Justine A. Chambers wins 2025 VIVA Award, while Lorna Brown receives 2025 Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize
Dance artist has explored gesture and her Black matrilineal heritage, while curator has made her mark at Artspeak Gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and far beyond
Portraits of Lorna Brown (left) and Justine A. Chambers. Photos by Rachel Topham
THE JACK AND DORIS Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts has just announced Vancouver dance artist and educator Justine A. Chambers as the winner of the 2025 VIVA Award. Lorna Brown, an artist, curator, and writer who has held director and curator positions at Artspeak Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, will receive the 2025 Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize.
Both are set to receive their honours at a ceremony at the Vancouver Art Gallery on March 11.
Chambers will debut The Brutal Joy in a Dance Centre and PuSh International Performing Arts Festival copresentation on February 5 and 6; like much of her recent work, it draws on her Black matrilineal heritage, evoking a Chicago jazz bar and referencing everything from fashion to line dancing. Chambers explored gesture, rhythm, and the physicality of resistance movements in her Laurie Young collaboration One Hundred More. And her site-specific Family Dinner project looked at the social cues and gestures of conversations around a table.
Justine Chambers’s The Brutal Joy. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography
The longtime figure on the local dance scene has performed extensively in gallery contexts, including at Western Front, the Contemporary Art Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. She was the recipient of the Lola Dance Award in 2017, the Chrystal Dance Prize in both 2017 and 2023, and was long-listed for the Sobey Art Award in 2023.
“Justine A. Chambers’ work demonstrates a rare integration of technical rigor, conceptual depth, and emotional resonance, expanding the framework for contemporary dance practice while remaining deeply rooted in embodied experience,” the VIVA Awards jury said in its announcement today. “Beyond her creative output, Chambers has made a significant impact as a collaborator, mentor, and cultural contributor, fostering meaningful artistic exchange within diverse communities within and beyond the performing and visual arts. Their leadership and generosity have strengthened the contemporary art and dance ecosystem, supporting emerging voices while elevating the field as a whole.”
Lorna Brown, meanwhile, is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects who served as director-curator of the artist-run centre Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004. Independent curatorial projects have spanned the billboard project Digital Natives, with Clint Burnham; Group Search: Art in the Library; and editing Ruins in Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. Between 2015 and 2022, she was acting director-curator at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, with key exhibitions including Beginning With the Seventies, which investigated the relationship between art, archives, and activism. As an artist, she currently has an installation showing in the Edge Effects exhibition on at the new Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum at SFU Burnaby; called Vancouver easements, it includes a large-scale wall drawing, soft sculptures, and a sound work. Her art is also in the collections of the Belkin, SFU Galleries, the National Gallery of Canada, the Surrey Art Gallery, and more. Brown received the VIVA Award in 1996, the Canada Council Paris Studio Award in 2000, and an honourary doctorate of letters from the then-Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2015.
A detail of the installation Vancouver easements by Lorna Brown at the Gibson Art Museum’s Edge Effects. Photo by Rachel Topham
The Balkind Prize jury said in its announcement today: “We recognize Lorna Brown for her outstanding contribution to curatorial innovation, scholarly research and critical reassessment of institutional forms. Her commitment to social change, demonstrated through her mentorship within cultural institutions and her mobilization of archives, has established a framework for artists and curators to build upon.”
The VIVA Award was established in 1988 by Jack and Doris Shadbolt as an annual prize awarded to mid-career B.C. visual artists. The 2025 VIVA Award jury consisted of Jesse Birch, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Anne Low, Cindy Mochizuki, and Jan Wade.
Meanwhile, the Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize is a biannual award to recognize excellence in the field of curating in the visual arts. The 2025 jury for the prize consisted of Bopha Chhay, Rhys Edwards, and Charo Neville.
Admission is free for the awards ceremony, but an RSVP is required at the link here.
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