2026 Artists
Get to know this year’s featured artists.
Brendon Ehinger (he/him) is a self-taught multi-instrumentalist and sound artist living on Treaty 2 territory (Brandon Manitoba). Performing under the moniker A Moon Shape Noise, Ehinger uses modular synthesis and time based effects to manipulate traditional instruments, live audio input, and field recordings, creating expansive semi-improvised soundscapes in real time. Blurring the line between sound art and musical performance his work explores themes of acoustic ecology and his own positionality in relation to identity, land, territory, and the environment. Brendon has performed solo and collaboratively in alternative spaces, galleries, and venues across Canada, the US, and Europe. He is also the founding director of Prairie Wires Modular, a recurring experimental music festival in Brandon, MB.
Eliza Bagg is an experimental vocalist and composer, performing in boundary-pushing work around the globe from the Concertgebouw to Carnegie Hall. She has soloed with major symphonies including the NY and LA Philharmonics, sung in new operas from the Komische Oper Berlin to Beth Morrison Projects, and premiered work by composers like Ted Hearne, Ellen Reid, Michael Gordon, Chaya Czernowin, and John Zorn. She is a member of vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. Bagg’s compositional work integrates mainstream pop aesthetics with classical vocal styles and historical forms. She received a 2025 FCA Creative Research Grant, has been in residence as a composer at Yaddo and Avaloch Farm, and has released three solo albums. She has created multiple opera-theatre projects for REDCAT's NOW Festival and Wild Up, and has performed her innovative work for processed voice and electronics at institutions such as Lincoln Center, Big Ears Festival, Prototype Festival, and the Bemis Center, among others.
After performing her work in New York, Alex Elliott and Hurricane Sandy came face to face. Physically demanding and emotionally charged, her work made it back to her hometown of Winnipeg and beyond. Her dances have been presented in New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Regina, and Halifax. Alex thanks Tedd Robinson for his ecstasy charged commission Logarian Rhapsody. She is the Artistic Director of her own company Alexandra Elliott Dance, as well as Art Holm, a multidisciplinary performance series in Winnipeg, and the Executive Director of Young Lungs Dance Exchange.
Justine Erickson is a Winnipeg based dancer, and a proud member of the Red River Métis Nation. She graduated from the School of Contemporary Dancers, and completed her BA Honours majoring in Dance at the University of Winnipeg. She has performed with companies such as Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, Alexandra Elliott Dance in Winnipeg, NAfro Dance Productions in Winnipeg, and New Dance Horizons in Regina. With two of her sisters, she is a founding member of The Eriksson Collective; in 2022 they co-created four short dance films exploring Métis family roots and the absences of material culture through museum collections in Scotland. She recently performed alongside their completed film in Auckland, New Zealand.
Andrés Jiménez Mejía is a contemporary dancer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1999. Andrés started his formal dance training in Colombia at the age of 17 with contemporary dance and ballet. He is a 2022 graduate of The School of Contemporary Dancers Senior Professional Program and he has a Bachelor of Arts in Dance at the University of Winnipeg. Andrés danced with Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers from 2022 - 2023 in projects such as "Emerging artist initiative" and Idan Cohen's "Looking Glass”. He has been dancing with Alexandra Elliott Dance since 2024. His interest in dance comes from an urge to express emotions and create atmospheres that will make the participant feel part of the artistic experience.
Casey Koyczan is a Dene multidisciplinary artist from Yellowknife, NT, that uses various mediums to communicate how culture and technology can grow together in order for us to develop a better understanding of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. He creates with whatever tools necessary to bring an idea to fruition, and works mostly with sculpture, installation, 3D/VR/AR/360, video, and audio to create music, soundscapes and film scores. He is an international artist that has participated in many residencies, exhibits, festivals and collaborations in parts of the world such as Finland, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, The Netherlands, USA, UK and Italy at the Venice Biennale. He is also a musician, producer, filmmaker, actor/narrator, and advocate for future generations of artists and musicians.
Zoë LeBrun (she/they) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist of settler descent from and practicing on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They earned their BFA (Honours) from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba in 2023. LeBrun’s process-based practice is rooted in the exploration of video, installation, sound art, and painting. These materials and processes embody metaphors of lived experience and bodily function, through which she seeks to better understand the human condition. By relying on experimentation, the works she creates reveal themselves over time, making the artistic processes behind them indivisible from the metaphysical core of LeBrun’s practice.
Brandon Miguel Valdivia has emerged as one of the most prolific and respected musicians in Canada working as a drummer and multi-instrumentalist over the past twenty years. He has worked with artists such as Polaris Prize Winner Lido Pimienta, Polaris Prize Winner Jeremy Dutcher, U.S. Girls, Not the Wind, Not the Flag, Laaraji, Arnold Dreyblatt, amongst others. Mas Aya is the name of his solo project for which he has garnished international acclaim with releases on Telephone Explosion Records and Shika Shika receiving warm critical reception from such sources as Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, CBC, the New York Times and more. His music merges jazz, electronic and Latin traditions creating an eclectic, unclassifiable music teeming with subtle contradiction and restless intruige.
Tanja Faylene Woloshen has been traversing the transformative style of Butoh dance around the planet for decades. Her dance works explore the somatic imagination, and how our bodies are storehouses for history, memory, and dreams. She is the only Butoh dance artist in Winnipeg. Her dance works explore ecology and posthumanism. Under her experimental moniker ÓFukami, Keri Latimer explores theremin transmissions from imagined futures—shadowy signals, melodic fragments, and sci-fi–tinged soundscapes. Her music blends prairie-rooted storytelling with dreamlike, off-kilter textures. Keri is known as the voice behind the alt-folk project Leaf Rapids, and the Juno-winning band Nathan.
Starting as a one-off pairing for a small gallery show in early 2019, the Calgary based duo of Laura Reid (violin) and Krzysztof Sujata (synthesizer and keys) quickly grew in activity. From starting recording in the summer and a mini-tour that fall, to an abrupt hiatus in the fall of 2020 amid life changes and a global pandemic, Osmanthus felt like the right project that began at the wrong time. A few years on, having released their debut album in 2024, they’re back in the studio working on new material and performing their new live piece, Lanie Wosku. Together they straddle the line between acoustic and electronic music, and accentuate how truly insignificant the distinction between the two worlds is.
PRINCESS DASHA is a Winnipeg-based artist working with performance, sound, and video. Highlights include performances for Cluster Festival, Nuit Blanche, Young Lungs Dance Exchange, Art Holm, WNDX Festival (where her performance Etudes for Keyboard received Best New Prairie Work), and send+receive (where she performed on a bill with internationally renowned computer musician Carl Stone). As a sound designer and composer she has worked with the Buddies in Bad Times, Stratford Festival, Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Cercle Molière, Theatre Projects Manitoba, Mammalian Diving Reflex, OneTrunk Theatre, Frances Koncan, Waawaate Fobister, Debbie Patterson, and Alexandra Elliott. Dasha is also one half of We Quit Theatre, a nationally touring performance collective with Gislina Patterson. She is a proud member of IATSE local ADC659, and a professional audio describer with VIEW Winnipeg.
Gage Salnikowski is a multi-instrumentalist composer, sound artist, and performer, based in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada on Treaty One Territory. As an autodidactic proficient in over 50 different instruments, Salnikowski’s work seeks to undermine the dichotomy between the colloquial and cultural academia. Embracing the avant-garde towards sublimation of the visceral and brutalist. Through merzbau of sound art installation, input reactive live coding, circumventive scoring and performance techniques, Salnikowski plunders and corrupts the technicality he has honed through years as a music educator for decidedly anti-academic results. A diptych of the absurd and accessible, Salnikowski’s work is equally at home performed in local bars as it is art galleries.
Kerrigan Salnikowski, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, sound artist, performer, and maker of instruments based in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada on Treaty One Territory. Salnikowski’s work seeks to convey ideas and emotions that could never be expressed through tonality or conventional instruments, by creating and manipulating sounds never before heard; achieved through the development of his own instruments, the use of objects and architecture as resonators, foley techniques, “found sounds”, electroacoustics, granular synthesis, percussive implements, and bowed objects, finding beauty in dissonance and discordance. Kerrigan Salnikowski is also a seasoned drummer, performer, and improviser in Winnipeg's music scene, having performed and toured with multiple local acts for over a decade.
Savant Flaneur is an avant-garde chamber collective working in sound, installation, and collaborative artistic practices on Treaty 1 Territory. Led by Nathan Krahn and Gage Salnikowksi, Savant Flaneur belongs equally in dive bars as in prestigious galleries. Often referred to as “chamber punk,” Savant Flaneur expels the dichotomy between western art music and colloquial music scenes. The goal looks to reconcile and adapt the concept of “Art Music” to a general public. Savant Flaneur is the idle virtuosi, ambivalent wunderkind, aimless and gifted.
The SunDog Ensemble is a rotating cast of musical creators exploring sound across genres, beamed into existence by Canadian pianist and songwriter Theresa Thordarson. The current lineup features Theresa on keys and vocals, composer/clarinetist Christopher Byman, multi-disciplinary guitarist John Himes, and jazz-adjacent guitarist/creator Ava Glendinning in a program including new and lesser-heard classical works, folk/pop music, and jazz non-standards.
In a career spanning 30 plus years, Jason has played drums for such acts as The Weakerthans, Bahamas, Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think. 2019 found Jason stepping away from the drumset to focus on Electronic Music.
Chimwemwe Undi is a poet, writer and editor based on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her debut full-length collection, Scientific Marvel (House of Anansi Press, 2024) won the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. She is Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate for 2025 and 2026.