Banff Artist in Residence - Summer 2026

Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer whose work ranges widely across media. Her work adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. Koh's ongoing projects include the Slow Fashion Season, an initiative encouraging sustainability in textiles and clothing; the Home Made Home initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing; and the League project focused on play as a form of creative practice. Koh received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2023 and was a 2023-24 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. She served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20 and the 2021 Koerner Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia, where she is now an Assistant Professor in Visual Art. 

https://germainekoh.com

Director and Associate Professor in the School of Craft & Emerging Media at the Alberta University of the Arts. Mackenzie received his MFA in 2005 from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University and his BFA in 1998 from Alberta College of Art & Design. His ongoing research focuses on collaboration with material that considers our co-evolution with plants and animals who provide the fibre we use to make cloth; and the communities and relationships required to sustain this activity. He has exhibited his work internationally, and participated in residencies at the Icelandic Textile Centre in Blönduós and the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland Oregon. His writing includes texts for Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture and VAV Magazine. Mackenzie lives in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Canada with husband Kristofer and daughter Elizabeth.

Fulbright Scholar Basia Irland is an artist, author, and activist who creates international large-scale water projects featured in her books Water Library (University of New Mexico Press) and Reading the River: The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland (Museum De Domijnen, the Netherlands). A monograph, Basia Irland, Repositories: Portable Sculptures for Waterway Journeys, is authored by Patricia Watts. Texas A & M University Press published What Rivers Know: Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways in 2025 with 210 color images. Irland is professor emerita, Department of Art, University of New Mexico, where she founded the Art & Ecology Program. Her website, basiairland.com, contains extensive documentation, including collaborations with scientists, projects along the entire length of waterways, ephemeral Ice Book series, portable Repositories, waterborne disease scrolls, essays about global rivers, and images from her large museum retrospective in the Netherlands. Her art has been featured in over seventy international publications.

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles area based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation, and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects, and impacted subjectivities. Learning Endings, her collaboration with Astrida and Aleksija Neimanis, is a multi-part interdisciplinary research project that surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. Stray Dog Hydrophobia, her most recent project with David Kelley, explores deepsea mining and the entangled histories of extraction from the sea rooted in British colonialism in Jamaica. In addition to numerous awards and fellowships, her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.