Top row (left to right): Angela Bains, Kathy Moscou, Michael Lee Poy. Bottom row (left to right): Marton Robinson, Kestin Cornwall.
Today, OCAD University’s Faculty of Design announced the hiring of five new tenure-track faculty members who self-identify as Black peoples of African descent.
Starting on the job August 1, 2020, are Angela Bains, Kestin Cornwall, Kathy Moscou, Michael Lee Poy and Marton Robinson.
The cluster hire is meant to address “the Faculty of Design’s 144 years of Black underrepresentation,” said Dr. Dori Tunstall, dean of the Faculty of Design, in a press release. Dr. Tunstall, who is the first Black dean of a faculty of design anywhere, led the process. “The overwhelming support of the Black communities in sharing the call and applying to the positions was crucial in making this Black Cluster Hire a success.”
Angela Bains is a co-founder and strategic director of TransformExp, an award-winning design firm; has worked on social change projects including the Free Nelson Mandela Campaign, as well as corporate accounts; and has taught strategic design at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
Kestin Cornwall trained at Sheridan College, and makes art exploring “the notion that culture and entertainment, including film and other media, shape the mass public perception of black people and people of colour in North American culture.”
Kathy Moscou merges visual arts and health: her PhD research on pharmacogovernance and comparative health policy addresses “equity in drug safety and governance to foster healthy communities,” while her art has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, the Royal Ontario Museum and the M. Rosetta Hunter Art Gallery in Seattle.
Michael Lee Poy is an Afro-Caribbean artist-activist and architect in Trinidad and Tobago. A graduate of the Pratt Institute and the Yale Graduate School of Architecture, Lee Poy has a practice centred on postcolonial Caribbean design and fabrication in the festival arts—especially Carnival—and has taught at the Department of Creative and Festival Arts at the University of the West Indies.
Marton Robinson is a Costa Rican artist who completed an MFA at the University of Southern California. Robinson’s art, which is informed mainly by African American traditions, challenges conventional representations of Black identities in art history, and he has participated in exhibitions at the Getty Center, X Bienal Centroamericana, Pacific Standard Time and the Palais de Tokyo.
