Otherworld: DesignTO Youth Showcase

The Otherworld Showcase presents an evening of shared imagination through art and design, exploring the world not only as it is, but as it could be.

The Otherworld Showcase also marks the culmination of a six-week youth program exploring how art and design can be used as tools for conscious change. Inspired by the writings of James Baldwin and Lola Olufemi, the program invited 60 youth to question the systems that shape our realities and to imagine alternative futures rooted in care, collaboration, and possibility.

Over the course of the program, youth examined the evolving roles of artists and designers today, and how we serve as connectors working across disciplines to shape more intentional and equitable worlds. Guided by guest speakers and mentors, they developed personal and collective responses to the question: What kind of world do you want to live in, and how can you begin to build it now? This showcase brings these ideas to life through a range of presentations.

Artists

Saira Faruq (she/her) is an eldest daughter, a visibly racialized Muslim woman, and a housing worker. Her creative practice is grounded in pursuing research as a leisure activity. She enjoys collaging, blackout poetry, and line drawing, often combining all three to point to larger, more complex, and problematic institutions. She often draws on her own lived experiences, and her critical engagement with mainstream media to inform her writing and art.

Andy Lee is an engineer and entrepreneur turned artist based in Waterloo, Ontario. His projects encompass creative use of electronics, mechanics, hardware, and software with medium to large-scale light installations, projection mapping, lamp building, and woodworking.

Anu Makinde is a writer, researcher, and mixed media artist. A recent graduate with a Master of Arts in Geography, she followed her curiosity to discover how migrations and diaspora in Black communities are revealed through the sounds and sights produced from them. Deeply invested in critically constructing visual literacy with poetics, documentary film photography, and music history, she recognizes the present conjuncture as an urgent moment to create collective liberatory pedagogies.

Maryam Mohamed is a multidisciplinary artist whose artwork tells stories of how the history of indenture continually impacts the Indo-Guyanese community, especially women. Through various mediums, Maryam explores unique ways of healing from generational trauma and reclaiming an ancestral culture she yearns to reconnect with. Her work questions the meaning of tradition and illustrates a vision for evolving traditions, folklore, and cultural standards. Maryam exhibited recent works in exhibitions at Northern Contemporary Gallery in 2023, and at the DesignTO Festival in 2024 and 2025. She held her first solo exhibition at the Women’s Art Association of Canada in 2025.

Eva Pestrin's practice focuses on labour and material reflection. Traditionally, domestic materials, such as textiles, are united with industrial mediums such as plaster, wood, and steel. Such material mediation, through contemporary art, suggests the exclusionary history of craft from art, and the social hierarchy of labour and material processes. By placing these historically gendered materials within new contexts, Eva aims to stress their narrative potential and challenge the conventions that have traditionally governed their place in the art world.

Sameeha Sheikh is a Pakistani-Canadian multidisciplinary designer that specializes in branding and marketing. She graduated from Seneca College with an Honours Graphic Design Diploma and also studied at York University's Bachelor of Design program. Sameeha is inspired by community, music, and nature. Her work explores how storytelling and design intersect to build spaces of belonging, particularly for underrepresented voices. Throughout her work, she experiments with typography, mixed media, and narrative to explore the boundaries of design.

Yve Lu Trinh is a creative technologist and multidisciplinary artist moving between digital environments and living landscapes across Ontario. Their work explores connection, memory, and collective healing often through sound, interactive media, and intimate spatial experiences. With recent studies through ArtWorksTO and OCAD University, Yve works at the meeting point of technology and ecology. Their practice invites audiences to slow down, listen inward, and re-enter relationships with the worlds around and within us.

tommybilliger, a.k.a bbilli, is a Nigerian-born multidisciplinary artist currently based in Toronto whose work spans many fields specializing mainly in graphic design, music production, video editing, and web design. Driven by an instinct to uncover new forms of expression and challenge the conventions of how art is made and experienced, bbilli considers creating as both a personal excavation and a playground — a way to rediscover the same wonder felt in childhood, like finding buried treasure. bbilli is largely inspired by music, philosophy, nature, fashion, and technology.

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‘Otherworld: DesignTO Youth Showcase’ is organized by DesignTO in partnership with JAYU, and supported by Entro, with media partner AZURE Magazine. The DesignTO Festival is supported by the Government of Ontario and the City of Toronto.

Thank you to our speakers Jeyolyn Christi, Sheri O. Nault, Luke Pearson, Keisha St. Louis McBurnie, and Shaya Ishaq, and mentors Michael Barry, Vanessa Fong, Isabel Okoro, and Pheinixx Paul.

DesignTO is a charitable arts organization celebrating 16 years of designing a sustainable, just, and joyful future. From January 23-February 1, 2026, the DesignTO Festival features 100+ free events and exhibitions across Toronto, showcasing hundreds of artists and designers. As Canada’s largest annual design festival, DesignTO has welcomed over 1 million attendees, reached 2.6 billion people through media, supported 7,000+ artists and designers, and generated $159 million in tourism impact since 2011.

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