Arnie Guha, Chief Innovation Officer at Phase5, is the multidisciplinary creative behind Acid4Yuppies, which focuses on experiential art works—from illuminated light boxes and electric murals, to psychedelics-inspired scarves and fine art prints. Guha’s ‘trippy’ works are complemented by an extensive body of minimalistic photography and portraiture. From vivid colours to subdued hues, Guha’s practice explores both realms of the visual experience from extreme intensity to soft suggestion.
@arnie_guha
acid4yuppies.com

Jess Riva Cooper is the Gardiner Museum’s 2026 Artist in Residence. Cooper’s artistic practice centers on clay as a material through which ecological narratives, mythologies, and human–non-human entanglements can be expressed. Working through hand-built ceramic sculpture, drawing, slips, and glazes, she creates hybrid forms in which botanical growth infiltrates, overtakes, or merges with architectural and bodily fragments.
@jessrivacooper

Beckie Di Leo is a practicing fine artist and fashion illustrator and the Creative Director of the 6IX Academy, Fashion/Arts Entrepreneurship program. She is a highly acclaimed fashion illustrator and has led the march within the bespoke live fashion illustration industry. Her client list is extensive (Balenciaga, Dior, Mercedes, Rogers), and she has performed at TIFF events, fashion weeks, and fundraising galas.
@beckiedileo

Photo: Tara Noelle

The physical world is underrated. Sitting with a thought matters more than scrolling past it. Craft is a form of resistance. In a past life at Tokyo Smoke, we gave people a new way to see cannabis. At Google, I saw what happens when information becomes free — and what people choose to do with it. At Arcana, we made the wilderness feel urgent again. Alan Gertner lives in Toronto with his family. He works with clay, code, vending machines, and whatever else the world demands. He has lived all over the world. The sky is beautiful everywhere. Don’t forget to look up.
@claymachineglow
claymachineglow.com

Natalie King is a queer interdisciplinary Anishinaabe (Algonquin) artist and member of Timiskaming First Nation. Working across painting, installation, video, and sculpture, her practice explores cultural survival, kinship, memory, and the radiant cycles of life and death within Anishinaabe cosmologies. Often depicting queer and Two-Spirit kin, King embraces multiplicity and ambiguity within contemporary Anishinaabeg experience. Her work operates from a critical, anti-colonial, and future-facing perspective, reclaiming presence through desire, sensual memory, and survivance.
@natalielauraking
natalielauraking.com

Photo: Rita Taylor, Banff Centre

Dre Ngozi is a DJ, multidisciplinary artist, music producer, host, and consultant known for her fearless, genre-fluid sound. Canadian-raised with Trinidadian and Nigerian roots, Dre moves effortlessly through global club, house, bass, and afro-house — delivering high-energy sets rooted in culture and connection. She has headlined major stages including The Cavalcade of Lights, TIFF Boombox, and AGO Massive, and opened for artists such as Majid Jordan, Teyana Taylor, and The Internet.
@drengozi
drengozi.com

Véronique Sunatori’s work explores memory, material continuity, and embodied storytelling through ceramics, sculpture and installation. She holds an MFA from York University (2018) and a BFA from Concordia University (2014). Her research interests include care-based methodologies, diasporic poetics, and the reparative gestures of craft.
@vero.suna
veronique.sunatori.com

Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New Haven. She explores how histories of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions. Zhang’s recent work investigates the surface as a charged site where connections between the decorative, ornamentation, cinematic surfaces, and skin are projected, learned, and inherited. Working across imagery and materials such as light, metal, found objects, and glass, she explores how these surfaces operate as perceptual thresholds.

@shelliezhang
shelliezhang.com