Mayor's Arts Award for Community Engaged Arts
2017 recipients
Earle Peach
Honouree
Earle Peach is a singer, songwriter, composer, conductor, arranger, teacher and performer. He leads four choirs in the city: the Highs and Lows, a mental health choir; the Solidarity Notes Labour Choir; the Gathering Place choir, a free drop in group which meets at the Gathering Place downtown; and InChoiring Minds, a community choir at Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House.
Peach hosts a monthly community coffee house in Mount Pleasant called Beats on Broadway. He teaches privately, and records musicians for demos and albums. He has written extensively for choirs, and for various folk groups, for film, theatre and dance. Several of his choral arrangements have been published through Cypress and Silent Dawn. He performs with Barbara Jackson as a duo called Songtree, and also has a band called Illiteratty which performs mostly his songs and instrumentals. Peach is politically active, and likes to garden, swim and ride his bike.
Ariel Martz-Oberlander
Emerging artist
Ariel Martz-Oberlander is a theatre artist, writer and teacher. As a Jewish settler on Coast Salish territories with diasporic and refugee ancestry, her practice is rooted in a commitment to place-based accountability through decolonizing and solidarity work. She divides her time between theatre and community organizing, and specializing in creative protest tactics on land and water.
Martz-Oberlander is a facilitator with the True Voice Theatre Project, producing new shows by residents of the Downtown Eastside, and vulnerably housed youth in collaboration with the Gathering Place and Covenant House. Her most recent work, created with support from the LEAP program, won a research and development prize from the Arts Club. Martz-Oberlander is also the associate producer for Vines Festival, presenting accessible, free eco-art in Vancouver parks. Good art is accountable to the community, raises up voices rarely heard, and is vital to repairing our world.
Jay Hamburger is the founder/current artistic director of Theatre In the Raw. He is a writer, theatre teacher, director, producer, Carnegie-Mellon University theatre graduate, and Vancouver community arts practitioner. He and partner Atty Gell started the 22-yearold company, which produces original and revived full-length and one-act play works.
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andice R. Curlypaws is committed to creativity as a way of life. She has travelled internationally as a performer, producer and creative facilitator in theatre, music, and mental health activism. She fronts the Myrtle Family Band and is a founding member of the Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret. Candice collaborated with the Dusty Flowerpot on the Jessie-nominated Hard Times Hit Parade, an immersive theatrical extravaganza set in a Depression-era dance marathon.
Patti Fraser (PhD) is an artist whose community engaged practice focuses on narrative and story to disrupt the impenetrable veil that often sees a crisis in stereotypical terms. Currently, she is co-artistic director of The Housing Matters Media Project, a youth-engaged media project formed to respond to housing justice issues.
Kim Villagante is a multi-dimensional artist. While a visual art student at the University of British Columbia, she began performing rap, poetry, and soul music, started the Main Street Art Collective, and worked as an art teacher. Since graduating two years ago, Villagante has been heavily involved in community arts practice. 
David Diamond is artistic director of Headlines Theatre for which he has directed hundreds of community-specific theatre projects and training locally and throughout North America and Europe, as well as in Namibia, Rwanda, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. He has pioneered the development of live, interactive forum television and webcasting.
Amanda Nahanee is a descendant and cultural ambassador of the Squamish and the Nisga’a Nation. Her formal training and traditional knowledge showcase both nations and her broad experience bridges Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. Amanda is well versed in Coast Salish language, mythology, history, rituals, protocols and village sites.
Naomi Singer is a community-engaged artist best known as the founding artistic director of the Secret Lantern Society, which produces non-secret events, such as Vancouver's annual Winter Solstice Lantern Festival. Now in its 18th year, the festival is celebrated in six neighbourhoods, attracts 20,000 participants and highlights the art, music, and performance traditions of diverse cultures.
Hélène Bolduc believes in the arts being a natural and integral part of everyday life. Trained as a stage performer in Simon Fraser University's Bachelor of Fine Arts program, Hélène discovered a strong interest for non-text-based theatre. This, and her previous linguistics studies, contributed to her fascination for non-verbal communication.
Carmen Rosen is a visual artist, singer, costume designer, theatre and festival stilt performer. She holds an Art History degree from the University of British Columbia and a diploma from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Maggie Winston is a professional puppeteer, performance artist, and drama educator. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Performance Puppetry from Sarah Lawrence College (New York) and the British American Drama Academy (London, UK).
Terry Hunter is co-founder and executive director of Vancouver Moving Theatre, an award-winning Downtown Eastside-based theatre company that produces innovative arts-based community development projects tailored with and for the Downtown Eastside.
Savannah Walling, a theatre artist and writer trained in dance, mime, and music, is the artistic director of Vancouver Moving Theatre, a professional company she co-founded in 1983 and with which she has toured four continents and created over 40 interdisciplinary productions.
Rosemary Georgeson's family has been intertwined with the Downtown Eastside since it was beach, trees, and clam beds. She has provided outreach and story consultation for the In the Heart of a City: Downtown Eastside Community Play and co-wrote and provided cast hospitality for We’re All In This Together: The Shadows Project.