The eight winners of the 2026 Governor General Awards, one of Canada’s most prestigious arts awards, were announced on Wednesday (16 September). They are: the Ontario-based textile artist Chung-Im Kim, the Vancouver-based art historian Roger Lee, the Kainai First Nations sculptor and installation artist Faye HeavyShield, the Vancouver-based artist and film-maker Carole Itter, the Inuk sculptor and film-maker Zacharias Kunuk, the Québec-based artist Lyne Lapointe, the Québec-based photographer Marie-Jeanne Musiol and the Montréal-based Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) artist Skawennati.
The Governor General Awards were created in 1999 by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Governor General of Canada. Up to eight awards are distributed every year: six awards recognise artistic achievements, one award recognises an exceptional fine craft artist and one award recognises an outstanding contribution to contemporary visual arts, media arts or fine crafts. Each winner will receive a bronze medallion and C$25,000 ($18,000).
Carole Itter, one of six winners of the artistic achievement awards, is a veteran interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer and film-maker who won the Viva Award in 1989 and the Audain Prize in 2017. In her breakout 1972 work Personal Baggage, she removed a cedar log from British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, disassembled it and transported it to the opposite coast of Canada, reassembling it in Lockeport, Nova Scotia. She documented the process in the book The Log’s Log.The inaugural artist of the Blue Cabin residency—which relocated and repurposed the cabin she had shared with her partner, the late artist and musician Al Neil—the octogenarian Itter is a West Coast icon and a high priestess of assemblage, collage, installation and performance.
Another Vancouverite honouree, Roger Lee, received this year’s outstanding contribution award for his work as an art historian. He is a collector and cultural advocate whose decades-long career has shaped Asian and diasporic art history in Canada. Born in Vancouver’s east side, he taught at the University of Regina from 1966 to 1999, bringing a transnational perspective that bridged Western scholarship and lived diasporic experience. He was also the first Chinese Canadian to teach Western art history in China. His renowned collection of Yixing teapots reflects this hybrid vision, uniting aesthetic inquiry with cultural memory.
This year’s recipient of the Saidye Bronfman Award celebrating craft processes is Chung-Im Kim, a Korean-born textile artist and educator based in Cookstown, Ontario. Every year, the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Québec (just across the Ottawa river from the federal capital) acquires either a single work or a series of works by the Bronfman Award’s winner.
The Inuit film-maker Zacharias Kunuk, one of the artistic achievement award winners, was a carver in 1981 when he sold three sculptures in Montréal to buy a home-video camera and 27in television to bring back to Igloolik—a settlement of 500 Inuit who had voted twice to refuse access to outside television. After working for six years for the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation as a producer and station manager, Kunuk co-founded Igloolik Isuma Productions Inc in 1990 with Paul Apak Angilirq, Pauloosie Qulitalik and Norman Cohn. In addition to the celebrated epic Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), Kunuk has directed more than 30 films and videos screened in film festivals, theatres, museums and art galleries.
The Swiss-born, Gatineau-based multidisciplinary artist Marie-Jeanne Musiol creates photograms, backlit works and experimental videos with the luminous imprints of plants she records in electromagnetic fields. A group of these images, which function as a kind of virtual energy herbarium at the intersection of botany and electrophotography, are collected in her series The Radiant Forest.
“The 2026 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts winners remind us of the essential role artists play in Canadian society, helping us understand ourselves and one another, Michelle Chawla, the director and chief executive of the Canada Council for the Arts, said in a statement. “Deeply rooted in their communities, their work sparks dialogue, reveals the richness of human experience and creates a stronger sense of belonging. Today, we celebrate these remarkable artists, whose creativity strengthens our connections across Canada and throughout the world.”
An exhibition featuring selected works by the winners of this year’s Governor General’s Awards will open at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on 7 November.
