Media Art Creation Grant

Charles Street Video is proud to present the participants of our first Media Art Creation Grant. CSV is proud to launch this pilot project in an effort to support our member media art practices.

We are pleased to announce our two grant recipients, Yasmine Mathurin and Jawa El Khash.

Recipients:
Yasmine Mathurin
Yasmine Mathurin is an emerging filmmaker and award-winning podcast producer. In 2011 she was selected to take part in the United Nations Human Rights Fellowship program for People of African-decent. This became the starting point for her to pursue her career in journalism and filmmaking. She previously worked as an associate producer with CBC Original Podcast, where she produced the audio-fiction podcast The Shadows which won Gold in the fiction category at the 2019 Canadian Digital Publishing Awards. She also produced the CBC podcast Tai Asks Why, which won a Webby people’s choice award in 2019.

She’s an alumni of the 2019 Netflix-Banff Media Diverse Voices Fellowship, the UnionDocs Feature documentary lab, the DOC Breakthrough Program and the Hot Docs Accelerator lab. She’s currently in production on her first feature documentary film with Sienna Films and the support of the CBC documentary Channel and the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Fund. She's also in development on a short hybrid-fiction film supported by the Canada Art Council.

Jawa El Khash
Jawa El Khash is an artist and researcher. Her work blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, using technology such as virtual reality and analogue holography to investigate the paradoxes and obscurities of the everyday nature of living in the world. She uses the contradictions inherent in the spatial mediums as a starting point to build environments that act as portals that investigate how we experience agriculture, architecture, archeology, and lepidopterology. The marriage of technology and art is the backbone of her everyday research, process and thinking, through studying optics, 3D and VR technology to creating replicas of reality.

We also thank the esteemed jurors, Ayo Tsalithaba, Cara Mumford, and Aram Collier, who dedicated their time and efforts.

Jurors:
Ayo Tsalithaba
Ayo Tsalithaba is a visual artist originally from Ghana and Lesotho. Their primary mediums include film, photography and illustration. They enjoy exploring issues of identity, specifically societal expectations of race, gender and sexuality through their films. Ayo has been featured in Huffington Post Canada, The Fader, The Kit, TFO, the University of Toronto magazine, Munch Magazine and they have made music videos with Tika, Bernice, Desiire and Emma Frank. They have screened their films and appeared on panels at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, Free, University of Toronto, George Brown, the Revue Cinema, Xpace Cultural Centre, and more.

Cara Mumford
Cara Mumford is a Métis filmmaker, writer, and collaborative artist from Alberta, living in Peterborough, Ontario since 2010. Since becoming a filmmaker in 2006, Cara’s short films have screened regularly at the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, and throughout Canada, in addition to festivals in the United States, Finland, and Australia. She has received industry training through Telefilm Canada (2010/11), Bell Media’s Diverse Screenwriters Program (2012), and the imagineNATIVE Film Festival’s Story Lab (2014) and Producer Mini-Lab (2015). Cara completed one year of development for her futuristic project, The Red Card, with the National Film Board’s Digital Studio (2016/17) and created a short film set in that world through the 7th annual CSV/imagineNATIVE residency. She is currently working on her MFA in Film at York University.

Aram Collier
Aram is a filmmaker, educator, and film festival programmer. He has a background in documentary, editing the award winning feature documentary Refugee and directing/editing the short doc Who I Became both which broadcast nationally on PBS in the United States. His subsequent dramatic and experimental film work has played festivals in the United States, Canada, Japan, and China. From 2011-2014, his omnibus live music and film project Suite Suite Chinatown toured Canada, Asia, and the United States. In 2017, he completed the Telefilm Canada funded feature film Stand Up Man, which he wrote, directed, edited, and produced. The film had its World premiere at the Atlantic Film Festival and its International Premiere at the Hawaii International Film Festival. Most recently Aram directed and edited the short documentary A Sweet And Sour Christmas for CBC. He is currently the Head of Programming at the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. Based in Toronto, Canada, Aram is a mixed race Asian Canadian/American (Chinese and English/Dutch/German) and a San Francisco native who has a BFA and MFA in Film Production from the University of California at Santa Cruz and York University respectively.

 2020