EMERGING DIGITAL ARTISTS AWARD 2025
In partnership with EQ Bank
January 7-31, 2026
Laura Caraballo
Alex Gibson
Eva Grant
Cadin Londono
Kahani Ploessl
The Emerging Digital Artists Award is an annual celebration of creativity and experimentation in digital media. Now in its 11th year, the prize recognizes the exceptional talents of emerging artists in Canada working at the forefront of the genre, highlighting the dynamic ways in which digital tools and technologies expand artistic practice.
This year’s exhibition presents the work of five remarkable artists that embrace the limitless nature of digital media, whether uncovering new possibilities for our physical bodies, revitalizing artforms that connect across cultures and geographies, honouring connections to “home” amidst feelings of dislocation, or employing glitch as a necessary tool for spiritual transformation. As recipients of the 2025 prize, each artist pushes the boundaries of their distinct medium, including still image, animation, game art, extended reality, and installation. Together, their works offer a snapshot of our current moment, including what to hold on to from the past and what to alter, shift, or destroy to move thoughtfully into the future.
Artist Bios
Eva Grant is a St̓át̓imc-Eurasian filmmaker, writer and artist based in BC whose work is grounded in archive, interface, and ecology. She has held fellowships and residencies through the Sundance Institute, imagineNATIVE, Artengine, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. A technological Trickster of the Indigital realm, she prototypes near-worlds, capacious futures, and their imagined implements. She studied philosophy and literature at Stanford University and is the founder of Tooth & Nail Pictures.
Alex Gibson is a Barbadian Canadian interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC). They use images and archives as sites to examine queer spaces, temporalities, and architectures. Gibson holds an MFA from UBC, and their work has been exhibited in Barbados, Canada, Italy, Poland, and the United States.
Cadin Londono is a Colombian game developer born in Medellin, Colombia and based in Tio’Tia:ke (Montreal). His interest in coding began from a young age, watching his father code his own games in his free time. Cadin released his first videogame at age eighteen and is now busy creating videogames that look at life through an anticolonial lens. He holds a BA from McGill University with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Philosophy.
Laura Caraballo is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bacatá [Bogotá] and based in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]. Her work uses technology to reimagine and create interactive, sensorial physical and virtual spaces that revisit the past and question its role in shaping Latinx futurist aesthetics and narratives. Laura is particularly interested in how we shape, and are shaped by, the spaces we inhabit within a temporal context, while exploring themes of home, memory, and consciousness.
Kahani (कहानी) Ploessl is a dimension-bending tech artist based in Markham, ON. Her work in generative, videogame, and installation art explores notions of the glitch and digital spiritualism. Guided by her Indian heritage, Kahani draws parallels between the cosmic philosophy of Hinduism and the pixelated manifestations of digital realms and avatar bodies. Her work considers the glitch as a purposeful gesture that can push our digital experiences away from their current structures and functions into experimental and transformative models for being.