Discipline Category: Visual Arts and Photography

Gillian Crawford is a self-described creative and grief walker of Métis and settler ancestry, living on Treaty One Territory. She is the creator of The Connection Desk, a small participatory public art installation in Winnipeg’s North End that explores grief and invites meaningful engagement.

Her eclectic and ever-evolving practice spans multiple mediums including poetry, photography, and installation. Her work is deeply rooted in the landscapes of home, exploring identity and uncovering the sacred in everyday life. Since the death of her father in 2024, Crawford has been transmuting a grief larger than her physical form into art, connection, and community—meeting herself anew along the way and discovering what each evolving self has to offer the world.

I am an Indigenous artist whose work is rooted in storytelling, healing, and connection to spirit. Through painting, I explore the relationship between land, identity, and intergenerational knowledge. My art reflects both personal experience and the teachings passed down through Indigenous ways of knowing.

Nikki Braun is a self-taught abstract artist with a background in graphic design, based just outside Winnipeg, Manitoba. After years working in creative industries, she returned to painting over a decade ago—and found freedom as an abstract artist.

Her layered acrylics, pen, and pencil pieces explore contrast, movement, and emotion. Her evolving style speaks to those drawn to raw emotion and fearless experimentation, inviting viewers into a world of vivid contrasts and layered meaning.

She has exhibited across Canada and shares her evolving process and finished work with a global audience online.

Vi Houssin is a transgender beadwork artist and drag performer. Her family is of white settler and Red River Métis ancestry. Her Métis family names are Ritchot, Poitras, Larence and Plante, and her ancestors held scrip in St. Vital and St. Boniface. She is a proud member of the Two-Spirit Michif Local and a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation. Vi works and lives in Winnipeg, Canada on Treaty 1 territory where she was born and raised.

Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

I have an eclectic mix of interests reflected both in my personality and work. From Japanese pop culture and history, folklore, gaming, to gothic/cute street fashion and more! If I find it engaging and fun, I want a piece of it; I want my creative practices to be centered on joy!

I was raised on books and visual arts in all their myriad forms. So, of course, that's where my creative outlets flourished! From as early as grade one I was writing and illustrating, surprisingly tragic and dramatic, stories to share with my classmates and teachers.

I have one novel self-published, with more on the way, and several small pieces published in local libraries and such. My inspiration derives from whatever emerges from my head, be it in the form of dreams, random thoughts, or unexpected eureka moments.