Annie Valentina Named as Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 Summer 2024 Artist in Residence
The Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 is pleased to welcome playwright Annie Valentina as their Artist in Residence for summer 2024. Annie Valentina holds a BA in Theatre from Dalhousie University. She served as Artistic Associate of Neptune Theatre from 2018 to 2023, and is also a well-regarded director locally and nationally. She was a 2014 Merritt Award nominee for her play Alien.
During her residency Annie will be starting work on a new play. Od Dzvezdena Prašina (From Stardust) is an exploration of multi-generational immigrant family dynamics told through Cass, a second-gen Queer Canadian-Macedonian. Through humour, emotional candour and magical realism, the play will engage with topics pertinent to immigrant families – elder care, medical bias, domestic violence and LGBTQ erasure, to name a few.
Annie writes, “Though Od Dzvezdena Prašina (From Stardust) is a fictional story with fictional characters, it draws on experiences very close to home. My own family are multi-generational immigrants of a classic Balkan hodgepodge of identities – my grandmother a Greek émigré to Bulgaria, my mother a Bulgarian émigré to Norway, and myself a queer Bulgarian-Greek-Canadian third (-fourth?) culture kid. Much of my artistic output seeks to illuminate intersections between cultural identities, in both the political and personal sense.”
Supported by TD Bank Group through the TD Ready Commitment Initiative.
Past Artist-in-Residence Projects
2023 - Dancing Kmɨtkinu
shalan joudry
shalan is a Mi’kmaw mother and narrative artist working in many mediums. She is a poet, playwright, podcast producer, storyteller and actor, as well as a cultural interpreter.
2022 - Immigrant Workers Center
Tamara Abdul Hadi
Tamara Abdul Hadi has an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and has taught photography for multimedia at Concordia and photography intervention courses in Cairo and Beirut.
2021 - Our Immigrant Stories
Aquil Virani
Aquil is an award-winning visual artist, graphic designer and filmmaker who blurs the line between art and activism, often integrating public participation into his socially-conscious art projects.
2019 - An Ocean of Change
Katarina Marinic
Katarina recently graduated with an MFA from NSCAD University in 2019. She has a BFA with a major in photography from NSCAD in 2017, and a diploma in Applied Photography from Sheridan College.
2018 - Refuge Canada
Shauna MacLeod
Shauna is a NSCAD graduate who has been working as a studio potter since 2012. She is one of a handful of ceramic artists working with Nova Scotia red earthenware clay.
2017 - THE “HERE AND ELSEWHERE” BEE
Andrea Tsang Jackson
Andrea is an emerging textile artist who holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture from McGill University and a Master’s Degree in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work has been published in Flare, the Chronicle Herald, and The Coast.
2016 - To Those Still At Sea...
Kyle Jackson
Kyle is a multidisciplinary artist who works with paint and interactive sculpture. A graduate of NSCADU with a Degree in Painting, Kyle’s art practice is primarily spent creating and building work to charm and engage the world.