The Daniels Faculty will be well represented at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, running in the Italian city from May 10 to November 23.

In addition to lecturer and Applied Technologies Director Nicholas Hoban, who is on the creative team representing Canada at the 19th iteration of the event, a number of Faculty students and alumni are among the nearly two dozen recipients of Biennale Fellowships supported by Canada’s Council for the Arts.

The fellows, says the Council, which bestows the fellowships on architecture students and emerging arts practitioners from across the country, “will conduct independent research in Venice and serve as exhibition ambassadors at the Canada Pavilion, engaging with a global audience including architects, artists, designers, scholars and cultural leaders.”

“The Canada Council is delighted to support this year’s fellows as part of Canada’s long-standing engagement with the Venice Architecture Biennale,” Michelle Chawla, Director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts, said in a statement announcing 2025’s recipients.

“This is a diverse group of passionate, creative thinkers who will expand their independent research in an international context and enrich the Canada Pavilion. The fellows’ participation will deepen the conversation on how art and architecture meaningfully impact and strengthen society, in Canada and all over the world.”

Among the recipients associated with Daniels and U of T are:

Renée Powell-Hines
Master of Architecture student Powell-Hines is an artist and aspiring practitioner who views the field of architecture and design through the lens of equity, ethnography and sustainability. Her passion for technology focuses her master’s degree coursework on digital fabrication and robotics, with the goal of making contemporary fabrication methods more sustainable and accessible in the hopes of integrating this optimized making method into affordable housing.

Tanis Worme
Worme is a non-binary/gender fluid Plains Cree (nēhiyaw) student pursuing their MVS in Curatorial Studies degree at Daniels. While their education in architecture is rooted in Ontario, their design sensibilities are grounded in their lived experiences as an urban Indigenous person from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Their growing body of studio work considers notions of memory through blood and storytelling. Their design ethos builds on these themes, drawing from intellectual traditions to deconstruct inaccessible architecture and offer alternative narratives of compassionate spatial interventions.

Lane Johnson
MARC graduate Johnson is an architectural designer who works at the intersection of design, research and practice. His thesis at Daniels focused on bio-climatic architecture in the Caribbean. Johnson has worked on projects in the Caribbean, Canada and the United States.

Darian Razdar
Razdar is a writer, artist and independent scholar who acquired his Master of Science in Urban Planning at U of T. Razdar’s practice is embodied, ecological, collaborative and research-intensive, often working with the mediums of poetry, image, textile and print. His publications include Edge Theory (Silverfish, 2025), Morning Poems (San Press, 2023) and COUNTER-MAP: A Poetics of Place (Reflex Urbanism, 2022). His practice is currently based in Toronto and Mexico City.

Adrian Yu
Yu received his Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies degree at Daniels. He is currently an architectural designer and photographer at Toronto-based Office In Search Of. Yu is also a visual artist interested in designing composite images as a way to generate critical narratives on architecture and the built environment. Memory, culture and emotion have become areas of interest in his work and motivate the use of interdisciplinary techniques spanning photography, illustration, photogrammetry and digital rendering to study their implications on our experience of space.

This year, a total of 21 fellows will be travelling to Venice from Canada. For the full list of fellowship recipients, click here.

Powell-Hines portrait by Kodi Ume-Onyido. Worme portrait by Carmelle Martinez. Johnson portrait by Yugo Takahashi. Razdar portrait by Chellise Michael. Yu portrait by María Chen Liang.