Burnaby's Karen Zalamea wins the 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award out of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

The local artist explores issues of identity, culture, and memory through photography

BURNABY-BASED ARTIST, educator, and cultural worker Karen Zalamea has won the 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award out of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

The photography prize, formerly biennial, is now given annually to any mid-career Canadian artist advancing the field of contemporary photography. It comes with a fully funded four-week residency at Banff Centre’s Leighton Artist Studios, worth more than $7,000.

Born in Vancouver, Zalamea uses photography to explore issues of identity, culture, and memory.

Karen Zalamea, *Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas)* (series), 2024–ongoing. Cyanotype on watercolour paper. Photo courtesy the artist

Zalamea intends to use the time and resources provided at Banff Centre to pursue cyanotypes—a camera-less technique that results in the negative of an object placed directly on a light-sensitive substrate under daylight, named after the cyan colour of the exposed areas. According to a release, Zalamea’s cyanotypes created at Banff Centre, part of her ongoing series Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas), explore “the history of Spanish colonial botany in the Philippines, investigating how plant life is enmeshed with identity and place as well as the colonial practices of knowledge extraction, scientific survey, and botanical illustration”.

Past winners of the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award include Anna Binta Diallo and Logan MacDonald (2021), Lotus L. Kang and Lorna Bauer (2018), Elise Rasmussen (2016), Colin Miner (2013), Celia Perrin Sidarous (2011), Maegan Hill-Carroll (2009), Ramona Ramlochand (2007), Justin Waddell (2005), Dianne Bos (2005) and David McMillan (2004), among others.

The 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award gave an honourable mention to Korean-Canadian artist Minwoo Lee.

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Gail Johnson

Gail Johnson is cofounder of Stir. She is a Vancouver-based journalist who has earned local and national nominations and awards for her work. She is a certified Gladue Report writer via Indigenous Perspectives Society in partnership with Royal Roads University and is a member of a judging panel for top Vancouver restaurants.

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