Photo: Joseph Monteyne
Congratulations to current MFA Visual Art student Violet Johnson on being selected as one of the winners of the 2025 Audain Travel Award!
Johnson’s analog photo-sculptural practice directly engages with bodies of waters along the Pacific Northwest Coast as a means of tracing significant sites and memories of her personal and familial histories, with a critical lens of the ongoing ramifications of settler colonialism.
This winter, Johnson intends to travel to London to work alongside other artists in her field to explore historic and alternative photography processes, as well as to immerse herself in the contemporary art scene of London through museum and gallery visits. She plans to engage in critical dialogue and making with other artists and researchers whose work concern the continued reverberations of colonialism through the lens of art.
The Audain Travel Award is supported by the Audain Foundation and administered by University of British Columbia, Vancouver and Okanagan, University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University, and Emily Carr University of Art and Design, it provides five full-time Bachelor of Fine Arts or Master of Fine Arts students in B.C. an opportunity to travel to view art.
Previous award recipients include Yuan Wen (MFA ’25), Tiffany Law (MFA ‘24), Sarv Iraji (MFA ‘23), Romi Kim (MFA ‘22), Xan Shian (MFA ‘21), and Rosamunde Bordo (MFA ‘20).
