Toronto, May 12, 2026 – The Ontario Arts Foundation is pleased to announce the inaugural recipients of the Tom Phillips Prize. Established by the late Thomas Vincent Phillips, these annual awards celebrate emerging Ontario visual artists, media artists and craft artists in recognition and support of their evolving artistic practices. Awards of $10,000 are presented in each of the following disciplines: Drawing, Painting, Installation, Sculpture, Printmaking, Media Arts and Ceramics.
Tom Phillips Prize Recipients
Anna Kavemehr
Tom Phillips Prize in Drawing
Storytelling lies at the heart of Anna’s practice. Her work is driven by a deep fascination with the human condition – exploring inner struggles, interpersonal dynamics, and the quiet complexities of emotion. Raised between cultures, she draws from both Eastern and Western influences, blending the aesthetics of traditional Persian art with her love for alternative music, Gothic literature, and surrealist visual language.
Art has long served as Anna’s refuge, a space to reconcile the dualities within her identity and express subjects often left unspoken, such as mental health and emotional vulnerability.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including shows in Tehran, Kuala Lumpur, Bologna, San Francisco, and Toronto.
Devon Price
Tom Phillips Prize in Painting
Devon’s work incorporates painting, digital concepts, and cinematic themes. His work explores issues of anxiety, the mundane and displacement. Devon is interested in the mechanisms humans use to manipulate their surroundings, and the influence that those measures have on the psyche. His paintings involve experimental renderings of people, places and objects that carry cognitive weight, and are rendered using a thin application of oil paint that allows for an atmospheric and watery quality in the painting. By a process that often crosses digital media with oil painting, the narrative subject matter exists in a balanced space between fabrication and reality.
James Monkman
Tom Phillips Prize in Media Arts
James Monkman is an award-winning Cree visual artist and art director. His work spans multiple different mediums from Virtual Reality, Experience Design, Film, and TV. Creating for these different mediums requires a unique ability to interplay between artistic vision and technical understanding to push the limitations of what’s possible. Monkman’s passion for creating comes out of the need to tell Indigenous stories using cutting edge technologies to dispel stereotypes and show Indigenous ways of knowing and cosmology in his pursuit of an aesthetic with an eye towards Indigenous futurism.
Jonah Strub
Tom Phillips Prize in Sculpture
Jonah Strub is a Toronto-based gay, Jewish artist with a primary focus on sculptural ceramics. His work is a love letter to camp, kitsch, musical theatre, Yiddish humour, and drag, allowing him to explore his own femininity through the humour of traditionally queer and Jewish aesthetics. He dives into themes like glamorous Jewish grandmothers, flamboyant creatures, and self-portraiture, often layering his face onto the creations, blending over-the-top patterns with exuberant, joyful imagery to celebrate kitsch.
Jude Akrey
Tom Phillips Prize in Printmaking
Jude Akrey is a white, trans, Autistic artist living on Between the Lakes Treaty Territory No.3 (Guelph, ON). Working across printmaking, painting, and community-engaged methodologies, their work explores and represents facets of Autistic experience. Through formal exploration of framing devices, gesture, and colour, they offer a more comprehensive depiction of Autism and the dynamics of coping in a neurotypical world. They are committed to investigating the power of empowered communities through shared learning and community-engaged artmaking. Jude holds a BA (Honours) in Studio Art from the University of Guelph. In 2023, they were selected as the City of Guelph 10th Annual Artist-in-Residence, and their project From One Queer to Another received the Warren Garrett Inclusive Programming Award through Ontario Culture Days.
Marina Van Raay
Tom Phillips Prize in Ceramics
Marina Van Raay is a Canadian-Japanese ceramic artist based in Hamilton, Ontario. She is a graduate of the Craft and Design Bachelor’s program at Sheridan College and is currently a full-time artist in residence at Harbourfront Centre. Her passion for clay and deep appreciation for craftsmanship was sparked by her father, who introduced her to pottery in 2016. Born in Japan, Van Raay moved to Canada at the age of five. Through her work, she explores the cultural experiences that have shaped her life, focusing on themes of nostalgia, identity, and memory, often evoking feelings of innocence and optimism through her design, process, and decoration.
Nami Ueno
Tom Phillips Prize in Installation
Nami Ueno is a visual artist from Japan whose practice explores the impact of beliefs, memories, and societal and cultural influences on personal experience and reality. Working across installation and drawing, she uses paper as a metaphor for memory, engaging with themes connected to the human body and mental condition. Through an emphasis on vulnerability and fragility, her work reflects an ongoing exploration of reclaiming personal power and transformation. Her recent projects have been shaped by personal loss, further deepening her exploration of memory, presence, and the unseen forces that shape human experience.
About the Awards
The Tom Phillips Prize Fund was established by Thomas Vincent Phillips, a devoted artist who expressed himself in a variety of media including drawing, painting, wood carving, photography and printmaking. Through a bequest, Tom set up the fund to support emerging artists in their evolving artistic mediums as they strive to create personal expressions of the world.
The Ontario Arts Foundation manages the endowment that funds the awards. The Ontario Arts Council is responsible for the selection process. The award recipients are selected through the Ontario Arts Council’s peer assessment process from the applicants to the Ontario Arts Council Creation Projects programs for visual, media and craft artists.
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For information, please contact:
Bruce Bennett, Executive Director
Ontario Arts Foundation
Tel: (416) 969-7413 bbennett@oafdn.ca
Established in 1991, the Ontario Arts Foundation (OAF) is passionately committed to building long-term support for the arts in Ontario. In 2024-2025, the OAF paid $4.8 million in endowment income and 540,000 in awards and grants.
For 60 years, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) has played a vital role in promoting and assisting the development of the arts for the enjoyment and benefit of Ontarians. In 2024-2025, OAC invested its grants program budget of $52.2 million in 204 communities across 123 Ontario ridings, providing 1,960 grants to individual artists and 1,030 grants to organizations.
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