Nala Haileselassie

with program assistance from Freida Wang

BlockStar Collective is a film program inviting youth ages 14-18 from priority neighbourhoods in Toronto, ON to experiment with filmmaking through radical film education, hands-on production workshops and the creation of a collective film. Through the program, youth filmmakers will be supported in reflecting on themes of family, friendship, community, neighbourhood, change and belonging. Participants will collaboratively create a collective short film investigating how our stories within our current communities and everyday environments are disparate yet overlapping. How can we learn from each other's homes, families and blocks?  The workshop series will culminate in works to be shared publicly through a community film screening. BlockStar Collective is interested in experimental, emergent and exciting perspectives of youth in Toronto who have something to say about their apartment buildings, their plazas, their parks.

This project is currently underway, with program taking place during Summer 2026, and a presentation in Summer 2027. Check back in for more details to be announced in the coming months.

Special thanks to our program site partner, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) and CineCycle.

Wend Yasen

with program assistance from Aliyah Aziz

Another Way is an experimental workshop program that invites multilingual participants based in and around Hamilton, ON with tenuous and fragmented ties to language to explore storytelling practices beyond fluency. Through a series of interdisciplinary activities, prompted writing, and group conversation, participants will be asked to consider what poetry can teach us about noticing, living, and translating our lived experiences into story. Participants will develop poetic scores — sets of creative instructions, gestures, prompts, or notations used to guide performance and artistic creation — which will shape the development and recording of their final works. The workshop series will culminate in works to be shared publicly through an exhibition. Another Way is interested in experimental, emergent, and expansive approaches to language and storytelling from participants navigating complex relationships to language and communication.

This project is currently underway, with program taking place during Summer 2026, and a presentation in Spring/Summer 2027. Check back in for more details to be announced in the coming months.

Special thanks to our program site partner, Hamilton Artists Inc.

Emkay Adjei-Manu

Sites of Rehearsal explores objects, images, and domestic ephemera as sites of individual and collective meaning and place-making. Grounded in Black and trans feminist approaches to gathering, looking, listening, and remembering, together; the project engages up to six Black, queer and/or trans/gender-diverse participants to consider how the things we gather, arrange, preserve, and return to inform our ways of being, knowing and seeing. This project looks at the ways everyday materials become sites of social evidence, while asking; 

• What do they teach us?

• What can an object hold, reveal, or invite? 

• What becomes visible when our things, and their histories, encounter one another?

Across three co-creation sessions, participants will be invited to bring or work with everyday materials such as photographs, recipes, notes, screenshots, lists, receipts, to collectively look closely at these materials, share the stories and relationships they hold, and experiment with arranging, mapping and transforming them through conversation and art-making. The project will culminate in a group exhibition that brings together the materials, arrangements, and works created through the sessions. 

Led by Emkay Adjei-Manu, (b.1996)  a multidisciplinary artist, researcher and facilitator whose practice explores Afro-diasporic queer and trans cultures through myth, memory and sound. 

Program Date(s) & Time(s): 

Friday, November 13: 6:30 – 8:30pm
Friday, November 20: 6:30 – 8:30pm 
Friday, November 27: 6:30 – 8:30pm

Program Location: 
Sheeep Studio / BAAA Back Alley for Art and Architecture
300 Campbell Ave Ste 114, Toronto, ON M6P 3S2

Compensation

Selected participants will receive an honorarium of $500 in recognition of their time, participation, and contributions to the project over three program sessions in November 2026. An additional artist fee of $515 each for participating in a group exhibition, in April 2027. The cost of materials and transit fare will be covered for folks in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). Meals will be provided. 

Submissions Close: Nov 5, 2026 

Notifications: 

Note: If you have questions or trouble filling out this form, please reach out to our program assistant Marina Fathalla, at specialprojects@whippersnapper.ca. Due to the volume of applications, only selected applicants will be notified.

Moe Pramanick

“I wish we’d met someone who knew us, to remind me that you and I existed beyond our bubble – for better, were we to forget ourselves, and for worse, were we to think that this was all there is.” — Yasmine Haj

Field Research invited South Asian youth to unearth, investigate and share their families’ migration stories. Over the course of four gatherings, participants used arts-based approaches to navigate the questions: How did you arrive here? How can we work together to document our collective histories? How will this inform where we want to go next? The project culminated in a public group exhibition showcasing works and works-in-progress developed throughout the workshop series.

Special thanks to our program site partner, Sehn Studio.

Anélia Victor and Fatin Ishraq

Solidarity Seeds engaged precarious urban agricultural workers across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) — those growing food under conditions that rarely feed them back. Despite meeting urgent needs for local, healthy food access, these workers continue to navigate hostile environments: ongoing discrimination, exploitative workloads, and workplace retaliation, particularly for queer and trans growers. Insights from a full-day gathering focused on co-learning urban agricultural and land liberation practices were transformed into a collective zine and a series of ceramic seedling pods — vessels that carry both story and seed — shared with the public through an exhibition.

Special thanks to our program site partner, Scadding Court Community Centre and presentation partner, Arcadia Art Gallery.

Harmeet Rehal

with program assistance from Dennie Park

Griefs & Glimmers brings together high-risk, covid-aware 2SQTBIPoC artist-organizers to reflect on five years of care work in the pandemic. Through collaborative collage-making and archival practices, participants will explore the textures, griefs, and glimmers of harm reduction and community care. Rooted in accessibility and relational facilitation, this workshop series responds to an arts sector increasingly hostile to immuno-compromised communities. The project culminates in a group exhibition honouring the need for safer, creative, and immuno-accessible spaces to gather, connect, and co-create.

Special thanks to our program site partner, JAYU.