Congratulations to our DARC Expanded Practice Residency recipients for Summer 2025! 🎉
Digital Arts Resource Centre (DARC) is proud to present the DARC Expanded Practice Residency for Summer 2025 to artists Olivia Onuk, Charlie MacLean, and Pixie Cram! The Expanded Practice Residency is a three-week intensive artist residency offered to Extended Access members of DARC seeking to develop their current practice, experiment with a new medium, or continue an existing project.
THE ARTISTS
Olivia Onuk
Olivia Onuk is an interdisciplinary artist, storyteller, and community organizer whose work explores art as a tool for healing, connection, and meaning-making. She works across poetry, video, drumming, and visual installation, drawing from her Nigerian heritage, spirituality, and Black/immigrant perspectives to center communal dialogue and creative expression.
With a background in family violence and conflict resolution and over 13 years of experience in curation, facilitation, and consultation, Olivia leads arts-based wellness workshops and develops creative programs for individuals and organizations. She was also the inaugural Artist in Residence in Government for the City of Ottawa, where she collaborated on art-driven approaches to civic well-being.
As part of this residency, Olivia is continuing Art as Therapy: In Conversation with Creatives—a video series that explores how artists use their practice to process, heal, and connect. She will be completing previously recorded episodes and filming new ones.
Charlie MacLean
Charlotte MacLean, otherwise known as Charlie, is an artist based between K’jipuktuk / Halifax and Adawe / Ottawa who works with a wide variety of media. Their work brings handcrafted people, places, and things into digital worlds using experimental performance. Currently, they are working on a scary picture book about two toy cats who live alone in a big house, and a multimedia puppet show for Halifax Fringe called Beautiful Huge New Property Coming Soon Right Here.
Charlie’s practice runs the gamut from oil painting, to camcorder video, to Unity Game Engine. The cross-disciplinarity of her practice is fuelled by the urge to resist being stuck doing one thing, as well as her curiosity and love of play.
Charlie graduated with a BFA from NSCAD in 2023, and in 2024 they were video artist inresidence at the Centre for Art Tapes. Their proposed project will build on their recent experience at Mermaid Theatre’s Animotion Puppetry Intensive. They are excited to spend a week in the DARC SOUNDSTAGE, where they will create a video-based HTML point-and-click adventure about a puppet trying to climb a mountain.
Pixie Cram
Pixie Cram is a Canadian filmmaker based in the Ottawa-Gatineau region. The format of her work includes stop-motion animation, live action fiction, and small-gauge film (super8 & 16mm). Her films have screened at festivals across Canada and internationally.
What is the Expanded Practice Residency?
The Expanded Practice Residency provides the recipient with access to DARC’s facilities, including the DARC Microcinema, SOUNDSTAGE, Digital Edit Suite, and Recording Studio, a fee for an optional artist talk or presentation of their work, and access to an array of audio-visual equipment for the duration of their residency. Artists will find creative ways to experiment with video and moving images, the distribution of sound, and other tactics for presentation and audience engagement.
DARC is proud to have Olivia, Charlie, and Pixie as our Artists in Residence, and we continue to be excited to support the work of independent artists through our resources, programming and education!
