With thanks to the RBC Foundation for their ongoing, generous support, the RMG is pleased to welcome Ioana Dragomir, Vanessa Godden, and Niya Abdullahi to the RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program in 2024-2025. In the coming year, these three artists will develop exciting new projects in our residency studio, then present that work in solo exhibitions at the RMG. We look forward to sharing their work with you!
Ioana Dragomir
Winter/Spring
Residency Dates: February 26 – June 9, 2024
Exhibition Dates: June 15 – August 11, 2024
Ioana Dragomir is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Montreal, Canada. She holds an Honours BA in studio practice from the University of Waterloo, an MA in Art History and Curatorial Studies from Western University, and is currently an MFA candidate at Concordia University. Her artistic practice combines her interest in writing, literary analysis, and curation with drawing, printmaking, textiles, ceramics, and installation. In particular, poetic methodologies of juxtaposition, metaphor, and slippage are important to her practice.
Vanessa Godden
Summer/Fall
Residency Dates: June 17 – September 29, 2024
Exhibition Dates: October 8 – December 1, 2024
Vanessa Godden is a queer Indo-Caribbean and Euro-Canadian artist, educator, and curator. They are a sessional lecturer at universities across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area and a cofounder of the curatorial collective Diasporic Futurisms. Godden holds a PhD from the Victorian College of the Arts (Melbourne, Australia; 2020), an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, USA; 2014), and a BFA from the University of Houston (Houston, USA; 2012). Their transdisciplinary practice explores how the relationship between the body, personal histories, and geographic space can be conveyed in multi-sensory performances, videos, and installations.
Niya Abdullahi
Fall/Winter
Residency Dates: October 21 – December 22, 2024 and January 6 – February 16, 2025
Exhibition Dates: February 22 – April 20, 2025
Niya Abdullahi is a multidisciplinary artist, technologist and the founder of @Habasooda, a collective dedicated to sharing the richness of the Muslim experience. Themes of identity, liberation and resistance inform her work in film which have screened at TIFF Next Wave, Nuit Blanche Saskatoon, Breakthroughs Film Festival, and Gallery 44. She was a 2021 Hot Docs Accelerator Fellow and sits on the Advisory committee for the Nia Centre of the Arts BLACKOUT project and the City of Toronto’s ArtworksTO program. Her art is personal, often drawing from her experiences as a first-generation Harari woman raised on Turtle Island, to tell stories through analogue and digital video, photography, and poetry.
Learn more about the residency program here.
