2025 VIVA Awards

Join us for an evening celebrating the remarkable achievements of VIVA Award winner Justine A. Chambers and Balkind Prize winner Lorna Brown.

The award ceremony will be held at the Vancouver Art Gallery on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, at 6PM. The two winners will be honoured for their impact on and contributions to the visual art community in BC.

The 2025 VIVA Award jury consisted of Jesse Birch, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Anne Low, Cindy Mochizuki, and Jan Wade. They noted that Justine A. Chambers' work "demonstrates a rare integration of technical rigor, conceptual depth, and emotional resonance" and that her creative output has "made a significant impact as a collaborator, mentor, and cultural contributor, fostering meaningful artistic exchange within diverse communities within and beyond the performing and visual arts."

The 2025 Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize jury consisted of Bopha Chhay, Rhys Edwards, and Charo Neville. They recognized Lorna Brown for her "outstanding contribution to curatorial innovation, scholarly research and critical reassessment of institutional forms," adding that her "commitment to social change, demonstrated through her mentorship within cultural institutions and her mobilization of archives, has established a framework for artists and curators to build upon.”

Light refreshments will be served at the ceremony.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Her work has been hosted by galleries, theatres and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. She is August Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based visual artist, curator, writer and editor. Brown is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and part of the Other Sights Producer team. She was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004, an artist-run centre focusing on the relationship between visual art and writing. Independent curatorial projects include the billboard project Digital Natives, with Clint Burnham; Group Search: Art in the Library, and she edited Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. Between 2015 and 2022, she was Acting Director/Curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, curating exhibition series such as Beginning With the Seventies that explored the relationship between art, archives and activism. Her work is in the collections of the Belkin, SFU Galleries, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank. Brown received the VIVA Award in 1996, the Canada Council Paris Studio Award in 2000, and an honorary doctorate of letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2015.

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