Four influential artists and cultural leaders are recognized for their lasting contributions to art, media and design.
We are celebrating the impact of four remarkable individuals for their work as luminaries, cultural innovators and influential leaders in the world of art, media and design, by conferring three Honorary Degrees and one Emily Award this year.
Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) is pleased to confer Honorary Degrees to indie icon and Grammy-nominated musician Neko Case, grunt gallery co-founder and curator Glen Alteen, and sculptor and installation artist Faye HeavyShield for their exemplary contributions to our local and global arts communities.
This year’s Emily Award will be presented to Peter Morin, artist, curator and professor, for his significant achievements in art, media and design.
“Each of these artists and cultural innovators embodies our mission to create a better world through art and design by using their creativity as a catalyst for change,” says President + Vice-Chancellor Trish Kelly. “In our centennial year, we are reflecting on our amazing past as we envision an even brighter future, and these honourees are inspiring us to imagine new possibilities for the path ahead. Their trailblazing work in community organization, music, sculpture and installation has broadened perspectives and shaped the cultural landscape both locally and across the world.”
Each year, the Honorary Degree Program celebrates and recognizes individuals whose sustained creative and philanthropic work has made a significant impact in their fields.
The Emily Award Program annually celebrates alumni whose achievements in art, media and design have elevated both their disciplines and the university.
The four recipients will receive their honours during Convocation on May 14, 2026.
Honorary Degree Recipients
Singer, songwriter, music producer, visual artist and writer Neko Case is the consummate career artist — fearless and versatile with a fierce work ethic and constant drive to search deeper within herself for creative growth. “One of America’s best and most ambitious singer-songwriters” (Rolling Stone) and “essentially peerless” (NPR), Case has long been revered as one of music’s most influential artists. Her authenticity, lyrical storytelling and sly wit have endeared her to a legion of critics, musicians and lifelong fans. In addition to numerous acclaimed and Grammy-nominated solo records, she is the author of The New York Times bestselling memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You and a Substack newsletter Entering The Lung. Case is currently composing the musical theatre adaptation of the Academy Award-winning motion picture Thelma & Louise. Her latest album on ANTI- Records, Neon Grey Midnight Green, was named one of Pitchfork’s Best Of 2025 — “an album that blossoms with awe.”
Glenn Alteen is a Vancouver-based curator and writer, and the founding Program Director of grunt gallery. He has worked extensively with performance art and is a cofounder of LIVE Performance Biennial (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005). His writing has been published in The Place of Objects: The John David Lawrence Collection (VAG 2025), Other Places: Reflections on Media Art in Canada (MANO 2019), Wordless: The Performance of Rebecca Belmore (grunt 2018), Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (MOA 2016) Making Always War (Stride Gallery 2015), Access All Areas (grunt 2008) and Caught in the Act (YYZ Books 2006).
Alteen has also helped organize a number of conferences including Indian Acts: Aboriginal Performance Art (2002), co-produced with TRIBE and grunt gallery; InFest 2004. produced by the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres; and Live In Public: The Art of Engagement at ECU (2007). In recent years, Alteen has been involved in archival projects as a producer of websites including Medicine (2008); Beat Nation (2009) through grunt gallery; Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the ‘60s (2009) produced through grunt and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC; Activating The Archive (2011); Background This Place (2013); and Taking Advantage – The Mainstreeters Redux (2014).
As program director of grunt gallery, Alteen was active in creating sustainable administration practices through the purchase of a facility (1995); the creation of the Glenn Alteen Legacy Fund (2006), an endowment held by the Vancouver Foundation; and the Blue Cabin Residency Program (2019).
In 2018, Alteen was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for Outstanding Contribution to Contemporary Practice.
Faye HeavyShield is a leading Indigenous contemporary artist with a practice spanning 40 years. Her work has been taught in numerous classes throughout ECU’s history, inspiring Indigenous students with her conceptual and minimal art pieces that speak volumes to First Nation histories, culture and knowledge-based philosophies. The 2021 recipient of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, HeavyShield has created powerful installations and sculptures characterized by repeating forms and motifs, including spirals, circles, grids and lines. Drawing from personal experience, her work reveals a deep relationship with the land, in particular the Kainai (Blood) Nation in Southern Alberta where she grew up and still lives.
During her first solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in 2025, “Faye HeavyShield: Issokawo’taan,” HeavyShield presented several works, including a re-staging of her acclaimed 1995–96 multimedia installation Venus as Torpedo. This large-scale work, with audio in both Blackfoot and English, features assorted garments draped over a protruding arm that extends across the museum floor. The exhibition was curated by Georgiana Uhlyarik, Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art at the AGO, and organized by the AGO in partnership with the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation.
HeavyShield has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including “Nations in Urban Landscapes” at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver; “rock paper river” at Gallery Connexion, Fredericton; “Into the Garden of Angels” at The Power Plant in Toronto; “kuto’iis (blood)” at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery; the 2005 Alberta Art Biennial; “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and “Clans” at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. Her work is held in private and public institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection; the Alberta Foundation of Art; the Glenbow Museum; the Heard Museum; the Eiteljorg Museum of Native American Art and Western Art; the MacKenzie Art Gallery; and the Kelowna Art Gallery. She is the recipient of an Eiteljorg Native American Contemporary Art Fellowship and received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award in 2021.
Emily Award Recipient
Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. His artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing; articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss; articulating Community Knowing; and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. This work takes place in galleries, in community, in collaboration, in publication, in the classroom and on the land. All of this art/work is informed by Dreams, Ancestors, Family Members and quantum theory, and is shaped/reshaped by a guiding principle — performance art as a research methodology.
Morin began art school in 1997, completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver in 2001. He completed his Master of Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in 2010. Initially trained in lithography, Morin’s artistic practice has travelled from printmaking to poetry, beadwork, Button-Blanket making, installation, drum making and performance art. Throughout his exhibition and making history, Morin has focused upon his matrilineal inheritances in homage to the matriarchal structuring of the Tahltan Nation and prioritizes cross-Ancestral collaborations in honour of his parents — Janell (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre (French-Canadian, Thetford Mines, Qué).
In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. He was long-listed for the Sobey Award in 2014 and 2024. Morin is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.