Karen Zalamea Wins 2025 Barbara Spohr Memorial Award For Photography

Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity have announced 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.

“I am honoured to be the 2025 recipient of the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award. As an independent artist over the last 15 years, I'm thrilled to be considered alongside the name of Barbara Spohr, as well as my estimable peers in photography who are invested in pushing the form forward as a vital medium. This award allows my first-ever residency at Banff Centre, and I will enthusiastically make the most of the rich resources offered there,” said Karen Zalamea

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 Herbarium (after Flora de Filipinas) (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.

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