Access A/V Residency Recipients

VP is excited to announce that Thomas Toews, Paul Gubernachuk, Shivanya Ra, Leaf Pankratz & Mystery Byrd are the recipients of the Access AV Residency Recipients for 2026!

In keeping with the spirit of the Scott Leroux fund's focus on exploration and research, VP's Access A/V Residency provides up to five artists with 60 hours of self-directed access to the analog-focused Adventure Lab. This program expands our commitment to research, experimentation, and sustained engagement with technologies, prioritizing process driven exploration over the production of finished works.

About the Artists

Thomas Toews

Thomas Toews is an experimental musician from Winnipeg MB. His improvised live performances explore feedback and harmony at multiple levels of abstraction. Utilizing “no-input mixing” as the primary method of sound generation, he explores landscapes of texture that flow into, and inform each other. His involvement in local experimental music includes organizing and promoting events, short film score work, and performances with drift sequence, send + receive, prairie wires, and more.

Paul Gubernachuk

“Party” Paul Gubernachuk is a Canadian visual artist inspired by 80's and 90's pop-culture including comic books, cartoons, movies, action figures and video games. He explores the “art of play” using retro toys, tech, media, and childlike wonder to create displays and puppetry, character illustrations, short films, animations, theatrics and immersive experiences.

Shivanya Ra

Shivanya Ra is an emerging multidisciplinary artist, curator, and disability advocate based in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg), originally from the Okanagan Valley (unceded Syilx/Okanagan Nation territory). Their practice is grounded in the belief that art is access—to ourselves, each other, and radical forms of belonging. As an Autistic-disabled, neurodivergent, Mad, and queer/bigender artist, they work across drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, photography, installation, and interactive media. Their work explores perception, identity, and space through disjunction, fragmentation, and kaleidoscopic forms, reclaiming atypical ways of sensing as embodied knowledge, alongside disabled joy and maturity. Shivanya holds an MA in Cultural Studies (Curatorial Practices) from the University of Winnipeg and a BFA from Mount Allison University. Recent roles include Maker-in-Residence at ideaMILL and contributing artist-curator with Sync Re-Ignite 2025.

Leaf Pankratz

Leaf Pankratz is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, theatre, dance, film, visual and media arts. Their work explores a mythologized framing of their experiences as a queer disabled person through a philosophy of disability as a creative catalyst. A recent graduate from the University of Guelph’s Master of Arts Theatre Studies program, they have developed a practice in performance as research that melds visual arts with performance-based exhibition. Pankratz also holds a BAH degree in linguistics and theatre, and a Deaf Studies Certificate through Red River Polytechnic. Pankratz’s short film, Adamah, has screened internationally as an official selection of the Circus International Film Festival, and in the Reel Pride Winnipeg shorts competition. Their live performance adaptation/continuation piece debuted at the Helmut Gallery in Leipzig, Germany. Their self-photography series, Before Photos, was recently exhibited at the Platform Center for Photographic and Digital Arts Members Wall. In recent years their practice has expanded more into visual mediums, including various forms of printmaking as well as analogue film. Regardless of medium, their work takes a devised and process-based approach with a focus on research and the development of new uses for existing mediums.

Mystery Byrd

Mystery Byrd is a fifth and second generation European-Canadian queer artist and film worker based on Treaty 1 territory with a lifelong background in DIY cinema and over 17 years of industry experience. Mystery loves family, philosophy, creation, people and criticism.