Student and Alumni Showcase

Anushay Sheikh

Gold Medal winners celebrate academic and personal success at fall convocation, Toronto Met Today.

2024 Gold Medal recipient Anushay Sheikh is a leader who amplifies marginalized voices and fosters important dialogues on queerness and Islam through creativity and advocacy.

Their powerful MFA project, The Test, explores the mental health experiences of eight Queer Muslim individuals. Rooted in the Sheikh's own experiences, the participatory and autoethnographic project serves as an act of (re)connection, healing, and reclamation.

Luke Galati

CBC (external link) , Get Reel: These young filmmakers hope their work can help youth battle mental illness.

Christopher Donovan

Chris Donovan

Chris Donovan, who currently lives in Fredericton while pursuing a master of fine arts in documentary media at Toronto Met, won the Scotiabank and National Gallery of Canada 2021 New Generation Photography Award (external link, opens in new window)  earlier this year for a series of photographs entitled The Cloud Factory, which were taken around Saint John. 

Susan Enberg

“In Jesus’ Name: Shattering the Silence of St. Anne’s Residential School” awarded Best Documentary Short at Toronto film festival 2018.

Dominic Akena

Finding the power in your story. Featured story in Image Centre Today. (opens in new window) 

Pearson Ripley

Featured in Image Centre Today: a Human with a Camera (opens in new window) , and 2018 recipient of Nikon’s 100th Anniversary Storyteller’s Scholarship. (external link, opens in new window) 

Marc Serpa Francoeur & Robinder Uppal

The World in Ten Blocks, a documentary installation about Toronto's Bloorcourt neighborhood featured throughout the Hot Docs 2016 festival as part of the DocX program (external link, opens in new window) .

Michelle Melles

Documentary Media alum lands game-changing broadcast deal with PBS, The Creative School News.

Documentary Media alum Michelle Melles is helping to rewrite the narrative around mental health. Her documentary thesis, Drunk on Too Much Life (external link) , has achieved a major milestone, securing a national broadcast deal in the United States.

Felipe Castaneda Gamboa

My Grad Moment video contest winner Felipe Castaneda Gamboa, shares a peaceful moment (external link)  during graduate studies. 

Alia Youssef

Uses photography to diversify generalized perceptions of Muslim women with her series, The Sisters Project. Featured in Elle (external link, opens in new window) .    

Dominic Akena

From child soldier in Uganda to documentary filmmaker: Dominic Akena shares story of survival. Global News Feature. (external link, opens in new window) 

Rebekah Reiko

Mandala Beats, world premiere, closes the 2017 Toronto Jewish Film Festival.

Alia Youssef

Awarded the 2020 Toronto Met Gold Medal. Winners were honoured in a virtual celebration.   

Eduardo Lima

Lima is the recipient of the Tom Hanson Photojournalism Award, 2016. (external link, opens in new window) 

He is a Toronto-based freelance photojournalist who is a regular contributor to Corbis Images and Metroland Media and who has been published in the Toronto Star and Le Monde. Website. (external link, opens in new window) 

Carrie Davis

Carrie Davis is the 2021 recipient of the Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement (SAGE) Award

The SAGE Award has been established by a friend of the Rotary Club through the Toronto Eglinton Rotary Charitable Foundation to encourage Indigenous students to pursue graduate studies with the hope of increasing the number of Indigenous peoples entering careers in academia. Awarded a Rotary scholarship in 1968, she was able to travel from her homeland of Denmark to pursue post-graduate work in biochemistry in the United States, at a time when it was uncommon for women to pursue higher education. After completing her PhD in 1974, she came to Canada where she taught and conducted research at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, until her recent retirement as a tenured faculty member.

DocNow @ Gallery 1313

Get out there, Toronto art lovers: 10 galleries with exciting new shows and open doors, The Toronto Star (external link, opens in new window) .

The month-long DocNOW Documentary Media Festival launches Aug. 5 with three multimedia installations by Toronto-based artists Neal Rockwell, Ubaid-ur-Rehman and Roya Biazar, who share personal perspectives on migrant and refugee experiences. 

Michèle Pearson Clarke

Doc Media alumna and professor named 2019 Toronto Photo Laureate (external link, opens in new window) 

Zanele Muholi

Showcased in feature about their work and its focus on marginalized queer communities in South Africa, by WPRESENT (external link, opens in new window) .

Michelle Melles

Recipient of the Image Centre Gold Medal. Melles created her film ‘Drunk on Too Much Life’ in part to help change the cultural narrative of mental illness and how it is often stigmatized and conveyed exclusively through medical diagnosis.

Vivian Belik

Underdog is a documentary film co-created with Naomi Mark about Yuka Honda, a Japanese expat who prepares for a 1000 mile dogsled race to fulfill her mother's dying wish. Featured on CBC Short Docs. (external link, opens in new window) 

Zanele Muholi

Paying Homage to the History of Black Women, The New York Times (external link, opens in new window)