Submissions are reviewed by a jury panel chaired by EQ Bank’s Senior Curator, Shannon Linde, and four invited guests from the digital and contemporary art communities. Learn more about each of the 2024 guest judges below.
Crystal Mowry (she/her) is the Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. She previously held the position of Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, collection, and publishing activities for over a decade. She has written texts for various artist-focused books on the work of Deanna Bowen, Shary Boyle, Brendan Fernandes, Maggie Groat, and others. She was born in Toronto and is currently based in Treaty 4 (Regina).
Kara Stone is an artist and scholar making work about psychosocial disability, sexuality, and the environment. She works in different media but most often in interactive art and experimental videogames. Her artwork has been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, and VICE, and exhibited at Athens Digital Art Festival in Greece, Vector Game Art Festival in Toronto, Canada and a solo exhibition at Babycastles in New York City, USA. She holds a PhD in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is an Assistant Professor at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Canada.
Skawennati investigates history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’kehá:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her artistic practice questions our relationships with technology and highlights Indigenous people in the future. Her machinimas and machinmagraphs (movies and still images made in virtual environments), textiles and sculpture have been presented internationally and collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal and the Thoma Foundation, among others. Residing in Montreal, she co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace.
Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. His practice spans installation, moving image, computation, theory, and performance. Recent exhibitions include CULTUS, Secession, Vienna; CONNECTING, KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels; Refigured, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art; Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the 12th Gwangju Biennale. His 2021 artist monograph Unknown Ideals is published by Sternberg Press.
