Visual Arts Nova Scotia is pleased to officially announce the participants of this year’s Mentorship Program. After receiving many great applications, the program will be supporting four dedicated emerging artists in Nova Scotia. Jordan Johnson, Kamila Orbegoso, Shane Keyu Song, and Jessica Steele and have been individually paired with established artists and mentors Melanie Colosimo, Margarita Fainshtein, Mathew Reichertz, and Christopher Webb.

EMERGING ARTISTS

Jordan Johnson is a multimedia artist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, working primarily in painting, digital art, and photography. Her work is rooted in the perspective of a mixed-race woman navigating the complexities of identity, resilience, and joy. Drawing from personal experiences of hardship, healing, and the enduring spirit of childlike wonder, Jordan’s art often blends raw emotional depth with moments of playful lightness. She envisions a practice where her chosen mediums merge seamlessly, creating immersive, multidimensional works. In June, she held her first solo exhibition at Hermes Gallery, marking a significant milestone in her artistic journey. With a growing momentum, Jordan is now focused on pursuing grants and residencies to further evolve her craft and expand her creative reach.

Kamila Orbegoso is an emerging interdisciplinary artist based in Kjipuktuk, Nova Scotia. She grew up in Lima, Peru where she studied psychology, moving to Canada in 2017 to study at NSCAD University. She graduated in 2024 with a BFA in Textiles and Fashion. She uses weaving, ceramics, mixed media, creative writing and installation to explore themes of memory, self-expression and healing, often working with her own family history and themes of trauma. Her work centres the way art can help navigate emotions and serve as a mechanism for self-exploration. Since graduating, she’s furthered her practice while facilitating textile and fashion based workshops and experiences for youth with Wonder’neath, NSCAD Art Factory and the MacPhee Centre for Creative Learning, exploring mixed-media creation and storytelling.

She is a 2025 recipient of a Research and Creation Grant by Canada Council for the Arts where she is researching the intersection of creative arts therapy theory and storytelling through craft, with creative writing, weaving and installation. In 2023-2024 she participated in the Flaxmobile Project residency and series of exhibitions. She worked with flax grown by regional farmers exploring themes of sustainability, scarcity and abundance with the work “Holding Each Other Up.”

Shane Song is an artist who has sought out and contributed to diverse environments where artistic and design skills are valued. She brings creativity, athleticism, and a problem-solving mindset to her work. With over twenty years of multidisciplinary practice, she has deepened her artistic foundation, expanding her knowledge of various media, techniques, and philosophies. Through collaboration, project management, and production experience, she continues to cultivate patience and focus in her creative process.

Her creative outlet includes traditional and digital drawing and painting, collage, assemblages, mural, graphic novel and comics, experiential/interactive installation, poetry, 3D art and holistic video game development, video and animation, music and associated visual art.

Shane engages art activity almost everyday. Art is her way of adjusting and healing in struggles of mental health, neurodiversity, and identity. She uses art and music to record life and its reflections, and to strengthen her belief on artist duty: by practicing art, surviving, exploring and self-developing.

MENTORS

Melanie Colosimo (she/her) is an artist and arts administrator from Atlantic Canada. For 15 years, Melanie worked at NSCAD University, starting at the Anna Leonowens Gallery as a Collections Assistant and eventually serving as Director/Curator for a decade. During her tenure, she oversaw 100 exhibitions, over 250 events, and various collaborative projects, including the NSCAD Lithography Workshop and RESPONSIVE: International Light Art Projects. She also established several programs, such as the Treaty Space Gallery, Art Bar +Projects and a certificate in Gallery and Studio Management. She concluded her time at NSCAD as Interim Academic Dean, and in 2023 became Director/Curator at the MSVU Art Gallery. She is currently the Manager of Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

As an artist, Melanie uses drawing, soft sculpture, and installation to examine themes of labour and how a region’s economic landscape influences community dynamics. A Sobey Art Award nominee in 2017 and 2020, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including installations for indoor and outdoor public spaces. Throughout her career, she has prioritized mentorship, helping artists realize their exhibition visions and supporting the promotion of the Atlantic art community.

Margarita Fainshtein is a multidisciplinary artist whose innovative work reflects on such themes as the motion of Time, History, Memory, Erasure and Culture. Her work closely examines the intersection of these concepts when applied to cultures and generations crossing. How do immigration and other cultural notions interact with political, social, and cultural infrastructures? How are political movements connected to an individual’s history, which in turn forms a global history?

Fainshtein creates interactive installations where the audience becomes an integral part of the work—physically and symbolically embedded within it. In her installations Fainshtein implements the light and shadow that transform to not just visual tools—they are metaphors for visibility, presence, and erasure. The viewer’s body becomes both participant and witness, actively engaging with a space. Beyond her installations, Fainshtein also creates communal art gatherings where people come together to exchange stories, ideas, and meals—fostering deeper connections between individuals and their experiences.

Fainshtein’s installations often feature responsive, site-specific objects that engage directly with its surroundings. Often activated by sound, voice, movement, and vibration, it illuminates in real time—its glowing presence shaped by the audience’s own input. Rather than remaining static, the objects shifting, evolving, and in a constant process of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Born in Ukraine, Margarita Fainshtein earned a BFA from University of Haifa, and MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions include: Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; Chicago Art Department, Chicago; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; The Artist House, Jerusalem (forthcoming), Studio 21, Solo show in New York, USA (forthcoming), and venues in North America and Europe. Fainshtein’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Acadia University, Canada; Art Bank, Canada; Art Institute of Chicago, USA.

Originally from Montreal, Quebec, Mathew Reichertz completed his BFA at Concordia University and his MFA at NSCAD University. He makes large, multi-panel, narrative paintings. In 2006 he became a tenure track member of the Faculty at NSCAD University where he is now a Professor in the Division of Fine Arts.

Christopher Webb explores the tension between inheritance and erasure, examining how migration, commerce, and identity intertwine across generations. Rooted in personal history and his Italian heritage, his work navigates assimilation, the loss of language, and the transformation of culture through necessity and survival. Using a restrained visual language, Webb renders everyday scenes and objects — sometimes cropped, often isolated — creating images that feel at once intimate and distant, familiar yet unknowable. Inspired by personal events and archival photographs, his paintings elevate the overlooked: shipping containers, fragments of handwritten text, vessels lost in transit. These motifs, layered with prose and memory, become artifacts of adaptation and longing. His recent focus on cargo ships and containers uses the movement of goods as a metaphor for displacement, reflecting on how migration reshapes identity and commodifies cultural memory.

Christopher Webb is a self-taught visual artist based in Herring Cove, Nova Scotia. In 2024 he was awarded the CREA – Cantieri del Contemporaneo Venezia Prize for Painting and will present his first international solo exhibition in 2026 at Marina Bastianello Gallery in Venice, Italy. Webb’s work has been exhibited in Canada and Europe and placed in public collections including the Nova Scotia Art Bank and Comune di Valenzano, Italy. He is co-founder and director of PAVIA Gallery.

Featured image details clockwise from top left: Kamila Orbegoso, Poemas into Landscape – On top of the Letters (detail), Woven tapestry, cotton, alpaca, paper, 16″ x 8″, 2024; Jessica Steele, Patchwork (detail), Hand-cut paper collage, 5” x 5”, 2025; Jordan Johnson, Dancing in my room (detail), Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 48″ x 30”, 2025; Shane Keyu Song, Connection (detail) (from the three-piece series Structure of Self), Acrylic on woodboard, 5″ × 5″, 2025.