Art students celebrated during inaugural Vibe Fest

This year, as part of the Faculty of Fine Arts' inaugural Vibe Fest, the Annual Art Awards were distributed, which recognize the outstanding achievements of students for their excellence in creative work, scholarship and community engagement.

Faculty of Fine Arts’ inaugural Vibe Fest showcases top-tier creative talent and facilities at ULethbridge

A creative showcase of student, alumni, staff and faculty talent, Vibe Fest opened the doors of the University of Lethbridge Centre for the Arts (UCA) and allowed community members to experience performances, exhibitions and presentations.

ULethbridge StoriesMonica Lockett

Congratulations to the 2025 art award recipients!

Dinah Gaston, Excellence in Art History/Museum Studies Award
Victoria Lasalle, Excellence in Art History/Museum Studies/Art Gallery Award
Kiara Pike and Sidney Frenette-Ling, Excellence in Art Studio Award
Madeson Singh, Excellence in Indigenous Art History/Museum Studies Award
Zoe Buckskin, Excellence in Indigenous Art Studio Award
Emma Van Bussel, Excellence in Printmaking Award
Julia Hartigan, Excellence in Drawing Award
Natalia Smith, Excellence in Painting Award
Ezra Saunders, Excellence in Spatial Practice/Digital Fabrication Award
Shayna Fullersmith, David Lanier Memorial Award
Dinah Gaston, Art Student Purchase Award
Sidney Frenette-Ling and Natalia Smith, Southern Alberta Art Gallery Award
Sarah Wall, Art Society Award
Dinah Gaston and Zoe Buckskin, Student of Art Endowment Award
Shayna Fullersmith, Ryan Jensen and Demi Zalesak, Roloff Beny Foundation Undergraduate Photographic Award in Fine Arts
Nahid Pouzesh, Roloff Beny Graduate Award in Fine Arts
Julia Hartigan and Kiara Pike, Gushul Studio Artist Residency Prize
Serene Weasel Traveller, Sidney Frenette-Ling, Natalia Smith and Julia Hartigan, Platform | Casa Student Showcase (2024-2025)
Megan Evans, Whyte Museum Internship

Featured Award Recipients

Dinah Gaston

Recipient of the Excellence in Art History/Museum Studies Award, Art Student Purchase Award and Student of Art Endowment Award

Dinah Gaston is a queer diaspora Filipino maker dedicated to the self-exploration around her mixed race and othering identity. Gaston’s work reflects upon notions of family, history, nationality, location, real and imagined memories. Her work looks at ancestral inheritance, identity and the mythological.

Gaston’s practice as of late has been a deep dive into the history and the communicative properties of traditional Indigenous Filipino and Muslim textiles of her ancestors. She is committed to engaging with the warp and weft of how she and her community have integrated within the fabric of Canada. Her solo exhibition entitled Bilad - exposed under the sun/exposed for all to see can presently be seen at Casa.

The month of August of 2024 took Gaston to a textile internship with the Museo de Textil in Oaxaca City, Mexico and this year, Gaston looks forward to a residency mentoring under a community of weavers and a master embroiderer in the Philippines, and learning ancestral forms of weaving from the area that her family is from. It is with special thanks to the Student of Art Endowment Awards that both of these residencies could happen. Gaston just recently accepted a full-time position as an archivist at the Kootenai Brown Museum in Pincher Creek.

Julia Hartigan

Recipient of the Excellence in Drawing Award, Casa Platform Showcase and the Gushul Studio Artist Residency Prize

Julia Hartigan is an Art Studio major at ULethbridge. Using drawing, painting, and collage, she explores mark, texture, and visual ambiguity. With a focus on drawing, she considers how material marks accumulate to form light and volume.

Hartigan works with themes of nature, observing the interactions of natural structures and artificial ones. In 2024, her large scale drawing, Sea, Sky, and Earth, was purchased as the inaugural work in the Faculty of Fine Arts Dean's Office art collection, and in 2025, her work Taxidermies (study) was displayed in the Student Platform Exhibition at Casa.

Ryan Jensen

Recipient of the Roloff Beny Foundation Undergraduate Photographic Award in Fine Arts

Ryan Jensen is an upcoming artist based in Lethbridge, Alberta. He recently completed a BMus in Digital Audio Arts from ULethbridge in Spring 2025.

His interest in art photography developed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. After purchasing a 6x7 medium-format film camera, he began making photos which explored feelings of nostalgia embedded within the visual landscape. These early experiments led to an obsession with documenting ghost towns and rural areas. While initial trips were fuelled by a fascination with abandonment and decay, overtime, he developed an understanding of the complex realities of rural depopulation.

For his upcoming work, Jensen will be traveling to interior British Columbia, specifically visiting sites associated with Japanese-Canadian internment or work camps. His focus will be on the sites where his maternal grandmother was interned with her mother and siblings, and the work camp where the men were sent to build Highway 3.

Kiara Pike

Recipient of the Excellence in Art Studio Award and the Gushul Studio Artist Residency Prize

To be unconventional; to work through embodied practice; to labour; to love; to wander; to notice. Kiara Pike is an interdisciplinary, process-driven artist who explores relationships with self and the non-human, both outwardly and inwardly. Their studio practice involves experimentation, printmaking, sculpture, and painting. In 2024, Pike was awarded an Excellence in Printmaking award at ULethbridge, where she is a third year student completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts - Art degree. Pike resides in Treaty 7 territory and has shown artwork locally in group exhibitions as well as at the Casa Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Alberta.

This body of work presents the viewer with themes addressing the human-urban impact on the lives of birds. By observing a series of overlooked interactions between humans and birds via the middleman of industrial design, I explore bird-strikes, bird-spikes, bird deterrents, and a wayward corpse. Through my artwork, I aim to emphasize industrial impacts that limit the lives of birds and provide the viewer with something confrontational, demanding individual conclusions and realizations.

Megan Evans

Recipient of the Whyte Museum of the Rockies Art History/Museum Studies Internship

Megan Evans is both an Art History and Museum Studies student, and the recipient of the 2025 Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies Internship. Focusing most heavily on curatorial and preparator work, she plans to learn more about display culture and collections management. Evans' personal work is inspired by Canadian geography and landscapes, and she cannot wait to incorporate Banff’s local environment into future works.

Zoe Buckskin

Recipient of the Excellence in Indigenous Art Studio Award, Student of Art Endowment Award and the Spirit Prize.