Announcing Our 2021 Honorary Doctorate + Emily Award Recipients

Images courtesy Laiwan, Eve Tuck and Nettie Wild.

Top, L-R: Laiwan and Eve Tuck. Bottom: Nettie Wild.

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By Emily Carr University

Posted on April 09, 2021 | Updated April 13, 2021, 10:55am

This year’s recipients will receive their honours during ECU’s virtual 2021 Convocation ceremony.

Emily Carr University of Art + Design is pleased to announce 2021 Honorary Doctorates will be bestowed upon educator, scholar and writer Eve Tuck; and director, writer and producer Nettie Wild.

This year’s Emily Award will be presented to cultural activist, interdisciplinary artist, writer, poet and educator Laiwan, a 1983 alumna.

“It is our great honour to recognize the accomplishments of these three brilliant scholars, writers, educators and creative professionals,” Gillian Siddall, President + Vice-Chancellor of Emily Carr University, says. “Each has made an indelible mark on the ECU community, as well as on their professional and creative communities more broadly. Their contributions to the projects of social and environmental justice, decolonization, community empowerment, and redefining equity and inclusivity through intellectual and artistic inquiry demonstrate originality, dedication and conscience of the highest order.”

All three will receive their honours during ECU’s virtual 2021 Convocation ceremony on May 14, 2021.

Each year the Honorary Doctorate Degree Program celebrates and recognizes the commitment, dedication, and service of individuals who are distinguished by their significant contributions and sustained creative and philanthropic achievements in their areas of expertise.

The annual Emily Award Program recognizes the outstanding achievements of members of the alumni community whose creative pursuits in the arts, media and design have brought honour to the university.

About Eve Tuck

Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Tuck directs Tkaronto Collaborative Indigenous Research for Communities, Land and Education (CIRCLE) Lab at University of Toronto. She is Canada Research Chair of Indigenous Methodologies with Youth and Communities. She is a recent William T. Grant Scholar (2015-2020) and was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2012).

Tuck is Unangax̂ and is an enrolled member of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, Alaska.

Her work is centred on urban education and Indigenous studies, and how Indigenous social thought can be engaged to create more fair and just social policy, more meaningful social movements, and robust approaches to decolonization. Tuck is the author of more than 20 peer reviewed articles. Her most widely-engaged articles include "Suspending Damage, a letter to communities," published by Harvard Educational Review in 2009; "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor," co-authored with K. Wayne Yang and published in 2012 by Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, "Breaking Up with Deleuze" published in 2010 by International Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, and “A Glossary of Haunting”, co-authored with C. Ree.

You can learn about Tuck’s research and writings at evetuck.com To learn more about the Tkaronto CIRCLE Lab go to tkarontocirclelab.com.

About Nettie Wild

Nettie Wild is one of Canada’s leading documentary filmmakers. Her ability to explore new ways of real life storytelling has kept her at the forefront of world documentary cinema in both form and content.

Nettie’s highly charged and critically acclaimed films have brought her audiences behind the frontlines and headlines of revolutions and social change around the world. Her more recent work is gaining recognition for forging new frontiers in storytelling on the big screen, on the web, and in large-scale public installations.

Nettie is well known for her award-winning documentary features including Fix: The Story of an Addicted City (2002), A Place Called Chiapas (1998), Blockade (1993) and A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution (1988).

Nettie’s latest feature, Konelīne: our land beautiful, won Best Canadian Documentary at the 2016 Hot Docs International Film Festival for its use of art to explore one of the most controversial topics of our time. Set deep in the hereditary territory of the Tahltan First Nation, Konelīne is a cinematic poem that captures the face of change as it moves across one of our last great wildernesses in the northwest of Canada.

In 2017, Nettie launched Uninterrupted, a cinematic spectacle using digital mapping to project images of the sockeye migration right across Vancouver’s Cambie Street bridge. Projected nightly for three summer months, Uninterrupted was a critical and popular success. It was lauded by the international art mag Wallpaper* as one of the must-see public art installations in the world for 2017.

Her most recent work is taking her into the world of virtual and augment reality. See canadawildproductions.com for more.

About Laiwan

Laiwan is a cultural activist, interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy.

Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. The same year she graduated from Emily Carr College of Art & Design (now ECU) she founded the OR Gallery in 1983. Envisioned to be run by one working artist who would live in the studio behind the gallery for one year, it held an open structure that prioritized a diverse range of material, artistic practices and experimental programming.

She returned to academia to receive an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for Contemporary Arts in 1999. Recipient of numerous awards, including recent Canada Council and BC Arts Council Awards, and the 2008 Vancouver Queer Media Artist Award, Laiwan has served on numerous arts juries; exhibits regularly; curates projects in Canada, the US, and Zimbabwe; and is published in anthologies and journals. Her latest collection of poetry “TENDER: selected poems” (2020) is published by TalonBooks.

Leading up to her project Distance of Distinct Vision in 1992, and since, Laiwan has been investigating colonialism toward a decoloniality. Since 2000, she has been investigating embodiment through performativity, audio, music, improvisation, and varieties of media, along with bodily and emotional intelligence, so as to unravel and engage presence. Recent public commissions have also enabled her to focus on issues of urban development, touching on poetic and philosophic themes related to current questions of environment and the built cityscape of Vancouver.

Based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, she teaches in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College, USA (2001-present). See laiwanette.net for more.

Media Contact

Michelle Cyca, Communications Manager

mcyca@ecuad.ca | 604 630 7412