Critical Distance Profile Type Artist

Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist and curator, working between Canada and India. Her visual practice extends to decolonizing distinctions between art, craft, and design, while her curatorial practice is focussed on the wider South-Asian diaspora and contemporary art from India.

Tamhane graduated with a BA in Art History from Carleton University, Ottawa, an MA in Contemporary Art from the University of Manchester, and an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices from Concordia University, Montreal. She has been a Research Fellow with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (2009) and an International Museum Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (2013). She has held positions as an Editor at Phaidon Press, London (2002-2006), an Assistant Curator at The Power Plant (2007-2008), Toronto, and a Producer of Contemporary Art Projects at Luminato Festival (2016).

francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist, and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread. Her novel was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the DUBLIN Literary Award. As an accomplished writer and artist in her own right, Burnt Sugar at Critical Distance is francesca’s first curatorial project, and an experiment in storytelling across mediums.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist born in Brooklyn, NY, the ancestral space of the Lenni-Lanape. She is a descendant of the Mende, Krim, Bamileke, and Bubi peoples, and her distinct visual language centers indigenization and the power in ancestral knowledge and memory through photography, printmaking, video, sound, and assemblage.

Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-born conceptual artist and writer. Working across installation, lens-based media and sculpture, Nnebe engages with topics ranging from the politics of Black visibility, embodiment and spatiality to the use of foodways and language as counter-archives of colonial histories. Nnebe is the recipient of the 2023 G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare in Lagos, Nigeria, and her work has been shown in exhibitions across Canada and internationally. In 2025, Nnebe will participate in a year-long residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands.

Bushra Junaid is a multidisciplinary artist-curator, author, and arts administrator based in Toronto. Born in Montreal to Nigerian and Jamaican parents, and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Junaid is best known for exploring history, memory, cultural identity, and placemaking through mixed media collage, drawing, and painting. Pivoting on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” and reflecting on John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), Junaid’s landmark curatorial project, What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic was presented at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (2020) and included video, mixed media, mural, and photo-based works by Canadian and international artists, as well as rare archival items.