Judges
Thank you to our judges!
We are honoured to present this year’s group of judges, who deliberated, debated, and carefully selected the 2024 Grad Show Awards Winners
Irma Kniivila
Irma Kniivila is an artist working primarily in comics. She is co-author of Everyday Hero Machine Boy (Skybound Entertainment), and illustrator for the Fluffle Bunnies series (Tundra). Irma has worked as a storyboard artist for TV and ads, illustrated for clients such as The Walrus and The Globe and Mail, and done colour work for Marvel, DC and Boom! Studios.
Hyein Lee
Hyein Lee, RGD, is an engineer turned illustrator and motion grapher. She has been teaching illustration and motion graphic design for over 14 years at post-secondary institutions such as Sheridan College, OCAD University, Centennial College, and Emily Carr University. Her clients include CBC, Scholastic, Cossette, Canadian Family, Canadian Living, This Magazine, Planned Parenthood, and many more.
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.
Bushra Mahmood
Bushra Mahmood is a Senior Design Manager at Adobe based in New York. She graduated from Sheridan Illustration class of 2012 and has spent over a decade working on creative tooling ranging from spatial, 3D to web.
Pete Ryan
Pete grew up on a farm in Southern Ontario. A bespectacled child, he spent his time indoors, drawing endless pictures of bears and dogs. Now he works from a sun soaked studio in British Columbia and does his little paintings for Magazines, Newspapers, Advertising, and Books. Pete is really into Golden Retrievers, 90’s Hard X Core, snowboarding, the Lord of the Rings, and being a global warming alarmist. He used to help Art Direct a magazine, but that hasn’t happened in a long while. He also used to teach Core Concepts in the illustration program at Sheridan College for like 10 years and then a little bit at Selkirk College, but he’s not doing that now either.