Two children drawing on glass to save the birds at Roundhouse Community Centre

Artists in Communities program

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Building community by making art together.

Since 2014, the Artists in Communities residency program has supported artists and community members as they build community by making art together.

Over 18 months, artists work in community centres collaborating with neighbours as creators, participants, performers, and audience members. The program uses art as a catalyst for engaging individuals and communities, inspiring participation, building relationships, and making our neighbourhoods more vibrant.

The residency projects leave lasting physical or social legacies in the community and build new understandings of creative processes and collaborative practices.

Previous residencies

2024-2025

Mapwork Quilt Project
Toni-Leah C. Yake, artist and community facilitator

Mount Pleasant Community Centre

Toni-Leah is an interdisciplinary artist and community arts facilitator dedicated to creating inclusive, experimental, and collaborative spaces for youth. Their current work at Mount Pleasant Community Centre focuses on exploring sound and visual art as tools for creative expression, skill-building, and community engagement.

In 2025, Toni-Leah is leading a series of innovative workshops that integrate sound mapping, modular synthesis, stop-motion animation, and visual experimentation. These programs invite youth to investigate their environment through deep listening, field recording, and interactive media, culminating in a collective digital sound map of the Mount Pleasant area. Additional workshops explore the intersection of sound and image through stop-motion animation, liquid light show techniques, and found footage manipulation, providing hands-on opportunities for young artists to develop their creative voices.

Rooted in a commitment to accessibility and artistic experimentation, Toni-Leah’s practice encourages youth to push the boundaries of traditional media, embracing both digital and analog tools to create work that is immersive, meaningful, and reflective of their own experiences.

Toni-Leah C. Yake (European; Kanien’kehá:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turtle Clan) resides on xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ territories. As a composer-performer, she is informed by kanyen’keha (Mohawk language), her embodied response to the land, and both conscious and unconscious realms. Guided by dreaming and Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) epistemology her work engages with liminality and spatialization, illuminated with archival recordings, synthesis, and noise.

Toni-Leah is a recent recipient of the First Peoples Cultural Council Individual Artist Award (First Peoples Cultural Council 2024),Bill Jeffries Award for Indigenous Students in the Arts (2025), and the Southham Prize (Canadian Music Centre - 2025).

Learn more about this project

Aaron Friend Lettner Makes Unusual Books

Dunbar Community Centre

Working primarily with photography, Aaron Friend Lettner traverses the crossways of culture, memory, and place. His work is distinguished by its esoteric flair and he sees bookmaking as a ritual act, where seen and unseen worlds elide. He has a natural ability to make artmaking approachable for all ages, creating excitement and curiosity though storytelling in unique ways.

Aaron received the inaugural Burtynsky Grant in 2016 for Doorway. In 2022, he won a Canadian national book design award for his work on anglepoise, which toured in Canada, Japan, and Germany. His books are held in special collections at the National Library of Germany and Simon Fraser University.

With over a decade of experience in various forms of storytelling, as well as a plethora of public works and arts-based programming, Aaron will now work alongside older and younger generations at the Dunbar Community Centre for the next 2 years. Through a series of community-based workshops and longer-term projects, Dunbar residents will have an opportunity to learn new creative languages, specifically related to hand-binding books, weaving, and ritual theatre.

Learn more about this project
2023

Dancing and Mobilizing – Truth Telling With Hip Hop
Sophia Sosa and Josh Cameron

West End Community Centre

Join Sophia Sosa and Josh Cameron are in their pursuit to co-create a community arts-driven space. All genders, all ethnicities, and all ages are welcome in their regular free weekly dance workshops, open community discussions, and celebrations through community gatherings and events.

Sophia Sosa is a Filipina passionate interdisciplinary artist, locally known as one of the most reliable sources for Hip Hop dance in Vancouver. She is also the founder and vice president of Barangay Project Society that provides free arts mentorship, dance workshops, and gatherings that connect to BIPOC and LGBTQ2S youths, immigrants, at-risk youths, and refugees.

Josh Cameron began his dance journey as a Bboy in 2008 and with his interdisciplinary street dance background and energetic style, Josh has earned titles at All Style and Breaking competitions across western Canada and the United States. He has now aligned his one-decade teaching practice with the Barangay Project Society, where he works as the executive assistant and director of Special Programs and Initiatives.

From March to November 2023, Dancing and Mobilizing is accessible to all ages, skill levels, and experiences. Social/partner dancing is your next step: to connect to current community issues, mobilize calls to action, and share artistically with one another.

Learn more about this project

Photo: Sophia Sosa and Josh Cameron, photo credit: Nic Latulippe

Edward FuChen Juan

Trout Lake Community Centre

From August to December 2023, Edward FuChen Juan will be the artist in residency at the Trout Lake Community Centre working on a community based collaborative project.

Ed invites the public to work with him on creating a legacy art piece through interactive workshops and public events.

The workshops will consist of papermaking, ink paste making, and printmaking. The workshop created artworks will be used as building blocks for the fabrication of the legacy art piece, which will be gifted to the Trout Lake Community Centre as the conclusion of the residency.

Edward is a contemporary visual artist based in Vancouver, BC, the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

He identifies as a queer Taiwanese Canadian with ethnic roots from the Hakka and the Plains First Nation people of Taiwan.

His art practice is printmaking on paper with water-based ink extracted from Indigenous materials of selected regions. Presently, he has expanded his process to papermaking with unconventional plant fibers of significance cultural importance.

Learn more about this project

Nathaniel Marchand

Trout Lake Community Centre

Trout Lake and John Hendry Park represent a unique social ecology connecting an urban wildlife habitat, a popular recreation space, and the multicultural community that uses it. Artist-in-residence Nathaniel Marchand will offer a variety of public interactions and workshops to highlight and celebrate these connective eco-social threads.

Open to all, explorations with natural ink making, storytelling, mask-making, land stewardship, and site specific installations invite the community, in its full diversity and identity, to deepen its awareness of the area's natural surroundings. Events will occur throughout the year, often aligning with Trout Lake Community Centre’s programming, such as Earth Day and the Lantern Festival.

Nathaniel Marchand (Métis / Franco-Ontarian / Mixed Settler) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose practice investigates relationships to the land, ethnobotany, and the use of natural materials. An advocate for intergenerational and cross-cultural collaborations his workshops and activities integrate a hybrid of eco-arts and new media explorations.

He holds a Certificate in Fine Arts from the Yukon School of Visual Arts and a BA in Communications and Video Production from Concordia University.

Learn more about this project

Photo: Nathaniel Marchand at Create! Arts Festival, photo credit: Wendy D
2022

Mudflats - Sylvan Hamburger

False Creek Community Centre

Mudflats draws its name from the ecosystem that predated settler development in False Creek. Over the course of the project, artist-in-residence Sylvan Hamburger, will glean materials from the neighbourhood’s industrial past to better understand its current circumstance. Through printmaking, drawing, and textiles, Mudflats upholds engagement with these salvaged materials as a means of creative placemaking.

Sylvan is hosting regular pop-up workshops in and around the False Creek Community Centre. These free, public events are an opportunity to meet neighbours, learn about the area’s history, and create vibrant installations that will hang throughout the community centre. All are welcome to join – keep an eye out for the colourful tent.

Sylvan will also be accepting donations of old sheets and fabric. Bring your own linens.

Learn more about this project

Jimmy Joseph and Lisa G

Marpole Oakridge Community Centre

Join artists Jimmy Joseph and Lisa G to co-create a community art panel that will be displayed in the Marpole Oakridge Community Centre. Everyone is welcome to help design, paint, and document this centerpiece artwork during regular weekly workshops from April to August 2022.

Master Carver, Jimmy Joseph, is Kwagiulth from Alert Bay. He is a fourth generation carver. He's been carving professionally for over 40 years. He lives a traditional lifestyle of hunting, fishing, and attending potlatches. He's also an active member of the Native American Church. Jimmy is a residential school survivor. He gave up drinking when he began carving, and never picked it up again.

Lisa G is a member of the Iris Film Collective, which currently works out of the Burrardview Fieldhouse (as part of the Park Board Fieldhouse program). She has been conducting community-led filmmaking workshops since 2005, such as the Our World program, which visits remote Indigenous communities across Canada and provides opportunities to create community directed short films.

These workshops will create a three-panel carved and painted artwork with a corresponding documentary short film sharing how it was made.

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Bracken Hanuse Corlett

Raycam Community Centre

Explore the history of the Raycam building and the space that surrounds it with interdisciplinary artist Bracken Hanuse Corlett who hails from the Wuikinuxv and Klahoose Nations. Unveil neighbourhood history with community members and create art that speaks to the future plans for the community.

Learning that the formation of RayCam was a grassroots response to the railway has piqued Bracken’s interest in working with community to create work that speaks back to the railways history and imposition on the land.

Bracken will facilitate workshops to create art that includes digital design, animation, performance, and projection mapping that will be shown both inside and outside of the centre.

Learn more about this project
2020-2021

Willoughby Arevelo and Isabelle Kirouac

Kitsilano Community Centre

Join the Art & Fungi Project, a living laboratory where everyone is invited to participate in fun activities and create artwork inspired by fungi and their many ecological roles that help to shape and connect our world.

This project is led by Willoughby Arevalo, a mycologist, visual artist, and kitchen wizard and Isabelle Kirouac, an interdisciplinary choreographer and movement educator. We will use our senses to connect with each other and with nature; walking, cooking, moving, drawing, writing, talking, mapping, gardening, playing, and much more. The land informs our bodies, and our bodies inform the land. We strive to emulate the fungi, whose mycelia create vast underground networks that interconnect beings across ecosystems to facilitate communication and exchange.

Through creating art that emerges from our encounters with fungal life, we strive to be active participants in our ecosystem, learning, listening, and responding to it.

Learn more about this project

Lori Snyder and Laura Cisneros

Hastings Community Centre

Build relationship to this land, and learn about Indigenous plants, foods, and medicines with Indigenous herbalist Lori Snyder and art historian and writer Laura Cisneros.

Through plant walks, art workshops, and gatherings we will explore the land around the Hastings Community Centre, New Brighton Beach (aka Khanahmoot) Hastings Community Park, and the Hasting Park Sanctuary.

Throughout the seasons participants will be invited to creatively investigate various plant life through painting, plant dyes, collage, photography, video, and poetry.

Learn which plants are Indigenous flora, which we can eat, make medicines, dyes, and tools with and which are simply enjoyed for their beauty. Preserve and expand this knowledge in collaboration and solidarity with different species, cultures and generations.

Learn more about this project
2019

Earthand Gleaners Society

Strathcona Community Centre

Times are tough, and it can seem like the things we want are out of reach, voices choked off. But with a little inspiration, some knack and some folks sharing skills and tools, we can at least make our own stuff, and lift up our stories.

What do you think is beautiful, helpful, useful, in Strathcona? How can we make more of it, amplify it, bring it to life? EartHand Gleaners Society is a group of artists and educators who use a community-engaged model for creating environmental art projects with opportunities for research, skill development and skill sharing.

You bring the ideas and helping hands, EartHand artists will bring the skills & expertise: photography, printmaking, pigments and natural dyes, sewing, weaving, carving, flintknapping, and more. Meet cool people, learn some new skills, and join the project.

Learn more about this project

Popcorn Galaxies

Mount Pleasant Community Centre

Explore Mount Pleasant with Popcorn Galaxies, a growing collaboration between June Fukumura and Keely O'Brien. Popcorn Galaxies is all about re-enchanting the everyday world through theatre.

Using unconventional structures and a DIY aesthetic, this project attempts to illuminate the mundane by juxtaposing it with the unexpected and to test the thresholds between imagination and reality, life, and theatre.

For this Artists in Communities residency, Popcorn Galaxies will be facilitating a number of free public workshops, classes, and larger scale projects that engage with the history, landscape, and stories of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

Learn more about this project

Cambium Arts

Carnegie Community Centre

Join Cambium Arts Collective as we explore and celebrate the vibrant connections across community, time, and place in the Downtown Eastside.

Centring low barrier art creation and inviting in playfulness and cultural exchange, artists Amal Rana and Erv Newcombe create a welcoming environment to nurture the creative impulse in diverse communities.

Together we'll locate the DTES community within its history while collectively envisioning its future through public workshops, community mapping, storytelling, sculpture, poetry, art making through everyday objects, and more.

Key questions we will explore: What are the daily celebrations and triumphs of the DTES? What's changing and why? What future do people envision for themselves/this place?

Learn more about this project
2017-2018

Super Bloomers

Renfrew Community Centre / Renfrew Ravine

Join this dynamic team of artists as they explore, make, and grow through the seasons in actions inspired by the Renfrew Ravine. They'll be hosting picnics, pop-up pollinator gardens, ravine walks, and hands-on art-making with natural materials.

Superbloom aim is to create a web of deep connections among people and plants that make the neighborhood resilient and beautiful. Consider this residency a collective love-letter to the Renfrew Ravine: its ferns, flowers, bees, butterflies, birds, frogs, fungi and more!

Our motto is "be brave, be kind, be green!" Led by artist Lori Wiedenhammer who on occasion likes to dress up in silly costumes and talk to bees!

Learn more and join us for workshops

Beat a path

West Point Grey Community Centre / Jericho

Explore the West Point Grey Community Centre and surrounding geography in unique and unexpected ways with artist, educator, and curator, Holly Schmidt.

This project will explore the social, cultural and historical forces shaping the West Point Grey community of tomorrow through dialogue and exchange.

Community members will practice the art of taking notice through a year of exciting and inviting events including workshops, walks, momentary exchanges and communal eating as a way to see the urban landscape of our everyday lives anew.

Find out more about this project

wayfinding // wandering

Sunset Community Centre / Sunset Rink / Moberly Arts Centre

Using the senses, wayfinding // wandering will get curious about the spaces between and within Sunset Community Centre, Sunset Ice Rink, and Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre.

With a pop-up approach, artists Matthew Ariaratnam and Julie Hammond invite community members of all ages to investigate how spaces shape us as individuals and as a community.

This project uses a de-skilled and re-skilled approach to creating physical and ephemeral artworks.

Together we will walk, play, listen, see, read, touch, smell, taste and share!

Learn more and join us for workshops

Birds in Residence

Coal Harbour / West End Community Centre / Barclay Manor

Birds in Residence celebrates our winged relatives, from songbirds to birds of prey to waterfowl in Coal Harbour and the West End. Artists Paula Jardine, Carmen Rosin, Cathy Stubington, and Robi Smith invite community to explore the birds who live in and fly through our neighbourhoods, reflecting on ideas of home and migration.

Along the way we'll deepen our relationship with the birds we live with, through nature walks, drawing, mapping, listening, movement, and song, and more, combining the insights and talents of artists, biologists, ornithologists and amateur bird enthusiasts!

This project will connect to broader community as part of the grand parade opening the 27th International Ornithological Congress and Vancouver International Bird Festival, August 19 - 26, 2018.

Learn more and join us for workshops
2016-2017

Yarn-Around

Roundhouse Community Centre (2017)

Explore the intersection of dance, yarn and collective narratives all over the Roundhouse Community Centre. This curious project will have all ages investigate, play and move using brightly colored yarn to animate railings, chairs, shrubs, and landscape architecture.

Community members will create, invent and share impromptu performances in ways that will surprise and delight you as a participant and audience member. Join us.

This artist in community project is led by Foolish Operations in collaboration with artists Julie Lebel, Carolina Bergonzoni and Diane Park .

For more information on how to get involved visit the Yarn-Around website.

Kerrisdale Arena Rock!

Kerrisdale Arena (2016/2017)

Rocking and rolling through November 2016 to June 2017, artists Lisa g Nielsen and Rene Cherrie will fuse sound and image to explore the exciting history of Kerrisdale Arena.

Community members will be invited to collaborate with stories, visions, music, art, and more to create an immersive video and sound installation within the arena itself.

Find Rene and Lisa creating real-time in the arena's "living room" or in their mobile projection/sound studio at other locations in the community.

Connect with and track the progress of this project

Box of Light: An artistic community inquiry at Britannia

Britannia Community Centre (2016/2017)

We see the collective consciousness of the community to be like a box of light.

Inside this box are many ideas, understandings, wisdom, stories, and knowledge that light the community from within. Sometimes this box gets messy or we forget what is inside, and we need to open it up.

This collaboration between poet/multi-media artist Ronnie Harris and Expressive Arts Therapist/community artist Kelty McKerracher will open the community box of light through multiple ideation processes with diverse community groups.

Learn more about this project
2015-2016

Working Holiday Project

Dunbar Community Centre (2015/2016)

A socially oriented art project that aims to engage the Dunbar community in a collaborative exploration into what constitutes a holiday.

Artists Elisa Yon, Leah Weinstein, and Jaspal Marwah bring a diverse range of art practices in: sculpture, textiles, crafts, performance, site specific installations, socially engaged art, and architecture.

Over the course of the fall, winter, spring, and summer, the artists will present a series of "season specific" art interventions, in response to traditional holidays as well as everyday self-made holidays.

Hands-on crafting activities, artist walks, participatory art installations, pop-up interventions, and food based collaborations are just some of the ways the artists will engage community members in a collective reimagining of what constitutes a holiday.

Follow the Working Holiday project

UpCYCLED Stories

Mount Pleasant Community Centre (2015/2016)

Join filmmaker, musician, artist, and Emily Carr University instructor, Sarah Van Borek, in the creation of a unique, 3-part movie that has music and dance components and that tells the story of the Mount Pleasant community using a focus on bikes and cycling as artistic inspiration, art materials (recycled bike parts), and public presentations.

Mount Pleasant community members of all ages, backgrounds, and skill levels are invited to explore their neighbourhood while contributing to various aspects of the project, including: storytelling, video/animation, music, dance, and sound. The project will be presented to the public in 4 stages, each at a bike pedal-powered pop-up projection nearby the Mount Pleasant Community Centre.

This project will begin in September 2015 and end with a celebration and premiere screening of the final movie at an outdoor "bike-in" the following September.

Learn more about UpCYCLEd Stories

Free Imagination

Thunderbird Community Centre (2015/2016)

An art project that invites and unites the Thunderbird community in the creation of a mural that will inspire and celebrate imagination.

The goal of the project is to engage with residents, young and old, and be part of a creative process through participation, informational sessions, and painting workshops. Emily Gray is a muralist and art instructor who is passionate about inspiring individuals and communities. When we are all together making beautiful things life is beautiful.

Emily Gray creates dynamic compositions that allow viewers to flow through the paintings and experience art on a larger scale. With simple and effective application of paint a space can be transformed. The creative possibilities are endless when we connect and set free our imaginations.

Learn more about Free Imagination

Magic Trout Imaginarium

Trout Lake Community Centre (2015/2016)

A project based out of the Tiny Community Center – the first "tiny house" ever used as a community classroom and artist residency.

As a curiosity cabinet with a modern twist, artists Zee Kesler , Emily Smith , and Françoise Thibault will explore art making as a means of self expression in order to create a new understanding and appreciation of Trout Lake's natural ecology, environment, and neighbourhood as a place of wonder and inspiration.

Learn more about the Magic Trout Imaginarium

Learn about the Tiny Community Centre
2012-2014

Songs for Reconciliation

Hillcrest, Britannia, Hastings, and Trout Lake community centres (2013/2014)

Community members learned about the traditional upbringing of children in Kwakwaka'wakw culture through language, song, dance, art, and history.

The project culminated in a public community performance at Trout Lake Community Centre on National Aboriginal Day, June 21, 2014.

Visit the project blog

Learn about the City of Vancouver's Year of Reconciliation

Are there trout in Trout Lake

Trout Lake Community Centre (2012)

Anthony involved the Trout Lake community through discussion, play, and stories.

"I don't make 'art objects' but instead prefer to work with people, using art to encourage conversations and develop events that can continue on in myths and stories, linking the diverse community together in shared memories," he explains.

Visit the project blog

Our Footprint

Renfrew Park Community Centre (2012)

Something Collective led an interdisciplinary approach to explore the Renfrew neighbourhood.

Friends and neighbours created an interactive, map through dance, video, soundscapes, green graffiti, puppetry, and photographs that marked their favourite spots.

Habitats

Kensington Community Centre (2012)

Dance artists Julia Carr, Meghan Goodman, and puppeteer Maggie Winston created a unique, site-specific performance experience that animated the Kensington Community Centre in an open house celebration.

Community members were invited to participate as performers and audience members to explore what makes a healthy habitat.

Together, the artists and community represented this healthy habitat through puppetry and dance.

Visit the Kensington Art blog