2026 Jack King Award

Nancy is an award-winning set and costume designer for performance based in Toronto, ON. They’re work includes designs with Tarragon, Native Earth, Howland, Guild Theatre Festival, Festival Antigonish, Driftwood, Hart House, Magnus, the City of Montreal and as part of the Summerworks and Next Stage Festivals. She enjoys building the next generation of theatre practitioners through her teaching and design work with Mount Allison University, University of Windsor, Toronto Metropolitan University and Sheridan College. Awards include a Dora Award for Outstanding Costume Design, three Dora nominations, the Ian and Molly Lindsay Young Design Fellowship, the Tom Patterson Guthrie Award, and the Peter Dwyer Scholarship.

Michelle is a Toronto based multi-award winning lighting designer who works with dance, theatre and opera companies across Canada and around the world. The evolution of Michelle’s unique aesthetic can be seen throughout her 20 year career by way of both small independent and large scale productions. She has designed for: Theatre Rusticle, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Stratford Festival, Opera Atelier, Theatre New Brunswick, Soulpepper, Foo Productions, Factory Theatre, New Harlem, Rossini Opera Festival, Shaw Festival, Cahoots Theatre Company, Blue Ceiling Dance, fu-GEN, The Theatre Centre, nightswimming, Tapestry Opera, National Arts Centre, Native Earth Performing Arts, Mirvish Productions, Theatre Passe Muraille and Tarragon Theatre. She has received eight Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a SATAward and the Pauline McGibbon Award. he is co-founder of the Designer’s Guild, the Chair of the Associated Designers of Canada and the Vice-President of ADC659.

Snežana Pešić is a performance designer, multidisciplinary artist, and educator whose work has been presented across Canada and internationally. Her recent work includes collaborations with Soulpepper Theatre, Crow’s Theatre, Canadian Stage, and Ghost River Theatre. Her designs have toured and been performed in the US, Chile, Mexico, Norway, and Serbia, and featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the Prague Quadrennial (2007 and 2015), World Stage Design (2009, Seoul; 2013, Cardiff), Innovative Costume of the 21st Century; Next Generation, and Costume at the Turn of the Century (Moscow, 2019 and 2015). In 2019, Snežana designed and curated the Canadian Professional Exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ2019). The international jury recognized Michael Levine's artistry and the exhibition with the Award for Excellence in Performance Design, earning Canada its first-ever PQ award. Snežana received the Betty Mitchell Award for outstanding lighting design and has been nominated for the Virginia and Myrtle Cooper Award in Costume Design and the Pauline McGibbon Award for emerging artists. Her work extends beyond stage design to film, devised performance, installation art, and commercial projects. Her debut film, Suture, won Best Experimental Short Film at the 2022 Toronto Independent Film Festival and the 2023 Veracruz Short Film Festival. Pešic is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and serves on the board of Associated Designers of Canada. www.snezanapesic.com She is particularly interested in the development of new works and interdisciplinary explorations. Rachel has been experimenting with designer-led theatre projects and is keen to integrate design into the text creation process. Rachel is invested in exploring the artistic expressions of the African diaspora in North America and beyond. Much of her work has focused on creating worlds for these stories on stage.