From The Gallery

Artistic Collaborations

The Door He Chose to Open

He was eight years old when he started narrating his own life from a Toronto curb, watching puddles run toward the storm drain. Decades on, Mohamed Hammoud’s award-winning story “Reclaiming My Name” became the seed of a memoir arriving this October. In this Threshold conversation, he talks about the name he set down as a child, the one he’s still learning to carry without shaking, and what it costs to decide which chapters of a life deserve to exist on the page.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

We Are the Architects, We Are the Architecture

Three bottles by the bedside — milk, juice, water — placed every night by a father who had no other language for care. It is one of the images at the heart of Her Story, a dialogue between a first-generation immigrant and their second-generation Canadian partner, honoured in the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. In this conversation, the Prairie Collective reflects on what it means to build a story together, how memory unlocks itself in layers, and why belonging is always under construction.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Car That Carried the Story

Ana-Maria Posada-Borda has been thinking about car rides for as long as she can remember—not the destinations, but what her parents said in those moments, facing forward, the cost of each word only clear to her later. Born in Montréal to Colombian parents who arrived before she did, she is eighteen years old and already published. Her story, submitted to the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award, received the Honourable Mention. In this conversation, she reflects on writing in secret, the surprise of being read, and what she would say to anyone sitting with a story they’re not sure belongs.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Music She Carried

A fiddle melody rises through the floorboards of a house in Oxford, and Winnie—stubborn, curious, already bending the rules—follows the sound upstairs toward a coughing Canadian soldier and a life she couldn’t have invented. In War Brides, Elisa Bryce weaves four generations of migration and music into a single voice. The Gallery of Human Migration spoke with the 2025 Migration Literary Award Honourable Mention about inherited courage, the women who held the story, and why she kept writing.

Read More »
Event poster: The Threshold—A Conversation with Keiko Honda; art sketch evokes migration, new homes, and shared belonging
Artistic Collaborations

The Nest That Holds The Story

Keiko Honda arrived in Vancouver in her early forties—navigating a new city from a wheelchair, hosting cultural salons in her living room, telling herself she was an observer. Then four words in an email changed everything. In conversation with Gallery Executive Director Nancy Perin, Honda reflects on what it truly costs to move a story from the private desk to the collective container, whose voices live inside the stories we think are ours alone, and why the doubt you feel about telling it is not a warning. It is the clearest sign that it matters.

Read More »
Digital artwork: a small sailboat with a woman leaving a quiet pier in a mountainous port area, a reflective migration journey toward beginning.
Artistic Collaborations

The Gallery’s Standing Invitation to Visual Artists

Sabrina Aureli stood at the edge of the frame—a balcony, a moon, a sea—and called it Beckoning. That image opened the Gallery of Human Migration’s first featured visual artist collaboration. Then Andrew Duff arrived, with his eye for the honest, uncomfortable, sometimes funny weight of being human together. Two artists, two cycles, one continuous thread. The Gallery’s invitation to visual artists is standing and permanent: bring work that listens, in any medium, for any movement. We are always looking for the next voice.

Read More »
Intergenerational walk in a park: elder with dog and smiling young adult, sharing stories of home, migration, and belonging.
Artistic Collaborations

A Mirror, Not a Memorial

In 1945, a Japanese family stranded north of Korea’s newly drawn 38th parallel survived not through strategy or strength, but because of one Korean ship captain’s quiet, unwitnessed act of compassion. That act is the reason Keiko Honda exists today. In this interview, Gallery of Human Migration Executive Director Nancy Perin speaks with Honda about her grandfather’s translated memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945—and what his story reveals about empire, migration, and the patterns of racial discrimination we are still living inside now.

Read More »
Person in white gazes at full moon over the sea from a balcony, evoking themes of migration, belonging, and shared humanity.
Artistic Collaborations

An Invitation to Visual Artists

Before journeys are traced in words, they are often sensed through images—a pause, a threshold, a gesture of listening.
Visual Voices of the 4Bs is an invitation to visual artists to engage with the Gallery of Human Migration’s framework — Beckoning, Beginning, Becoming, Belonging — four movements that shape the human experience of migration. Through images, artists help open spaces of reflection, offering ways of seeing that do not explain, but invite.
From this place of listening, the Gallery invites artists to contribute visual works that respond to one moment of the 4B journey—or, for those who feel called, to accompany the full cycle over time.

Read More »
Red gift box with Best Wishes and a ribbon, resting on a rock in a forest setting, symbolizing shared journeys and blessings.
Artistic Collaborations

The Red Box That Travels Like Humanity Itself

Everywhere, people move—each carrying an invisible red box filled with their past, their dreams, and their hopes.
When you see them together, you see us all—one human constellation, bound by movement and memory.

Read More »
Person wearing a white mask looks sideways in front of a dark background with two decorative pieces.
Artistic Collaborations

The Art of Ester Crocetta

Ester Crocetta is a contemporary artist born in Italy. Her artistic career has developed both in Italy and internationally, with numerous exhibitions that have established her as a prominent figure in contemporary art.

Read More »
Silhouette of a person with colorful watercolor texture emanating from their head, symbolizing creativity and imagination.
Artistic Collaborations

Women in Migration: Strength, Resilience, and Transformation

When migration is discussed, the focus is often on statistics, borders, and policies. But behind every number is a human story—and half of those stories belong to women. Women migrants are not simply companions or dependents. They are leaders, workers, caregivers, innovators, and cultural ambassadors.

Read More »
Book cover: vintage microphone with a maple leaf and 'Where Is Here?' book title, black text on a white background.
Artistic Collaborations

Where is Here? – A CBC Radio Drama Anthology

In 2004, the Gallery of Human Migration became the proud repository of the final drafts of Where Is Here?, a two–volume anthology of radio plays on migration themes produced by CBC Radio and edited by Damiano Pietropaolo, then Executive Director of CBC Radio Drama.

Read More »
Red gift box with Best Wishes and a ribbon, resting on a rock in a forest setting, symbolizing shared journeys and blessings.
Artistic Collaborations

The Red Box That Travels Like Humanity Itself

Everywhere, people move—each carrying an invisible red box filled with their past, their dreams, and their hopes.
When you see them together, you see us all—one human constellation, bound by movement and memory.

Read More »
Close-up of a black and white film strip representing nonprofit storytelling through impactful visual media.
Documentaries

RE:Location Documentary Series

A family receives notice. They have days to pack what they can carry. The place they built — the street, the neighbourhood, the name of the corner where everyone knew everyone — will not be there when they look back. The RE:Location Documentary Series, presented by the Gallery of Human Migration, gathers these stories of forced uprooting: communities erased by policy, by fear, by the quiet violence of progress. What was lost. What was carried forward. What is still asking to be seen.

Read More »
Silhouette of a person with colorful watercolor texture emanating from their head, symbolizing creativity and imagination.
Artistic Collaborations

Women in Migration: Strength, Resilience, and Transformation

When migration is discussed, the focus is often on statistics, borders, and policies. But behind every number is a human story—and half of those stories belong to women. Women migrants are not simply companions or dependents. They are leaders, workers, caregivers, innovators, and cultural ambassadors.

Read More »
Giving Tuesday poster with abstract art celebrating shared humanity, set for December 2, 2025.
Events

Giving Tuesday 2025 at the Gallery of Human Migration

Every story of migration begins with someone deciding the world might hold something worth moving toward. On Giving Tuesday 2025, the Gallery of Human Migration invited its community to become part of that movement — not as witnesses, but as participants. Your support carries migration stories into the light: into publication, into conversation, into the hands of people who have never seen their own experience reflected back at them. This is what belonging looks like when a community decides to build it together.

Read More »
Editor’s note: today’s top pick on migration and belonging; warm hands typing on laptop, inviting shared human stories
Expert Voices

What A Story Costs

Story is not free. A reflection on the Migration Literary Award, what it revealed, and the road to The Tapestry.

Read More »
Families and newcomers gather by the Eternal Flame at Parliament Hill, a hopeful stop in a family journey toward becoming.
Expert Voices

Becoming Is Not Passive. It Is an Ethical Act.

She packed what she could carry, said goodbye to people she didn’t know how to leave, and moved. No photograph at the border. No policy paper written in her name. This March, the Gallery of Human Migration brings together artists, filmmakers, and writers—Sabrina Aureli, Sunny Yi, Leena Minifie, David Paperny, Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann, and Keiko Honda—to ask what transformation actually costs. Becoming, they suggest, is not personal growth. It is an ethical act.

Read More »
Intergenerational walk in a park: elder with dog and smiling young adult, sharing stories of home, migration, and belonging.
Artistic Collaborations

A Mirror, Not a Memorial

In 1945, a Japanese family stranded north of Korea’s newly drawn 38th parallel survived not through strategy or strength, but because of one Korean ship captain’s quiet, unwitnessed act of compassion. That act is the reason Keiko Honda exists today. In this interview, Gallery of Human Migration Executive Director Nancy Perin speaks with Honda about her grandfather’s translated memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945—and what his story reveals about empire, migration, and the patterns of racial discrimination we are still living inside now.

Read More »
Close-up of a black and white film strip representing nonprofit storytelling through impactful visual media.
Documentaries

RE:Location Documentary Series

A family receives notice. They have days to pack what they can carry. The place they built — the street, the neighbourhood, the name of the corner where everyone knew everyone — will not be there when they look back. The RE:Location Documentary Series, presented by the Gallery of Human Migration, gathers these stories of forced uprooting: communities erased by policy, by fear, by the quiet violence of progress. What was lost. What was carried forward. What is still asking to be seen.

Read More »
Intricate spiral staircase with ornate railing, viewed from below, symbolizing nonprofit pathways of growth and support.
Featured

A Return Long Overdue: The Vatican, Indigenous Artifacts, and the Politics of Repatriation

The Gallery of Human Migration celebrates the Vatican’s decision to return sacred Indigenous artifacts to their original communities—a long-awaited act of justice. Though not directly involved in this process, the Gallery has long advocated for such restitution. We celebrate this moment with conviction and gratitude, as witnesses who have long hoped to see institutions embrace genuine acts of restoration and reconciliation.

Read More »
Rows of shoes lined up on pavement, representing a nonprofit awareness campaign for missing children.
Indigenous Voices

Missing Children Awaken a Societal Reckoning

The silent beat of the metaphorical drums reverberated within me as the whispering continued: “Since time immemorial our ancestors freely walked on our land, yet in a blink of an eye we were buried in Terra Nullius.”

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Door He Chose to Open

He was eight years old when he started narrating his own life from a Toronto curb, watching puddles run toward the storm drain. Decades on, Mohamed Hammoud’s award-winning story “Reclaiming My Name” became the seed of a memoir arriving this October. In this Threshold conversation, he talks about the name he set down as a child, the one he’s still learning to carry without shaking, and what it costs to decide which chapters of a life deserve to exist on the page.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

We Are the Architects, We Are the Architecture

Three bottles by the bedside — milk, juice, water — placed every night by a father who had no other language for care. It is one of the images at the heart of Her Story, a dialogue between a first-generation immigrant and their second-generation Canadian partner, honoured in the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. In this conversation, the Prairie Collective reflects on what it means to build a story together, how memory unlocks itself in layers, and why belonging is always under construction.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Car That Carried the Story

Ana-Maria Posada-Borda has been thinking about car rides for as long as she can remember—not the destinations, but what her parents said in those moments, facing forward, the cost of each word only clear to her later. Born in Montréal to Colombian parents who arrived before she did, she is eighteen years old and already published. Her story, submitted to the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award, received the Honourable Mention. In this conversation, she reflects on writing in secret, the surprise of being read, and what she would say to anyone sitting with a story they’re not sure belongs.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Music She Carried

A fiddle melody rises through the floorboards of a house in Oxford, and Winnie—stubborn, curious, already bending the rules—follows the sound upstairs toward a coughing Canadian soldier and a life she couldn’t have invented. In War Brides, Elisa Bryce weaves four generations of migration and music into a single voice. The Gallery of Human Migration spoke with the 2025 Migration Literary Award Honourable Mention about inherited courage, the women who held the story, and why she kept writing.

Read More »
Event poster: The Threshold—A Conversation with Keiko Honda; art sketch evokes migration, new homes, and shared belonging
Artistic Collaborations

The Nest That Holds The Story

Keiko Honda arrived in Vancouver in her early forties—navigating a new city from a wheelchair, hosting cultural salons in her living room, telling herself she was an observer. Then four words in an email changed everything. In conversation with Gallery Executive Director Nancy Perin, Honda reflects on what it truly costs to move a story from the private desk to the collective container, whose voices live inside the stories we think are ours alone, and why the doubt you feel about telling it is not a warning. It is the clearest sign that it matters.

Read More »
Intergenerational walk in a park: elder with dog and smiling young adult, sharing stories of home, migration, and belonging.
Artistic Collaborations

A Mirror, Not a Memorial

In 1945, a Japanese family stranded north of Korea’s newly drawn 38th parallel survived not through strategy or strength, but because of one Korean ship captain’s quiet, unwitnessed act of compassion. That act is the reason Keiko Honda exists today. In this interview, Gallery of Human Migration Executive Director Nancy Perin speaks with Honda about her grandfather’s translated memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945—and what his story reveals about empire, migration, and the patterns of racial discrimination we are still living inside now.

Read More »
Media release for Toronto's Gallery of Human Migration, celebrating migration, belonging, and shared humanity.
Interviews

ChinTV: Launch of the Migration Literary Award 2025

Toronto, February 7, 2025. The Gallery of Human Migration (The Gallery) is thrilled to announce the inaugural Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award, a celebration of the transformative power of migration through storytelling.

Read More »
Featured

Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Awards

At eleven, Rocco Maragna landed at Pier 21 with nothing certain but the father waiting on the other side. Decades later, the founder and president of the Gallery of Human Migration has been named one of Canada’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants of 2026—recognition that traces back to the same question he carried off that boat: how does a place come to hold the people arriving in it? His story, and the community that helped tell it, are still being written.

Read More »
Giving Tuesday poster with abstract art celebrating shared humanity, set for December 2, 2025.
Events

Giving Tuesday 2025 at the Gallery of Human Migration

Every story of migration begins with someone deciding the world might hold something worth moving toward. On Giving Tuesday 2025, the Gallery of Human Migration invited its community to become part of that movement — not as witnesses, but as participants. Your support carries migration stories into the light: into publication, into conversation, into the hands of people who have never seen their own experience reflected back at them. This is what belonging looks like when a community decides to build it together.

Read More »
2025 Grand Prize logo with abstract design in a gold circle for nonprofit event promotion.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Grand Prize: Mohamed Hammoud

A child’s life is split by a siren that rips the ordinary day apart — the beginning of exile, of loss, and of a name given and taken. From the sun-baked streets of Beirut to a new life in London, Ontario, this is a story about what happens when you carry a homeland inside you while learning to survive somewhere else. Tender, fierce, and memory-rich, the narrative tracks one family’s decision to leave, the small rituals that keep them human, and the quiet work of reclaiming selfhood in a world that keeps renaming you…

Read More »
Intricate spiral staircase with ornate railing, viewed from below, symbolizing nonprofit pathways of growth and support.
Featured

A Return Long Overdue: The Vatican, Indigenous Artifacts, and the Politics of Repatriation

The Gallery of Human Migration celebrates the Vatican’s decision to return sacred Indigenous artifacts to their original communities—a long-awaited act of justice. Though not directly involved in this process, the Gallery has long advocated for such restitution. We celebrate this moment with conviction and gratitude, as witnesses who have long hoped to see institutions embrace genuine acts of restoration and reconciliation.

Read More »
Media release for Toronto's Gallery of Human Migration, celebrating migration, belonging, and shared humanity.
Interviews

ChinTV: Launch of the Migration Literary Award 2025

Toronto, February 7, 2025. The Gallery of Human Migration (The Gallery) is thrilled to announce the inaugural Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award, a celebration of the transformative power of migration through storytelling.

Read More »
Book cover: vintage microphone with a maple leaf and 'Where Is Here?' book title, black text on a white background.
Artistic Collaborations

Where is Here? – A CBC Radio Drama Anthology

In 2004, the Gallery of Human Migration became the proud repository of the final drafts of Where Is Here?, a two–volume anthology of radio plays on migration themes produced by CBC Radio and edited by Damiano Pietropaolo, then Executive Director of CBC Radio Drama.

Read More »
Featured

Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Awards

At eleven, Rocco Maragna landed at Pier 21 with nothing certain but the father waiting on the other side. Decades later, the founder and president of the Gallery of Human Migration has been named one of Canada’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants of 2026—recognition that traces back to the same question he carried off that boat: how does a place come to hold the people arriving in it? His story, and the community that helped tell it, are still being written.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Door He Chose to Open

He was eight years old when he started narrating his own life from a Toronto curb, watching puddles run toward the storm drain. Decades on, Mohamed Hammoud’s award-winning story “Reclaiming My Name” became the seed of a memoir arriving this October. In this Threshold conversation, he talks about the name he set down as a child, the one he’s still learning to carry without shaking, and what it costs to decide which chapters of a life deserve to exist on the page.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

We Are the Architects, We Are the Architecture

Three bottles by the bedside — milk, juice, water — placed every night by a father who had no other language for care. It is one of the images at the heart of Her Story, a dialogue between a first-generation immigrant and their second-generation Canadian partner, honoured in the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. In this conversation, the Prairie Collective reflects on what it means to build a story together, how memory unlocks itself in layers, and why belonging is always under construction.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Car That Carried the Story

Ana-Maria Posada-Borda has been thinking about car rides for as long as she can remember—not the destinations, but what her parents said in those moments, facing forward, the cost of each word only clear to her later. Born in Montréal to Colombian parents who arrived before she did, she is eighteen years old and already published. Her story, submitted to the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award, received the Honourable Mention. In this conversation, she reflects on writing in secret, the surprise of being read, and what she would say to anyone sitting with a story they’re not sure belongs.

Read More »
Artistic Collaborations

The Music She Carried

A fiddle melody rises through the floorboards of a house in Oxford, and Winnie—stubborn, curious, already bending the rules—follows the sound upstairs toward a coughing Canadian soldier and a life she couldn’t have invented. In War Brides, Elisa Bryce weaves four generations of migration and music into a single voice. The Gallery of Human Migration spoke with the 2025 Migration Literary Award Honourable Mention about inherited courage, the women who held the story, and why she kept writing.

Read More »
Event poster: The Threshold—A Conversation with Keiko Honda; art sketch evokes migration, new homes, and shared belonging
Artistic Collaborations

The Nest That Holds The Story

Keiko Honda arrived in Vancouver in her early forties—navigating a new city from a wheelchair, hosting cultural salons in her living room, telling herself she was an observer. Then four words in an email changed everything. In conversation with Gallery Executive Director Nancy Perin, Honda reflects on what it truly costs to move a story from the private desk to the collective container, whose voices live inside the stories we think are ours alone, and why the doubt you feel about telling it is not a warning. It is the clearest sign that it matters.

Read More »
Editor’s note: today’s top pick on migration and belonging; warm hands typing on laptop, inviting shared human stories
Expert Voices

What A Story Costs

Story is not free. A reflection on the Migration Literary Award, what it revealed, and the road to The Tapestry.

Read More »
Digital artwork: a small sailboat with a woman leaving a quiet pier in a mountainous port area, a reflective migration journey toward beginning.
Artistic Collaborations

The Gallery’s Standing Invitation to Visual Artists

Sabrina Aureli stood at the edge of the frame—a balcony, a moon, a sea—and called it Beckoning. That image opened the Gallery of Human Migration’s first featured visual artist collaboration. Then Andrew Duff arrived, with his eye for the honest, uncomfortable, sometimes funny weight of being human together. Two artists, two cycles, one continuous thread. The Gallery’s invitation to visual artists is standing and permanent: bring work that listens, in any medium, for any movement. We are always looking for the next voice.

Read More »
Families and newcomers gather by the Eternal Flame at Parliament Hill, a hopeful stop in a family journey toward becoming.
Expert Voices

Becoming Is Not Passive. It Is an Ethical Act.

She packed what she could carry, said goodbye to people she didn’t know how to leave, and moved. No photograph at the border. No policy paper written in her name. This March, the Gallery of Human Migration brings together artists, filmmakers, and writers—Sabrina Aureli, Sunny Yi, Leena Minifie, David Paperny, Suzanne Elki Yoko Hartmann, and Keiko Honda—to ask what transformation actually costs. Becoming, they suggest, is not personal growth. It is an ethical act.

Read More »
Intergenerational walk in a park: elder with dog and smiling young adult, sharing stories of home, migration, and belonging.
Artistic Collaborations

A Mirror, Not a Memorial

In 1945, a Japanese family stranded north of Korea’s newly drawn 38th parallel survived not through strategy or strength, but because of one Korean ship captain’s quiet, unwitnessed act of compassion. That act is the reason Keiko Honda exists today. In this interview, Gallery of Human Migration Executive Director Nancy Perin speaks with Honda about her grandfather’s translated memoir, The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945—and what his story reveals about empire, migration, and the patterns of racial discrimination we are still living inside now.

Read More »
Person in white gazes at full moon over the sea from a balcony, evoking themes of migration, belonging, and shared humanity.
Artistic Collaborations

An Invitation to Visual Artists

Before journeys are traced in words, they are often sensed through images—a pause, a threshold, a gesture of listening.
Visual Voices of the 4Bs is an invitation to visual artists to engage with the Gallery of Human Migration’s framework — Beckoning, Beginning, Becoming, Belonging — four movements that shape the human experience of migration. Through images, artists help open spaces of reflection, offering ways of seeing that do not explain, but invite.
From this place of listening, the Gallery invites artists to contribute visual works that respond to one moment of the 4B journey—or, for those who feel called, to accompany the full cycle over time.

Read More »
Giving Tuesday poster with abstract art celebrating shared humanity, set for December 2, 2025.
Events

Giving Tuesday 2025 at the Gallery of Human Migration

Every story of migration begins with someone deciding the world might hold something worth moving toward. On Giving Tuesday 2025, the Gallery of Human Migration invited its community to become part of that movement — not as witnesses, but as participants. Your support carries migration stories into the light: into publication, into conversation, into the hands of people who have never seen their own experience reflected back at them. This is what belonging looks like when a community decides to build it together.

Read More »
Cityscape at night with glowing river reflections, highlighting themes of migration, shared paths, and urban belonging.
Stories Collection

Halifax was in me

When I was 23 years old, I packed everything I owned into my parents’ mini-van and headed east. The van was filled to the limit with boxes, bags, art supplies, and my cat, Parsifal, wedged among them. My parents were the kind of quietly generous people who never complained about a 20 hour drive across

Read More »
Red gift box with Best Wishes and a ribbon, resting on a rock in a forest setting, symbolizing shared journeys and blessings.
Artistic Collaborations

The Red Box That Travels Like Humanity Itself

Everywhere, people move—each carrying an invisible red box filled with their past, their dreams, and their hopes.
When you see them together, you see us all—one human constellation, bound by movement and memory.

Read More »
2025 Grand Prize logo with abstract design in a gold circle for nonprofit event promotion.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Grand Prize: Mohamed Hammoud

A child’s life is split by a siren that rips the ordinary day apart — the beginning of exile, of loss, and of a name given and taken. From the sun-baked streets of Beirut to a new life in London, Ontario, this is a story about what happens when you carry a homeland inside you while learning to survive somewhere else. Tender, fierce, and memory-rich, the narrative tracks one family’s decision to leave, the small rituals that keep them human, and the quiet work of reclaiming selfhood in a world that keeps renaming you…

Read More »
2025 Honourable Mention award with blue star, recognizing nonprofit excellence and achievements.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Ana-Maria Posada-Borda

Between the city streets of Montreal and the quiet rhythm of family drives, a young woman learns that identity isn’t a destination—it’s a motion between two worlds. Torn between her Colombian roots and Quebec upbringing, she discovers that belonging isn’t about choosing sides but weaving them together. In the silence of a twenty-two-minute car ride, she begins to understand that home lives not in geography, but in the stories we carry forward…

Read More »
2025 Honourable Mention award with blue star, recognizing nonprofit excellence and achievements.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Irene Yi

Between two names—Fan and Ivy—lies a life divided by language, history, and survival. From Wuhan to Ottawa, she navigates racism, silence, and the relentless performance of belonging. As she questions who she is allowed to be in either world, her voice rises—fragile yet defiant—into a declaration of dual existence. This is a story of migration as metamorphosis, where speaking becomes an act of reclaiming the self…

Read More »
2025 Honourable Mention award with blue star, recognizing nonprofit excellence and achievements.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Keiko Honda

After a life in cancer epidemiology and a sudden disability, a woman finds herself uprooted and unmoored—until community becomes the studio that calls her into being. Through accessible salons, surprising collaborators, and a series of small, brave experiments, she discovers that art isn’t a prize reserved for the few: it’s the act of bringing your perspective into the world. This memoir traces the slow, beautiful alchemy of identity, where losses transmute into creative belonging and a neighbourhood becomes a sheltering atelier…

Read More »
2025 Honourable Mention award with blue star, recognizing nonprofit excellence and achievements.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Morsal Yakuby

An artist reflects on the ache of loss, the tenderness of memory, and the search for a home that exists between cultures. Through her mother’s resilience, her family’s escape from war in Afghanistan, and her own struggle for voice and belonging, she comes to see that home is not a place—it’s a feeling, a legacy, and a language of love that outlives fear…

Read More »
2025 Honourable Mention award with blue star, recognizing nonprofit excellence and achievements.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: The Prairie Collective

A conversation across generations: one voice arrived as an adult immigrant; the other was raised in the aftermath. Through kitchen memories, scraped knees, milk-bottles left at bedside, and a pilgrimage back to India, the two trace what gets inherited across migration—grief, caution, courage, and the slow construction of belonging. Honest, intimate, and unexpectedly tender, this dialogue reveals how migration builds family architecture: a living repository of stories, each retelling a beam, each memory a brick…

Read More »
2025 Honourable Mention award with blue star, recognizing nonprofit excellence and achievements.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Elisa Bryce

A fiddle tune, an attic, a soldier’s cough—and a life that crosses an ocean. War Brides follows women whose loves stitched continents together after the war. It’s a vividly human account of travel, adaptation, and the strange comforts of music and community when cities lie wrecked and new worlds feel raw and foreign. With tenderness, humour, and plainspoken courage, the story maps how love rebuilds ordinary rituals—kitchen dances, milking cows, and kitchen parties—and how those rituals anchor a life remade far from home…

Read More »
2025 Honourable Mention award with blue star, recognizing nonprofit excellence and achievements.
Literary Award

2025 Literary Award Honourable Mention: Brenna Tomas

A family history of migration becomes a living classroom for radical hospitality and reimagined learning. Tracing Nonna’s voyage from Italy to North America, this piece links personal memory to educational theory and asks: how do communities cultivate belonging that values difference rather than erases it? By weaving academic insight with intimate recollection, the story invites readers to see migration as an experiential archive—a series of missteps, lobster-shell sheds, and small acts of resilience that together teach us how to belong differently…

Read More »
Intricate spiral staircase with ornate railing, viewed from below, symbolizing nonprofit pathways of growth and support.
Featured

A Return Long Overdue: The Vatican, Indigenous Artifacts, and the Politics of Repatriation

The Gallery of Human Migration celebrates the Vatican’s decision to return sacred Indigenous artifacts to their original communities—a long-awaited act of justice. Though not directly involved in this process, the Gallery has long advocated for such restitution. We celebrate this moment with conviction and gratitude, as witnesses who have long hoped to see institutions embrace genuine acts of restoration and reconciliation.

Read More »
Close-up of a black and white film strip representing nonprofit storytelling through impactful visual media.
Documentaries

RE:Location Documentary Series

A family receives notice. They have days to pack what they can carry. The place they built — the street, the neighbourhood, the name of the corner where everyone knew everyone — will not be there when they look back. The RE:Location Documentary Series, presented by the Gallery of Human Migration, gathers these stories of forced uprooting: communities erased by policy, by fear, by the quiet violence of progress. What was lost. What was carried forward. What is still asking to be seen.

Read More »
Gift wrapped in colorful paper against festive background, symbolizing holiday donations for nonprofit causes.
Stories Collection

An Unforgettable Christmas

Each of us will keep in mind a particular Christmas. A Christmas to remember in a unique and unforgettable way. My first Christmas in Toronto was spent soon after my mother and I arrived.

Read More »
Historic village buildings and modern skyline with tower, representing cultural exchange initiatives.
Stories Collection

Discovering My Identity, A Journey of Belonging Between Two Countries.

If you ever feel uncertain about where you belong, take heart in this: your story matters. Let it join the great narrative of humanity in motion. You never know where your journey may take you—but by embracing your unique identity and experiences, you can find your place in the world, and in doing so, help others find theirs.

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Person wearing a white mask looks sideways in front of a dark background with two decorative pieces.
Artistic Collaborations

The Art of Ester Crocetta

Ester Crocetta is a contemporary artist born in Italy. Her artistic career has developed both in Italy and internationally, with numerous exhibitions that have established her as a prominent figure in contemporary art.

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Media release for Toronto's Gallery of Human Migration, celebrating migration, belonging, and shared humanity.
Interviews

ChinTV: Launch of the Migration Literary Award 2025

Toronto, February 7, 2025. The Gallery of Human Migration (The Gallery) is thrilled to announce the inaugural Gallery of Human Migration Literary Award, a celebration of the transformative power of migration through storytelling.

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Silhouette of a person with colorful watercolor texture emanating from their head, symbolizing creativity and imagination.
Artistic Collaborations

Women in Migration: Strength, Resilience, and Transformation

When migration is discussed, the focus is often on statistics, borders, and policies. But behind every number is a human story—and half of those stories belong to women. Women migrants are not simply companions or dependents. They are leaders, workers, caregivers, innovators, and cultural ambassadors.

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Rows of shoes lined up on pavement, representing a nonprofit awareness campaign for missing children.
Indigenous Voices

Missing Children Awaken a Societal Reckoning

The silent beat of the metaphorical drums reverberated within me as the whispering continued: “Since time immemorial our ancestors freely walked on our land, yet in a blink of an eye we were buried in Terra Nullius.”

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Book cover: vintage microphone with a maple leaf and 'Where Is Here?' book title, black text on a white background.
Artistic Collaborations

Where is Here? – A CBC Radio Drama Anthology

In 2004, the Gallery of Human Migration became the proud repository of the final drafts of Where Is Here?, a two–volume anthology of radio plays on migration themes produced by CBC Radio and edited by Damiano Pietropaolo, then Executive Director of CBC Radio Drama.

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New on the Gallery

Your story of migration, the one inherited, lived, and witnessed across generations, has a place here. The Tapestry, the 2026 edition of the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award, is an international recognition and publication initiative honouring personal and ancestral stories. Every selected voice is honoured equally. No rankings, no podium. Submissions open March 31 and close August 31, 2026.