooted in autoethnographic research and guided by queerness, a celebration of the Global South, and a commitment to community knowledge-sharing. It is built upon performance, digital media, sound, textiles, and DJing as languages to imagine futures where identity and belonging are reconfigured through a postmodern lens.

Curated by Elliott Ramsey

Endowed by The Lind Family in memory of Philip B. Lind

Banner Image, left to right: Bagua Artist Association (Sean Cao + Katharine Meng-Yuan Yi), Ximena Velázquez, Dana Qaddah, Alejandro A. Barbosa, Pegah Tabassinejad. Photo by Alison Boulier.