Current undergraduate student
When Najet Ghanai was a little girl, the answer to ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ would solicit one of two answers, either “I want to be an opera singer” or “I want to be an artist.”
“NSCAD won out,” she announces, over coffee in a break between classes. “It’s always been a magical place in my mind.”
Holding such high hopes for the school from an early age, Najet says she’s pleased by the choice she made back in Grade 2. Now in her third year, she is doing an interdisciplinary BFA program, melding an interest in sculpture with furniture design. NSCAD’s strengths are its small classes, personalized attention, supportive professors and the adaptability of interdisciplinary studies to suit individual interests, she says.
Read More
Current undergraduate student
Whether he’s drawing or painting, making a film or performing, First Nations artist Joseph Tisiga is telling stories.
“Art is for me a way to take motivation and personal narrative and put it in a physical construct,” says Joseph, a member of the Kaska Dene First Nation from Whitehorse. He explores his personal mythology arising from his indigenous heritage in a conceptual project he calls “Indian Brand Corporation.”
Read More
BFA 2000
Craig Moore tried hard to get into NSCAD. Even after being accepted, 10 years after his first attempt, he questioned whether it was for him.
At the time—this was the mid 1990s—NSCAD didn’t have its own film program. Craig, who now runs a web video production company called Spider Video, was wondering if maybe he should go elsewhere. And so, he went to speak with NSCAD professor Bruce Barber.
Read More
BFA 2006
Ursula Johnson recalls what she wrote in her essay when she applied to get into NSCAD: “I am not an aboriginal artist. I am an artist who happens to be aboriginal.”
But by the time she graduated in 2006, her thinking had done an about face.
“I learned who I was,” says Ursula, a Mi’kmaq artist originally from Eskasoni in Cape Breton. She weaves a long, ribbon-like strip of ash into a basket form as she talks, seated in Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery’s studio space where she’s doing a six weeks’ residency.
Read More
Current undergraduate student
It seems appropriate that Daltry Rose Campbell-Lemire’s nose is smudged with pale yellow pollen; she’s definitely the kind of person who stops to smell the roses.
Read More
