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Dance artist and educator Justine A. Chambers and artist, curator and writer Lorna Brown are being recognized for their exceptional creative work and commitment to the art community in British Columbia.
The two have won the 2025 VIVA Award and the 2025 Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize, respectively, presented by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The VIVA Award jury noted that Chambers’ work “demonstrates a rare integration of technical rigour, conceptual depth and emotional resonance, expanding the framework for contemporary dance practice while remaining deeply rooted in embodied experience.” She has also fostered meaningful artistic exchanges and collaborations within diverse communities.
Chambers’ practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Her work has been hosted by galleries, theatres and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. She is August Tyler-Hite’s mother.
The Balkind Prize jury celebrated Brown’s many contributions to “curatorial innovation, scholarly research and critical reassessment of institutional forms,” adding that her commitment to social change has “established a framework for artists and curators to build upon.”
Brown is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and part of the Other Sights producer team. She was the director/curator of Artspeak Gallery, an artist-run centre focusing on the relationship between visual art and writing, from 1999 to 2004. Independent curatorial projects include the billboard project Digital Natives, with Clint Burnham, and Group Search: Art in the Library, and she edited Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. Between 2015 and 2022, she was acting director/curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, curating exhibition series such as Beginning with the Seventies that explored the relationship between art, archives and activism.
The VIVA Award, established in 1988 by Jack and Doris Shadbolt, is an annual prize awarded to mid-career visual artists in British Columbia who demonstrate exceptional creative ability and commitment to the visual arts. The 2025 VIVA Award jury consisted of Jesse Birch, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Anne Low, Cindy Mochizuki and Jan Wade.
The Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize is a biannual award set up in memory of Alvin Balkind to recognize excellence in the field of curating in the visual arts. The 2025 Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize jury consisted of Bopha Chhay, Rhys Edwards and Charo Neville.
Chambers and Brown will be honoured in an awards ceremony on March 11 at the Vancouver Art Gallery. All are welcome to attend, but an RSVP is required here. For more information, visit the Shadbolt Foundation’s website. ![[Tyee]](/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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