Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Announces Karen Zalamea Winner of the 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award

The photography prize is now given annually to any mid-career Canadian artist advancing the field of contemporary photography, and comes with a fully funded residency at Banff Centre’s Leighton Artist Studios.

BANFF, AB, December 5, 2024 – Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is thrilled to announce Filipino Canadian photo-based artist Karen Zalamea as the winner of the 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award. This prize, established by the friends and family of the late Canadian artist Barbara Spohr, awards a mid-career artist whose work has made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary Canadian photography a fully funded four-week residency in the Leighton Artist Studios at Banff Centre, worth over $7,000 CAD in value.

Born in Vancouver and currently based in Burnaby, British Columbia, artist, educator, and cultural worker Karen Zalamea uses photography as a means to explore issues of identity, culture, and memory.

As a progression in her practice, Zalamea plans to use the time and resources provided at Banff Centre to pursue cyanotypes – a camera-less technique that results in the negative of an object placed directly on a light-sensitive substrate under daylight, named after the cyan colour of the exposed areas. Zalamea’s cyanotypes created at Banff Centre, part of her ongoing series (2024-ongoing), reflects on the history of Spanish colonial botany in the Philippines, investigating how plant life is enmeshed with identity and place as well as the colonial practices of knowledge extraction, scientific survey, and botanical illustration.

As of 2025, previously a biennial prize, the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award will now be given every year, and the application requirements have expanded to welcome submissions from any Canadian mid-career artist with a substantial exhibition history in photography.

Recent winners of the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award include: Anna BintaDiallo and Logan MacDonald (2021), Lotus L. Kang (2018), Lorna Bauer (2018), Elise Rasmussen (2016), Colin Miner (2013),Celia Perrin Sidarous (2011), Maegan Hill-Carroll (2009), Ramona Ramlochland (2007), Justin Waddell (2005), Dianne Bos (2005) and David McMillan (2004), among others.

The jury of the 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award would also like to recognize an honourable mention for Korean Canadian artist Minwoo Lee.

As part of Zalamea’s residency in early 2025, Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is pleased to present an artist talk on February 28, 2025. In this free talk, she will discuss her broader practice as well as the series Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas) (2024-ongoing) that she will continue at Banff Centre.

This event is presented in partnership with Exposure Photography Festival and is made possible through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Government of Canada and Government of Alberta. Banff Centre would also like to acknowledge the friends and family of the late artist Barbara Spohr whose contributions supported the creation of the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for Photography.

For more information on Banff Centre’s Visual Arts training and development opportunities, visit banffcentre.ca/visual-arts. To find out when the 2026 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award will open for submissions, visit banffcentre.ca/leighton-artist-studios.

For more information or interview requests, please contact:

Carly Maga
Director, Communications
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
tel: +1.403.763.6210
cell: +1.403.431.3423
carly_maga@banffcentre.ca

About Karen Zalamea
Karen Zalamea (she/her) is a Filipino Canadian artist, educator, and cultural worker whose photographic practice attends to issues of identity, culture, and memory. Zalamea is the recipient of the Prefix Prize, and her projects have received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She has attended artist residencies in the Philippines, Iceland, and Canada. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and as public art projects across Canada and internationally. Zalamea holds an MFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver.

Zalamea was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, and now resides in Burnaby, on the ancestral and unceded homelands of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples. karenzalamea.com

About Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Founded in 1933, Banff Centre is a post-secondary institution built upon an extraordinary legacy of excellence in artistic and leadership development. What started as a single course in drama has grown to become a global organization leading in arts, culture, and creative decision-making across dozens of disciplines, from the fine arts to Indigenous Wise Practices. From our home in the stunning Canadian Rocky Mountains, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity aims to move everyone who attends our campus - artists, leaders, thinkers, and audiences - to unleash their creative potential and realize their unique contribution to build an innovative, inspiring future through education, performances, convenings, and public outreach. banffcentre.ca

About Walter Phillips Gallery
Walter Phillips Gallery is exclusively committed to the production, presentation, collection and analysis of contemporary art and curatorial practice. For contemporary artists, particularly those engaged in alternative forms of practice, Walter Phillips Gallery remains an essential and principal site where art is presented to an audience for critical reception. banffcentre.ca/walter-phillips-gallery