Judges
Thank you to our judges!
We are honoured to present this year’s group of judges, who deliberated, debated, and carefully selected the 2026 Grad Show Awards Winners
Lynds Gallant
Lynds Gallant is currently a Design Director leading a team of brilliant designers in Innovation at Playstation.
During her 15 years in the game industry, Lynds has done An Actual Jillion things as a triple-threat Creative Director, Art Director, and Concept Artist – visually designing some of the first mobile games that were enjoyed by millions of players, art directing a colourful tapestry of indie games across tons of platforms, as well as co-founding and successfully raising capital for several independent studios.
Lynds is passionate about building design teams and studios that embrace balance, empathy, and mental health as the core framework for fostering creativity, helping people to be their best artistic selves, and actually enjoying that process along the way.
.
Matt James
MATT JAMES is a painter, author/illustrator, and musician whose books include Yellow Moon, Apple Moon by Pamela Porter (New Mexico Book Award); I Know Here by Laurel Croza (Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award); When the Moon Comes by Paul Harbridge (Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award); and I Know How to Draw an Owl by Hilary Horder Hippely. Matt’s illustrations for Northwest Passage, a tribute to the Stan Rogers song, won the Governor General’s Literary Award.
The books Matt has written include Tadpoles, Nice Try, Charlie!, and his author-illustrator debut, The Funeral, which was named a New York Times and New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book.
As a child, Matt James liked to trace comics and pretend that tennis racquets were guitars—now he lives in Toronto and behaves more like a grown-up.
Hyein Lee
Hyein Lee RGD is an engineer turned illustrator and motion grapher. Her work is populated by lonesome, humble and friendly monsters which depict melancholy moments with cuddly-toy appeal.
Her clients include CBC, Scholastic, Cossette, Canadian Family, Canadian Living, This Magazine, Planned Parenthood, and many more.
She is currently an associate professor at Emily Carr University.
Jennifer Lum
Jen is an art director and designer with extensive experience in illustrated publishing. She has art directed projects that received recognition from the Eisner Awards,The Joe Shuster Awards, The Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence in Book Design and the Governor General Awards. She works with publishers, writers and artists to produce graphic novels, children’s books, non-fiction, novels and corporate publications. Jen is an instructor at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she teaches a course on making comics.
Pete Ryan
Pete Ryan is an editorial illustrator living in BC. He’s won 3 medals from the Society of illustrators. He cares about gardening and lifted trucks.
No, that is not a wig.