The Artist-in-Residence

Applications for 2025-26 are due April 14th, 2025.

The Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) at the University of Toronto invites all qualified applicants to apply be our artist-in-residence for the 2025-26 school year. The QTRL residency will provide financial and other material support for artists working in any medium (photography, sculpture, visual art, media arts, theatre, poetry, playwriting, fiction, etc.), whose work centres on LGBTQ2S+ lives, communities, histories, and cultures. The residency will culminate in a funded exhibition, reading, screening, or performance of the resident’s work-in-progress. The successful applicant is expected to be in residence in the Greater Toronto Area during the period of their award and will join the faculty and students who make up our intellectual community and participate in activities at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. These may include guest lectures, a public artist talk, office hours with our students, and a general presence at the Centre. They will be given office space and access to the vast faculty resources, manuscript archives, and library collections available at the University of Toronto and the Bonham Centre. In addition to financial support for a final artist showcase the successful candidate will receive a stipend of $20,000. To get a sense of the wide disciplinary range and diversity of the Bonham Centre’s community and academic offerings visit our website at http://sds.utoronto.ca.

To apply, please submit a short 1-page cover letter and curriculum vitae to qtrl.sds@utoronto.ca. The letter should discuss your work in general and the project you plan to undertake while in residence.  Please also include an example of your work in the form of an on-line link, PDF, jpeg. or other format.

Applications due: April 14th, 2025.

Artist-in-Residence-call-for-applications-2025-26


About the Artist-in-Residence

The Centre residency provides financial and other material support for artists working in any medium (photography, sculpture, media arts, theatre, writing, etc.), whose work centres on LGBTQ2S+ lives, communities, histories, and cultures and expressly concentrates on 1) the role art plays in expanding how we think about sexual diversity 2) relations between art, activism, and social justice. The residency culminates in a fully funded exhibition, reading, or performance of the resident’s work-in-progress. The artist-in-residence is expected to be in residence in the Greater Toronto Area during the period of their award and will join the faculty and students who make up our intellectual community and participate in the Centre’s day-to-day activities. They are given office space and access to the vast faculty resources, manuscript archives, and library collections available at the University of Toronto and the Bonham Centre.

2024-25


Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, TV, film, and fashion. A Canadian Screen Award winner, Vivek is the creator and writer of the new CBC Gem Original Series How to Fail as a Popstar, which had its international premiere at Cannes. She has collaborated with musical icons Jann Arden, Peaches, and Jully Black, and was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. Her best-selling book I’m Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel,” and she is the founder of the award-winning publishing imprint VS. Books, (featured on CBC’s Canada Reads) which supports emerging BIPOC writers. Vivek has been a brand ambassador for MAC Cosmetics and Pantene, and she is a director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation.


Previous Artists-In-Residence

2023-24: Jody Chan and Brian Rigg

Jody Chan is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and care worker. They are the author of Haunt (Damaged Goods Press), All Our Futures (PANK), and Sick (Black Lawrence Press). They are the winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award and the 2021 Trillium Award for Poetry. They are also a performing member with RAW Taiko Drummers. During their residency, Chan will work on a hybrid manuscript of poetry and essays exploring crip queer narratives and rituals around birth, death, and suicidality in relation to climate crisis, the ongoing pandemic, and the many past and future apocalypses in our and our ancestors’ lifetimes. In collaboration with other artists and movement workers, and via the multi-sensory, multi-access practice and ethics of disability poetics, they will also work towards creating audio and video pieces to accompany this manuscript, as well as their second book impact statement, which will be published in Spring 2024 with Brick Books. Chan’s first two books contend with how the idea of home is often weaponized by the state and intimately tied to the violence, trauma, and loss experienced by queer and trans disabled people. This project thinks through how home can be different, a site of safety and justice, building on a body of work by folks like Sins Invalid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Stacey Park Milbern, Mia Mingus, and many more, in talking about crip lives, crip grief, and the worlds we build for each other.



Brian Rigg is a Jamaican/Canadian writer and poet based in Toronto. His poems have been published in magazines from the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. They have also been anthologized in Ma’ka, Diasporic Juks: Contemporary Writing by Queers of African Descent (Sister Vision Press) and Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets (Arsenal Pulp Press). A False Paradise, his first collection of poetry, was published by ECW Press in 2001. A small group of his poems titled Soft Animals won the 2021 Steel Toe Books chapbook competition. He is a proud LAMBDA Fellow from the 2016 cohort. During his residency, Rigg will work on a collection of poems currently titled Warrior in the Garden. Drawing inspiration from Afro-Surrealism and the Black Fantastic, the new poems will explore how absurdism and speculative fictions inform Black queer life and create spaces for disruption, resistance, and transgressive play. He will also organize a weeklong workshop crafted for BIPOC, Queer and Trans poets, culminating in a reading event.


2022-23: Rhoma Spencer

Rhoma Spencer – Actor, Playcreator, Director and Comedian is a veteran Theatre Practitioner practicing in Toronto since 2001. A graduate of York University with an MFA in Directing she formed the now defunct Theatre Archipelago(TA) in 2005 and under her Artistic Direction the company produced Mad Miss /Just Jazz in 2005, Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine (2006), Twilight Café (2007), I Marcus Garvey (2009) Obeah Opera (2012).

Acting credits include: House of Bernarda Alba (ModernTimes/Aluna), Solitudes (Aluna Theatre), Jean and Dinah (Lordstreet Theatre) Mad Miss, Fallen Angel and the Devil Concubine (TA/bcurrent), Stori Ya (bcurrent) and two seasons of the groundbreaking Afri-Canadian sitcom, Da Kink in my Hair for Global TV. Film: Sound of Tears (Short) which received an African Academy Award for Best Narrative Short (Diaspora). The Apartment (TV series Pilot for CCN TV6, Trinidad). The award winning film, Scarborough (Comfy Films)

Directing credits include: Login Logout Password, Queerantine. Just Jazz, I Marcus Garvey, Our Lady of Spills, Twilight Cafe for Theatre Archipelago, Carnival Medea- Trinidad, For Colored Girls- USA and many more. In addition to stage, she has been the Artistic Director of Pan Alive, the Steelband Music Festival during Toronto Carnival for the three years.

Rhoma is also the recipient of a US House of Congress Proclamation and the Borough President of NYC Proclamation for her contribution to Caribbean Theatre. She is also featured in the Who is Who in Black Canada and in The 50th Independence Anniversary publication of Distinguished Nationals of Trinidad and Tobago in Canada in the field of Arts and Culture. In 2017 she founded Canadian-Caribbean Arts Network and was the Artistic Director of the Canada contingent participating in CARIFESTA XIII in Barbados and again at CARIFESTA XIV in Trinidad and Tobago in 2019. She recently launched her Debut Comedy Album and is also featured in The Kenny Robinson’s Nubian Disciples of Comedy 25th anniversary album (2020) available on Amazon, ITunes and Spotify.


2023-24: Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野

Teiya Kasahara 笠原 貞野 comes from a background of over a decade of singing both traditional and contemporary operatic roles across North America and Europe, most recently praised as “a force of nature” (Toronto Star) and “an artist with extraordinary things to say” (The Globe and Mail). They combine opera, theatre, and taiko in their artistic practice and also co-lead Amplified Opera, a new initiative which is bringing Toronto an “injection of creativity and a politics of inclusivity” (barczablog) to the opera community with their recent inaugural concert series AMPLIFY highlighting stories of equity-seeking artists. During their residency, they will work on an opera project called Little Mis(s)gender, which challenges the idea of voice type that dominates the opera industry.

Kasahara explains, “This system has been maintained and continues to be enforced by the predominately white, male, heteronormative, patriarchal opera industry at large which continues to suffer from racist and sexist ideologies that are deeply embedded within opera houses and traditional, canonical operas themselves. My project will consist of a one-person opera that uses what I refer to as a “transitional Fach” to disrupt and transcend the expectations of the operatic voice type(s) and prescribed gender and body types that follow suit.” You can learn more about their work on their website.


2020-21: Michèle Pearson Clarke

Michèle Pearson Clarke is a Trinidad-born artist, writer and educator who works in photography, film, video and installation. Using archival, performative and process oriented strategies, her work explores the personal and political possibilities afforded by considering experiences of emotions related to longing and loss. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art at Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2019) and Le Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (2018); LagosPhoto Festival (2018), All That is Left Unsaid at ltd los angeles (2018); Black Radical Imagination at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016); Parade of Champions at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto (2015); and a solo exhibition, A Welcome Weight on My Body (2018) at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Based in Toronto, Clarke holds an MSW from the University of Toronto, and she received her MFA from Ryerson University in 2015, when she was awarded both the Ryerson University Board of Governors Leadership Award and Medal and the Ryerson Gold Medal for the Faculty of Communication + Design. From 2016-2017, Clarke was artist-in-residence at Gallery 44, and she was the EDA Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough for the 2018 winter semester. Clarke’s writing has been published in Canadian Art, Transition Magazine and Momus, and in 2018, she was a speaker at the eighth TEDxPortofSpain. Most recently, Clarke has been awarded the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts 2019 Finalist Artist Prize, and she has been appointed to serve a three-year term as the City of Toronto’s Photo Laureate until 2022. Clarke is currently a contract lecturer in the Documentary Media Studies program at Ryerson University.