Participants will have the opportunity to receive a one-on-one in person portfolio review with Shellie Zhang or Emilie Croning. Each Portfolio Review is 20 minutes. We encourage you to bring prints to look at/discuss.
WhatNext: New Gen Artist Series is a year-round free program from Gallery 44 that supports emerging artists aged 16–35 as they begin to shape their careers. Through seasonal virtual workshops, the series offers practical guidance on topics like freelancing, finding opportunities, writing for your practice, contemporary photography, and building sustainable professional habits.
WhatNext: New Gen Artist Series is made possible through the support of
Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is an artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Working across a range of media, Zhang explores how legacies of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions across bodies, materials, and images. Her work examines processes of integration and assimilation, asking how culture is learned, negotiated, sustained, and transformed through lived experience. She is interested in how symbols and iconographies shift across generations, carrying histories that are inherited, transformed, and reimagined over time. Drawing on motifs of transformation and adornment from both the natural and constructed world, she investigates surfaces as perceptual thresholds that register the imprints of metamorphosis and adaptation.
Zhang has exhibited at venues including Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. In 2026, she received her MFA in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art. She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. Zhang was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017), received the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award (2021), and was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2025). Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Frieze, Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Zhang is a founding board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust.
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Emilie Croning is a curator, art historian, and writer whose work centers on creating space and advocating for emerging artists globally. Her research focuses on representation, identity, and the visual languages that shape diasporic narratives and cultural memory.Croning has held positions and collaborated with a range of galleries and arts organizations including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Wedge Curatorial Projects, Gallery 44, Gallery TPW, BAND, Nia Centre for the Arts, the Toronto Biennial of Art, Capture and CONTACT Photography Festivals, Critical Distance Centre for Curators, among others.Recent exhibitions include: Delali Cofie: A Place of Ours (United Contemporary, 2026); Passing Through, Holding On (Cry Baby Gallery, 2026); Feels Like Home (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2023); Jorian Charlton: Out of Many (Art Gallery of Ontario), and Online (Gallery TPW, 2021)
In Fall 2025, Croning founded EMC Contemporary – a curatorial platform and nomadic art gallery dedicated to community-building and artist advocacy. Working closely with galleries, institutions, and arts organizations in Canada and abroad, EMC Contemporary serves as a forum for professional and creative development, offering opportunities and accessible resources that support and guide artists as they navigate the contemporary art world. She holds a BFA in Art History & Studio Art from Concordia University (Montréal), an MA in Art History & Diploma in Curatorial Studies in Visual Culture from York University (Toronto).
