The Artist as Changemaker Residency is an ongoing inquiry. Since the beginning, it has been shaped by a curiosity about what becomes possible when artists are resourced and supported to facilitate meaningful social change in their communities.

 

Between 2025-2026, a cohort of eight socially engaged artists worked alongside eight community partner organizations, each pairing bringing together a different set of questions, communities, and creative approaches.

For these artists, the creative process is the change process. Artists and their partners spend the year building relationships, learning systems change tools, and exploring how the artistic process itself can shift thinking, build trust, and open up new possibilities for the communities they work with. This is work that can take time, is relational, and often uncertain. It asks artists to show up not just as makers but as listeners, collaborators, and co-creators. It asks organizations to make room for the creative process alongside the other tools they bring to community engagement.

Now in its sixth year, the residency continues to be co-designed with the artists who move through it, growing and changing alongside the communities it serves. Meet the eight artists of 2025-2026 below to learn more about their journey and process artifact. Or you can read the full Arist as Changemaker Report via the button below.

 

 

How You Can Engage

This work grows when communities show up. Whether you are an artist, an organizer, a funder, or simply someone who believes in the power of creative practice, there is a place for you here.

CELEBRATE WITH THE ARTISTS

Come to the Creative Process Celebration and connect with the people doing this work

AMPLIFY THE ARTISTS' WORK AND IMPACT

Share this work with people who need to see it

JOIN IN THE WORK

Express your interest in joining a future cohort as an artist or community partner

Meet the Artist as Changemaker

Each artist carries a question, a “How Might We,” that drives their work and ignites change. Their stories are invitations to witness creativity as social transformation.

 

Artist Biography: Adrianne Williams is a multidisciplinary artist, working with themes of urban culture and the individual. Her paintings, installations and video works explore her Caribbean ancestry, while often highlighting ideas of pop culture and culture clash. Williams completed her BFA in Drawing at the Alberta University of the Arts in 2007. She has shown her work in Calgary, Edmonton, Italy and Spain.

Initiative Description: Adrianne is a visual artist whose practice weaves together illustration, community storytelling, and cultural celebration. During her residency, in partnership with United African Diaspora, she engaged with Black Calgarians across Calgary to understand the systems of support, education, and representation that communities are building for one another. Through this, she created a community coloring book that maps the African diasporic presence in Calgary through illustrated neighborhood scenes and activity pages. Designed for children and families, the book transforms mutual aid, cultural price, and collective dreaming into an accessible and joyful artifact that can travel into homes, classrooms, and community spaces. 

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back - Watch Here

 

 

Artist Biography: Born and raised in Panama, Edward Campbell developed his interest in all the arts through his mother. During his high school years, a love for dance and design flourished, pursuing both careers simultaneously as a B-boy and a graphic designer. He attended The University of Panama and completed his bachelor’s degree in their Graphic Design program. In 2003, he founded Fullstyle Family, one of the oldest breaking groups in Panama. Prior to moving to Calgary in 2014, Edward hosted workshops in Panama, Costa Rica, and the United States. Since moving to Calgary, he has joined the crews People’s Militia and Next of Kin. He has kept busy teaching many different studios around Alberta and aims to be a bridge for new dancers to understand, respect and benefit from dance.

Initiative Description: Edward Campbell, in partnership with the Center for Newcomers, designed and piloted a program called Breakin’ Mindsets. The program aimed to engage youth at risk through breakdancing lessons while also fostering life skills, resilience, and a stronger sense of belonging through mentorship and guest speakers. Working with first-and-second generation newcomer youth navigating the intersections of settlement, education, healthcare, and the justice system, Edward used breakdancing as the entry point and built outward from there. Participants moved through dance sessions, financial literacy, self-love, and conversations about accountability and belonging. The program built self-discipline, resilience, and a stronger sense of belonging among participating youth. It created connections between young people who shared similar backgrounds and experiences, and opened conversations about identity, culture, and what it means to build a life in a new place.

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back - Watch Here

 

 

Artist Biography: Natasha Faye Jensen is an interdisciplinary artist from Moh’kins’tsis (Calgary), located in the Treaty 7 territory of Southern Alberta, Canada. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly known as the Alberta College of Art and Design) in 2013, and she completed her Master of Arts (MA) in Contemporary Art Practice at the Edinburgh College of Art in 2020. Natasha has participated in both solo and group exhibitions, as well as festivals in Canada, the United States, Finland, and the United Kingdom.

Initiative Description: Throughout the residency, Natasha Jensen created a zine titled I Used To Be A Mountain to explore how storytelling can inspire deeper engagement with climate and conservation issues. Through extensive research and collaboration with her community partner, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), Natasha examined ways of translating complex information on extraction and conservation efforts into experiences that are more accessible and emotionally resonant with Albertans. Her zine invites readers to reflect on their relationship with Alberta’s landscapes, particularly the Eastern Slopes, and consider how resource development can co-exist alongside conservation efforts to create a more sustainable future. 

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back - Watch Here

• I Used To Be A Mountain Publication

 

 

Artist Biography: Samuel Obadero (he/him) is a Nigerian-Canadian multidisciplinary artist based in Calgary/Mohkínstsis. Founder of Motif Photography and Motif Media Agency, Sam has spent 20+ years crafting portraits and narratives that elevate under-represented communities. An award–winning photographer and arts-administrator, he mentors emerging Black creatives, produces socially engaged exhibitions, and explores the coming together of art, grief and resilience through film and performance.

Initiative Description: Sam Obadero is a photographer whose practice centers on bearing witness and building connection through image. During his residency, he stepped outside his primary medium to engage in deep listening with postpartum mothers, sitting with their stories, their silences, and the emotional terrain that rarely surfaces during public conversation. From these exchanges, he developed an original spoken word piece that translates lived testimony into art, illuminating the grief, resilience, and humanity of families navigating postpartum challenges. 

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back - Watch Here

 

 

Artist Biography: Shandie is a Vietnamese-Canadian social innovator whose practice is grounded in dance and performance. She is a community programmer, producer, and creator of connections and space activation. In the national Kiki Ballroom community, Shandie is known as Princess Sen Gvasalia. She co-founded VogueYYC in 2018 - a group of like-minded individuals dedicated to growing and nurturing Calgary's Kiki Ballroom scene. Popular categories such as Performance (Voguing), Runway, Face, and Realness are now being practiced and presented by more people who identify within this culture in Calgary. This brings more conversation to the evolving dialogue about the challenges and celebrations facing gay and trans IBPOC in the community. As a movement based creative, Shandie’s curiosities lie in how the body can be a conduit of inner and external social impact.

Initiative Description: Shandie convenes queer racialized youth regularly through ballroom and vogue, using dance and its surrounding culture to build a space that functions both as artistic practice and community infrastructure. The work draws on ballroom’s deep lineage as a form of community making, born from African American and Latino queer and trans communities in New York. In this tradition, the floor, the dance, and the house structure are themselves practices of safety, kinship, and self-authorship rooted in the long history of queer and trans communities building for themselves what the world around them would not. 

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back

  • Part One - Watch Here

  • Part Two - Watch Here

 

 

Artist Biography: Sara-Maya Kaba is a poet, spoken word artist, dancer, and aspiring visual artist. She uses movement, creative writing, and visual storytelling to explore themes such as mental health, identity, memory, and South Asian womanhood. Her arts background includes writing and directing Severing Roots, a spoken word performance with six Muslim women artists on Islamophobia, and performing in Passages, a large-scale dance production exploring Muslim diasporic stories in Canada. Sara-Maya is a Pathy Foundation Fellowship alum, having designed and led an arts-based mental health literacy program that reached over 500 participants across Pakistan. She is the co-founder of The Fourth Space, a nonprofit that uses art, play, and story to build connection and mental health literacy across communities, and currently works part-time as a guest educator with the Calgary Board of Education.

Initiative Description: Through her nonprofit The Fourth Space and in partnership with Canada Immigrants Women Association (CIWA), Sara-Maya designed and ran a program called Creating Space. The program aimed to support immigrant girls and women through a series of creative workshops. Each session introduced participants to a different artistic practice while creating opportunities to explore identity, well-being, and womanhood in Canada. By fostering safe and welcoming environments for participants to share their experiences, Sara-Maya demonstrated the value of coming together through creativity, where the process of creating, connecting, and sharing becomes just as important as the final artwork itself.

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back - Watch Here

 

 

Artist Biography: Sue-Shane Tsomondo is a writer, arts administrator and occasional writing instructor based in Mohkinstsis. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Sue-Shane’s writing is a lifelong exploration of diasporan guilt and blackness. She has previously performed for Woolfs’ Voices and Single Onion. In 2019, Sue-Shane founded a literary arts platform, Sue’s Stokvel, to highlight the work of racialized writers across the globe. Between 2020 and 2021, Sue-Shane received the University of Calgary Women’s Resource Centre Alumni Award and appeared on the cover of the Calgary Journal for her work on Sue’s Stokvel. While writing and providing social commentary continues to be at the forefront of her artistic practice, Sue-Shane also wears the hat of an arts administrator, most recently as the executive director of an artist-run-centre.

Initative Description: Sue-Shane is an artist whose practice is rooted in gathering, dialogue, and the deliberate creation of the conditions for human connection. During her residency, she convened a year-long reading community that brought Calgarians together around texts exploring race, power, belonging, and collective liberation. The work unfolded incrementally, each gathering layering new ideas and deepening relationships between participants. 

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back - Watch Here

 

 

Artist Biography: Tiffany Lai is a drama educator and a registered social worker in both Hong Kong and Alberta, Canada. She graduated with distinction from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts with a Master of Fine Arts in Drama, majoring in Drama and Theatre Education. Her thesis focused on utilizing Drama in Education pedagogy to enhance the Chinese character recognition and writing skills of students with dyslexia. Tiffany has received multiple accolades, including the Estella Wong Drama Education Scholarship, the HKSAR Government Talent Development Scholarship, the Reaching Out Award, and the Bravo! Hong Kong Youth Theatre Award. She was also twice sponsored by the Lee Hysan Foundation to undertake short-term drama training in the UK.

Initiative Description: In partnership with YW Calgary, Tiffany Lai designed and ran a program called Little Big Steps: Building Emotional Literacy through Stories and Drama. The program aimed to support children and caregivers in exploring their emotions, self-confidence, communication, and relationships through a series of interactive drama-based workshops. Using storytelling, humour, imaginative play, and various creative activities, Tiffany helped families develop emotional literacy and strengthen their connections in a safe and supportive environment. By creating opportunities for children and caregivers to learn and play together, this program highlights how theatre can be an accessible and engaging tool for fostering communication, empathy, and well-being within families across Calgary.

Process Artifact:

• Community Process Celebration Share-back - Watch Here

• Akemi‘s Song X Drama in Education Activity Cards

 

 

Community Partners

 

 

 

Have Questions?

Learn more about the AAC Residency program here: Program Information Package 

Or contact: Kelaena Maude, Program Lead at kmaude@mtroyal.ca. 

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