After a 10-year hiatus, FADO’s emerging Artists Series is back in 2025!
A much-loved staple of FADO’s programming year from 2003 to 2014, FADO’s emerging Artists series was created to provide a platform for younger artists to develop and present a performance piece in a professional context, often for the first time. As the series developed, the opportunity it provided extended to nurturing new performance curators. Each new project in the series has interpreted in its own particular way the central term of its mandate reformulating who/what should be considered ‘emerging’ in the context of performance art practice as presented through the FADO frame.
For the 2025 Emerging Artist Series, ‘emerging’ is discarded as a label that reveals age, defines time spent or as a qualification of perceived depth of experience. Instead, from February through May two curators and three series researcher residents develop performance installations, performance events and research projects that bring the notion of ‘emerging’ into relationship with community and forms of practice.
2025: On View | curated by Jordan King
2025: not knowing is the most intimate | curated by Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan
2025: EAS LABists: Christina Anna Trutiak, James Knott, Vanessa Godden
2014: 11:45 P.M. | curated by Kate Barry
2013: .sight specific. | curated by Francisco-Fernando Granados
2011: Extra-Rational | curated by Gale Allen
2009: Misinformed Informants | curated by Lisa Visser
2008: Vivência Poética | curated by Erika DeFreitas
2007: Enter-gration | curated by Nahed Mansour
2005: Open Airway | curated by Elle McLaughlin
2005: Feats, might | curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland
2004: Home Repair by One Night Only
2004: Game City | curated by Craig Leonard
2003: Gestures | curated by Tanya Mars
FADO’s Emerging Artists series was initiated in 2003 by Canada’s own performance art matriarch and educator Tanya Mars, who recognized that the best way to encourage young artists was by offering them a professional presentation opportunity. Her vision was one of mentorship, targeting an interesting mix of new and emerging artists, many of them former students, whom she commissioned to develop new works responding to a thematic context. The first event, curated by Mars, included ambient, conceptual and cabaret-style performance art gestures. This event later developed into the Emerging Artists Series. FADO’s intention with this on-going series was to nurture new work and ideas, provide direction and mentorship, and showcase the work of the city’s newest perspectives in performance art.
As the series developed, it became clear that this was an opportunity to nurture not only emerging performance artists, but also emerging curators, allowing FADO to encourage new curatorial voices in performance art, and introducing FADO to new communities of artists (and new artists to FADO). The series has continued to develop and change, later including the work of artists not just from Toronto, but regionally as well. This way, the series exposes local audiences to the range of performance work happening in the emerging performance scene across Canada.
