EMILIA-AMALIA is an intersectional, intergenerational, feminist experimental working group, initiated in Toronto in 2016. The group takes its name and structure from the practice of affidamento—the relationship in which one woman entrusts herself symbolically to another.
As part of the 150 Hours School, Emilia and Amalia were ‘entrusted’ to one another and through the exchange of authority and writing, their differences became one another’s point of reference for the world.
The group uses informal knowledge sharing and experimental writing to cultivate relationships of mentorship, collaboration and reciprocal indebtedness between generations of artists, writers, thinkers, curators and practitioners.
Our writing and reading groups, film screenings, publications, public talks and workshops are intimate exchanges through which we centre the personal and the political in a desire to activate the undetonated potential of the past. Within our partnerships, we create space and redistribute resources to address feminist histories that have been obscured or overlooked.
EMILIA-AMALIA is an open group that invites all levels of engagement. We are all experts, and no one is an expert.
EMILIA-AMALIA is initiated by Cecilia Berkovic, Yaniya Lee, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, Leila Timmins, Joy Xiang and Shellie Zhang.
EMILIA-AMALIA meets on the ancestral and traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat, who are the original owners and custodians of the land.
Current
Cecilia Berkovic
Cecilia Berkovic is a queer artist and graphic designer living in Toronto. She has been involved in local artist-run culture, in various capacities, for over 15 years. She holds an MFA from Bard College in New York.
Yaniya Lee
Yaniya Lee is the author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024, figure ground/Art Metropole) and Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project (2024, Artexte). In 2025, Lee received her PhD in Gender Studies from Queen’s University for her portfolio project “Black Art Study: Methods and Methodologies for a Black Studies Approach to Canadian Art History.” Among the projects she developed are the Black Canadian Art History Scholarship Database (blackartstudy.ca) and Doing the Work: Selected Syllabi (greyzonepedagogies.com). She has published in journals and magazines including Racar: Canadian Art Review, C Magazine, Flash Art, Montez Press, and Asia Art Archive. In 2020 she co-edited a special issue of Canadian Art magazine on black artists and black art histories.
Annie MacDonell
Annie MacDonell is a visual artist working in Toronto. Her practice includes film, photography installation and writing/performance.
Gabrielle Moser
Gabrielle Moser is a writer, art historian and curator. She has organized exhibitions for Access Gallery, Gallery TPW, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries, Vtape and Xpace. Her writing appears in venues including Artforum, C Magazine, Canadian Art, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, Prefix Photo and in the book Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Sharon Sliwinski and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Duke University Press, 2017). Her first book is Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (Penn State UP, 2019). She is currently associate professor, art history, and Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University in Montréal.
Zinnia Naqvi
Zinnia Naqvi is a lens-based artist working in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Her work examines issues of colonialism, cultural translation, social class and citizenship through the use of photography, video, the written word, and archival material. Recent projects have included archival and re-staged images, experimental documentary films, video installations, graphic design, and elaborate still-lives. Her artworks often invite the viewer to consider the position of the artist and the spectator, as well as analyze the complex social dynamics that unfold in front of the camera.
Naqvi’s work has been shown across Canada and internationally, with exhibitions in New York, Iceland, Pakistan, and United Arab Emirates. She received a BFA in Photography Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, Montreal. Currently she is a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University.
Leila Timmins
Leila Timmins is a Toronto-based writer and curator. She is currently Senior Curator at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. She has held previous positions in Toronto at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Workman Arts, Gallery TPW, the Justina M Barnicke Gallery, and Images Festival and in Vancouver at the the Helen and Morris Belkin Gallery, UBC.
Joy Xiang
Joy Xiang is a writer, editor, and occasional performer based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is interested in where poetry meets criticism, to create shifting narrative forms that might unveil or expel systems of power. She has been Editor at C Magazine since 2022, co-runs the monthly poetry night Mixed Metals with SK Hughes, and is involved with various grassroots zines/publications. Previously, she was assistant editor at Canadian Art, and on the editorial teams of Milkweed erotic zine and Blackwood Gallery.
Shellie Zhang
Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, the diaspora and popular culture. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.
Past and Founding Members