Gallery of Human Migration Founder Rocco Maragna Named to 2026 Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Awards
TORONTO, ON — August 10, 2026 —The Gallery of Human Migration announced today that its founder and president, Rocco Maragna, has been named one of the Top 25 Canadian Immigrants of 2026, an annual honour presented by Canadian Immigrant magazine with support from presenting sponsor Western Union. The awards recognize twenty-five nation builders selected from seventy-five finalists following public nomination, judging, and online voting.
Maragna left Italy with his mother at the age of eleven, landing at Pier 21 in Halifax. He studied architecture at the University of Toronto, the International University of Art in Venice, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and went on to a decades-long career spanning four continents.
In 1997, a return visit to Pier 21 reshaped his path. In his award profile, Maragna described feeling “the full arc of my migration: beckoning, beginning, becoming, and belonging”—the same four movements that now structure the Gallery’s work. That visit led him to step back from architectural practice and found the Gallery of Human Migration, a digital storytelling institution exploring how movement, displacement, and memory shape belonging.
The Gallery’s editorial work and its Migration Literary Award trace back to the same conviction behind this recognition: that the stories of individual migrants are the foundation of how Canada understands itself. Maragna’s own path—from newcomer to architect to institution builder—embodies the throughline the Gallery has worked to make visible in others’ stories all along.
About the Gallery of Human Migration
The Gallery is not a building. It is not an archive. It is not an advocacy organization.
It is a living cultural institution—the only one of its kind in Canada—dedicated to migration as a universal, continuous, and formative human experience.
We exist in the digital space because that is where the world’s stories now move. Our website is the Gallery. The Gallery is our website.This is not a limitation. It is a reflection of our deepest conviction: migration has no fixed address.
Canada has long told itself it is a mosaic—each piece in its place, fixed, finished, defined by the borders that separate it from the piece beside it. A mosaic is diversity without transformation. Coexistence without contact. It shows you where people landed. It cannot show you how they moved, what they carried, what they left behind, or who they became in the crossing.
We are something else. We are a tapestry. Still being woven. Alive. Built from threads that pull against each other—threads of courage and grief, of arrival and departure, of the chosen journey and the forced removal. No thread tells the whole story alone. The pattern only appears when all of them are held together.
And the tapestry is never finished. Because humanity is never finished. The weaving is not what happened before we got here. It is happening now. The arrows in our logo have come to rest—but they are still arrows. They could move again. That is the point. That has always been the point.
Media Contact
For additional information and images, please contact:
Nancy Perin, Executive Director
events@galleryofhumanmigration.org
Learn more at galleryofhumanmigration.org.