Come to our pizza welcome party!

If you’re a Fine Arts student in Art History & Visual Studies, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing or our School of Music, then you’re invited to our annual Welcome (Back) Pizza Party!

Join us from 4-6pm Thursday, Sept 14, in the Fine Arts courtyard.

Enjoy free pizza, cake, drinks and lawn games, and be sure to enter the prize draw for 5 Fine Arts hoodies (one given to a student in each of our departments).

The Fine Arts teaching faculty & staff will be serving, so swing by and say hi!

Have you signed up for the Sept 5 New Student Orientation?

Wondering what it’s going to be like to be a UVic Fine Arts student? Get a snapshot of your upcoming year while meeting other students at our annual New Student Orientation event!

RSVP now for this free session & get a jump on the semester!

Date: Tuesday, Sept 5
Time: 2pm ~ 4pm (directly following UVic’s Welcome to the Territory event)
Location: Gather at the Phoenix Theatre building

Event description: The Dean of Fine Arts invites all first-year & new transfer undergraduate students in all five of our units (Art History & Visual Studies, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing) to attend this short introduction & overview of the Faculty, including speakers from Fine Arts Academic Advising & Co-op + Careers. You’ll have the chance to ask questions before breaking into groups for short, peer-led departmental orientation sessions and facility tours, plus a brief orientation in our computer labs.

By the end of this session, you’ll know what’s in which of our four buildings, where the faculty cafe is, how to access the computer labs, where to print assignments and art projects, who to talk to about your concerns, and so much more!

Staging an immigrant experience

2022 was a busy year for playwright Thembelihle Moyo, who came to Fine Arts from Zimbabwe as a Visiting Artist in 2021 and currently splits her time between our faculty and UVic’s Equity & Human Rights office.

In addition to being named playwright-in-residence with locals Puente Theatre, seeing her play The Prophetic Place run in Canadian Theatre Review and having a new play The Dark Bridge go into development with Puente and partners at the Arts Club Theatre, Electric Company, Playwrights Theatre Centre and ZeeZee Theatre, Moyo also saw the Phoenix Theatre mount both a staged reading and workshop production of her immigration play, It’s Just Black Hair.

“It’s about the experience of immigrants—especially those from Africa—and the microaggressions that people don’t discuss,” Moyo said during an interview with CBC Radio (above, with host Jason D’Souza). “You might think it’s easy to talk about our hair, our food, the way we think . . . the play talks about all the issues that surround us as people who are trying to get into a new culture.”

A group effort

Directed by Theatre professor Yasmine Kandil, produced by EQHR executive director Cassbreea Dewis and supported by EQHR’s Mandy Suen and Theatre’s Staging Equality research project and professor Sasha Kovacs, It’s Just Black Hair also featured Theatre student Divine Mercy Ezeaku in the lead role.

“About half of it was based on my experience as a new person to Canada,” says Moyo. “I lived in Africa for 39 years and it’s not easy for me to just throw away everything that I came with . . . it takes time for a person to learn a new place.”

Yet while her experiences were very specific, Moyo feels the play offers a universal with which people from many countries can empathize. “I just want people to get to know each other, accept each other, learn from each other. I want to commit to my Canadian lifestyle 100 percent, but I still have my African experiences with me. I just want people to be mindful as I’m learning the ways of Canada.”

Black Hair actors Wendy Magahay & Divine Mercy Ezeaku

Join us for New Student Orientation on Sept 5

Wondering what it’s going to be like to be a UVic Fine Arts student? Get a snapshot of your upcoming year while meeting other students at our annual New Student Orientation event!

RSVP now for this free session & get a jump on the semester!

Date: Tuesday, Sept 5
Time: 2pm ~ 4pm (directly following UVic’s Welcome to the Territory event)
Location: Gather at the Phoenix Theatre building

Event description: The Dean of Fine Arts invites all first-year & new transfer undergraduate students in all five of our units (Art History & Visual Studies, Music, Theatre, Visual Arts, Writing) to attend this short introduction & overview of the Faculty, including speakers from Fine Arts Academic Advising & Co-op + Careers. You’ll have the chance to ask questions before breaking into groups for short, peer-led departmental orientation sessions and facility tours, plus a brief orientation in our computer labs.

By the end of this session, you’ll know what’s in which of our four buildings, where the faculty cafe is, how to access the computer labs, where to print assignments and art projects, who to talk to about your concerns, and so much more!

Climate Disaster Project a finalist in global journalism awards

CDP founder Sean Holman with student Sandra Ibrahim (UVic Photo Services)

We’re thrilled that the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) has been announced as a finalist in the global Covering Climate Now 2023 Journalism Awards, which honour the best coverage of the climate emergency and its solutions.

The CDP has been selected for bringing “the compelling and authentic stories of people in climate disaster–affected communities to the foreground.”

As one of four finalists in the “engagement journalism” category, the CDP’s trauma-informed work with climate disaster-affected communities has been recognized for their recent media partnerships with APTN Investigates, Megaphone and Asparagus magazines, and the Fraser Valley Current newspaper, which include climate survivor stories taken by UVic students Tosh Sherkat, Aldyn Chwelos, Paul Voll and Gage Smith.

Tosh and Aldyn were recently profiled in this article following their appearance on CBC Radio’s What On Earth.

“There are so many people that contributed to this honour,” says Sean Holman, CDP creator and the Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism with the Department of Writing. “Our newsroom is supported by leading journalists, psychologists, social workers, climate scientists and public policy scholars who are working humanize climate coverage . . . . But none of this be possible without the hundreds of students and climate disaster survivors we collaborate with to share and investigate stories of climate disaster. More than anything, this honour from belongs to them.”

Even being named a finalist is a significant honour for the CDP, as other 2023 CCNJA nominees include the likes of the BBC, the Guardian, PBS, Le Monde, Al Jazeera, the Narwhal, CBS, ABC, AP, NY Times Magazine (etc).

Winners will be announced in September at Climate Week NYC (Sept 17-24).

An international teaching newsroom

Working with partner institutions across Canada and around the world, the Climate Disaster Project (CDP) uses the model of an international teaching newsroom in order to train students in trauma-informed journalism techniques to collect, compile and share survivor stories.

The CDP has already had a significant impact since launching in September 2021. To date, Holman and his CDP team of students and recent grads have produced more than 120 stories in collaboration with disaster survivors worldwide.

In the past academic year alone, 136 students were enrolled in CDP-related classes in nine different institutions (including UVic, First Nations University, Mount Royal University and Toronto Metropolitan University), learning about the human impacts of climate change, working to share those experiences with the news media, and investigating common problems and solutions identified by climate disaster survivors.

New partnerships have recently been secured that will soon see the project expanded to Brazil, Hong Kong, Norway, Nepal, Pakistan, and South Africa and the United States.

High-achieving twins both earn the Victoria Medal for their love of writing

Rachel (left) and Sarah Lachmansignh

When it comes to the academic arts experience, it’s easy for undergraduates to lose track of their initial passion as they get caught up in the drive for grades and goals. Yet despite Rachel and Sarah Lachmansingh’s many laudable achievements—including both being named winners of the Victoria Medal, the first time this annual award for the highest GPA in the Faculty of Fine Arts has been presented to two people—these graduating Department of Writing students have never lost sight of the reason why they started writing in the first place.

“At the core of it, writing is love,” says Rachel. “Whether people want to do it as a profession or a hobby, the centre of that creativity is the heart.” Sarah agrees: “Whatever I’m working on, it’s got to be something that I love.”

More than just courses

It’s perhaps not surprising that the Lachmansingh sisters would agree: as identical Guyanese-Canadian twins from Toronto, both decided to move to Victoria together specifically to enroll in UVic’s acclaimed Writing program. Both were double-scholarship winners (Rachel for the Lorna Crozier Scholarship and the WP Kinsella Award in Fiction, Sarah for the Rosalind Hulet Petch Memorial Scholarship in Writing and the Millen Undergraduate Scholarship), both saw their work published off-campus, both were editorially involved with UVic’s long-running undergraduate literary journal This Side of West (TSOW) and both were mentees for the Writers Union of Canada BIPOC Writers Connect program. Ironically, both also won first prize in different categories with the annual UVic Libraries/EQHR on the Verge writing contest during their first year on campus.

“We were walking to a class together when Sarah got an email saying, ‘Congratulations! You won!’ and I thought, ‘Hmm, I wonder if I won too?’ . . . then five seconds later I got an email saying I had won,” laughs Rachel. “That was a fun twin thing for people, because it was a real coincidence we had both won for the same contest.”

A very storied academic journey

In addition to on the Verge, the Lachmansinghs kept more than busy during their studies. Sarah saw her work published in both EVENT and other literary magazines, worked as the fiction intern for The Malahat Review and served as both fiction editor and social media director for TSOW. As well as serving as editor-in-chief and reviews editor for TSOW, Rachel earned national attention as a finalist for the 2022 CBC Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the National Magazine Awards; her writing has been similarly published in the literary likes of Grain, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead and others.

“I’ve published a lot—it’s been really fun trying to balance it all with my studies!” Rachel says with a characteristically quick laugh. “But a bigger goal for me now is just to find a sustainable writing practice that also makes me very happy: being in a writing program, there’s a lot of emphasis on polishing work for publication, but it’s also fun to focus on yourself as a writer, try out things you haven’t done before.”

While Sarah feels her work with TSOW was foundational (“I’ve wanted to be an editor since I was a kid”), she also feels it was significant in helping to build the sense of community for which the Writing program is well known. “It was such a highlight to be able to celebrate students in the early stages of their writing,” she says. “It was a great experience and a big honour for me.” That said, she is looking forward to getting more of her own work out there. “I’m hoping to get the ball rolling a bit more when it comes to publishing . . . I’d like to see about creating a poetry practice for myself.”

An enviable skill set

Both feel their combination of academic work, peer mentorship and professional practice have helped build an enviable skill set that will serve them well going forward. “Funnily enough, one of the basic skills that will help me no matter where I end up is email writing,” laughs Rachel. “As EIC, I learned how to nail that: when you lead a team and run a magazine, there’s a certain level of organizational skills you have to develop, which I’ll carry with me as I continue on in the professional world.”

Now back in Toronto, both feel UVic’s Writing program provided an essential foundation for their future professional growth. “Having the writerly culture in the program and Victoria in general, we felt like we were part of a community, part of a place where we all celebrated reading and writing and being thoughtful,” concludes Sarah. “It was really important in validating us as writers.“

Rachel & Sarah outside UVic’s Writing department in spring 2023