We are thrilled to announce the selected artists for the inaugural Tett Artist Residency in 2025: Q1: Jabra Mitwasi, Q2: Erin Kennedy, Q3: Rowynne Grant, and Q4: Callia Silverton
Designed to nurture emerging artists in Katarokwi/Kingston, this three-month residency provides each recipient with exclusive studio access at a time, fostering an environment conducive to creative incubation within our vibrant community arts centre.
These artists represent a rich range of disciplines, each bringing their own perspective to our vibrant arts community. We can’t wait to see the creativity they’ll spark in 2025!
Biographies
Jabra Mitwasi is a Palestinian designer and artist passionate about Arabic Calligraphy and graphic design. He holds a master’s degree in design from the University of Sunderland (2019) and has over 15 years of teaching experience at Dar al-Kalima University-Bethlehem, specializing in typography and calligraphy. Mitwasi has always pursued self-development in art, taking numerous workshops in video editing, drawing, painting, artistic cloth dying, stained glass, ceramics, and more. His commitment to exploring diverse mediums and techniques is exemplified by his creation of a large polystyrene sculpture for Caritas Hospital’s 50th-anniversary celebration. In addition, he studied icon painting in Greece and Palestine, producing Byzantine and Jerusalem School-style icons, and participated in screen printing workshops, broadening his artistic range. His portfolio includes a joint video installation project and several contemporary calligraphy paintings. Now based in Kingston, Ontario, Mitwasi continues to push the boundaries of his artistic practice, especially through contemporary interpretations of Arabic Calligraphy. Passionate about community engagement, he has held exhibitions and workshops that celebrate the cultural and visual significance of Arabic Calligraphy.
Instagram: @jabraartstudio
Erin “RobotZwrrl” Kennedy is an eccentric robot maker and analogue astronaut based in Kingston, Ontario. She develops robots that address environmental challenges in creative ways through new media art and kinetic sculptures. Erin engages with local environmental stewards of all ages when testing the robots outdoors in public through a hands-on format, allowing them to tangibly see the steps involved in creating and envisioning future solutions. Nature inspires her robot designs and how they respond to the dynamic environment. Erin's skills span electronics, mechanical design, firmware programming, and fabrication. She unconventionally learned to build robots by being self-taught online and through mentorship, leading to studies at International Space University. To pursue her ideas further she founded Robot Missions Inc.
Instagram: @RobotZwrrl
Rowynne Grant is an artist, graphic designer and tattooist based out of Ontario, Canada. Inspired by the astoundingly beautiful nature of our world, she explores abstracted organic shapes, colour and pattern across a variety of mediums including watercolour, acrylic, digital, collage and tattooing. Frequently, her work combines mediums; layering different textures over each other to create intricate depths. Over her residency, she will be exploring combining her traditional fine arts skills with her graphic design background, using typography and recycled materials to evoke a truly contemporary art form: memes.
You can find her work at rogrant.com and on Instagram at @moss.l0v3r, as well as @ro.does.tattoos.
For work inquiries, please email rograntdesigns@gmail.com.
Callia Silverton is a Kingston-based artist who grew up in Toronto, Ontario. She works mainly with acrylic paints, but uses an array of media including digital, gouache, graphite, and pen & ink. She seeks to capture the light and mood of scenes with thick daubs of paint and is influenced by the impressionist art movement. Callia studied fine arts at Sheridan College before completing her HBSc at the University of Toronto (UofT). She is currently completing her master’s in anatomy at Queen’s University. Callia’s love of art and love of science stem from the same innate curiosity about the world around her. Her curiosity and connection are expressed in her artistic works which represent people and places she loves. Callia has spent time as an illustrator for various university newspapers, an art-director of a student-run café at UofT, and as a volunteer painting teacher at a hospital in Toronto. In high school, Callia’s yearbook superlative was “Most likely to have a painting hung in the Louvre”, and while the Louvre might be a bit of a stretch, she hopes to break into the Canadian art scene. For now, she continues to explore, connect, and create.