Edmonton Celebrates Creativity: $100K Awarded to Local Artists
May 8, 2025
At the May 7 presentation of the 2025 Edmonton Arts Prizes, the four primary recipients were announced and celebrated for their excellence in film, visual art, music and literature. Thank you to everyone who joined us at the Roxy Theatre to celebrate this year’s recipients!
The presentation was hosted by Ellie Heath and included the Edmonton Arts Prizes partner organizations and Councillor Aaron Paquette. “On behalf of the Mayor and Council, I bring congratulations and confirmation of our support for what the arts community does,” said Councillor Paquette. “As you create and live, you connect one heart to another and one soul to another. In that connection, we are made strong. I thank you all for doing that.”
Each of the twelve nominated artists received a prize, with $15,000 going to the primary prize recipient in each category, and two secondary prizes of $5,000 awarded to the runners up. In total, $100,000 was awarded to the artists.
Congratulations to the 2025 Edmonton Arts Prizes recipients!
City of Edmonton Music Prize:
Primary winner: margø
Runners up: Celeigh Cardinal, King Thief
City of Edmonton Film Prize:
Primary winner: Darrin Hagen
Runners up: Don Depoe, Scott Portingale
The Eldon + Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize:
Primary winner: Raneece Buddan
Runners up: Cheyenne LeGrande ᑭᒥᐊᐧᐣ, Heather Shillinglaw
Robert Kroetsch – City of Edmonton Book Prize:
Primary winner: Benjamin Hertwig
Runners up: Crystal Gail Fraser, Marilyn Dumont
2025 City of Edmonton Music Prize
(in partnership with Alberta Music)
Primary winner:
margø for who are you when you’re alone?
Alternative pop musician, songwriter, composer, and producer margø creates loud music with empowering messages; encouraging her listeners to embrace their uniqueness and practice self-love.
margø’s debut album who are you when you’re alone? represents the quiet moments alone in our rooms in the middle of the night when we’re left to face our true selves — and how we learn to live with (and love) every aspect of ourselves, including our flaws.
RUNNERS UP
Celeigh Cardinal for Boundless Possibilities
King Thief for King Thief (Self Titled)
2025 Eldon + Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize
(in partnership with the Eldon and Anne Foote Fund at the Edmonton Community Foundation & CARFAC Alberta)
Primary winner:
Raneece Buddan for Adorned in our Threads
(Nominated by Art Gallery of St. Albert)
Raneece Buddan’s artistic practice is an ongoing journey of self-discovery, constantly learning more about her cultural identity as a Jamaican woman of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean ancestry. As a multidisciplinary artist, Raneece finds joy in a well-rounded practice oil painting, woodworking, clay sculpting, ceramics, resin casting, printmaking and weaving.
“Adorned in our Threads serves as an archive of ancestral knowledge and all which runs through my veins that I am now accessing. Using Dutch elm wood with DED, this piece highlights Dutch wax textiles, which through colonization have become a staple in West African attire contributing to the loss of traditional textile practices. Embedded through carving and application are a mix of traditional Nigerian, Ghanaian and Indian textiles.”
RUNNERS UP
Cheyenne Rain LeGrande ᑭᒥᐘᐣ for mi^kisak ᒦᑭᐢ
(Nominated by Saz Massey, Downtown Spark)
Heather Shillinglaw for MNIDOONS GIIZIS OONHG — LITTLE SPIRIT MOON (NOVEMBER)
(Nominated by Tyler Sherard, McMullen Gallery)
City of Edmonton Film Prize
(in partnership with Alberta Media Production Industries Association)
Primary winner:
Darrin Hagen for Pride vs. Prejudice: The Delwin Vriend Story
Darrin Hagen is a playwright, author, composer, Queer historian, and Artistic Director of Guys In Disguise. He has created over 40 plays, and dozens of published essays and articles dealing with Queer history.
Hagan directed the documentary, Pride vs. Prejudice: The Delwin Vriend Story. Delwin Vriend never wanted to be a human rights activist, but in challenging his firing for being gay, he set in motion a chain of events that impacted the lives of LGBTQ+ people — not just in Alberta, not just in Canada, but around the globe.
RUNNERS UP
Don Depoe/Dept. 9 Studios for Dark Match
Scott Portingale for Emergence
Robert Kroetsch – City of Edmonton Book Prize
(in partnership with Audreys Books & Writers’ Guild of Alberta)
Primary winner:
Benjamin Hertwig for Juiceboxers
Award winning, multi-disciplinary artist Benjamin Hertwig’s writing is informed by his own dis/ability, specifically living with multiple sclerosis and PTSD. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in places like the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, and the Walrus, among others.
“Juiceboxers is a novel about a group of friends from Edmonton and took me almost ten years to write. Central themes are masculinity, conformity, violence, white supremacy and militarism. It’s also a love letter to Edmonton, the city of my birth and the place I have returned after almost a decade away. How do we cultivate and create peace – personal, societal, relational – in the aftermath of war and violence? That’s what the novel is about.”
RUNNERS UP
Crystal Gail Fraser for By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories
Marilyn Dumont for South Side of a Kinless River
About the Edmonton Arts Prizes
The Edmonton Arts Prizes celebrate artists from a range of art forms and practices, recognizing their work, and investing in their continued experimentation and creation.
With the shared aim to enhance Edmonton’s reputation as a hub for extraordinary creation in the arts, the prize program is coordinated by the Edmonton Arts Council, in partnership with the City of Edmonton and our community partners: Alberta Media Production Industries Association, Alberta Music, Audreys Books, CARFAC Alberta, Edmonton Community Foundation and Writers’ Guild of Alberta.
More information on the Edmonton Arts Prizes can be found here.
