Canadian artists that submit works to NAISA’s general call for submissions are eligible for receiving either The James Bailey Award or the Andra McCartney Award. Both awards were established by NAISA in 2022 through a gift by Kevin Austin.
The James Bailey Award
A $300 award that recognizes a work submitted by a Canadian artist to NAISA’s call for submissions which best exemplifies an inventive and adventurous spirit and pushes the boundaries of Radio and Transmission Art. Special consideration is given for a work submitted by an artist who is new to the field of radio and transmission art.
James Bailey is an improviser and electroacoustic musician active in the Toronto experimental music scene for decades. His main practice involves found objects and/or electronics as well as standard instruments played in unconventional ways. He is, and has been, involved with several small performance groups during the last twenty years but had been recording solo works for nearly twenty years before that, notably the works from his LP Dimensions. He produces the weekly radio show Electric Sense on CIUT FM in Toronto. His installation Piano Travels was featured in this first exhibition that NAISA hosted at its current location.
The James Bailey Award Winners
2025 – Jane Tingley was awarded the James Bailey Award for her piece Foresta Inclusive – (ex)tending towards
The two-part artwork uses human interactivity and environmental data transmission in order to explore the complexity of the natural world, as it plays out beyond limited human sensory perception. The work used data collected during the summer of 2022 from a tree at the rare Charitable Reserve in Cambridge ON, as a driver for nearly all aspects of the visual, acoustic and olfactory elements that were exhibited in the interactive and sensorially rich environment created at NAISA, which unfolded in a parallel winter-time synchronicity in 2025. The work continues Jane Tingley’s interest in destabilizing the mental habit of privileging human experience over everything else.
2024 – Martín Rodríguez was awarded the James Bailey Award for his piece In Search of Aztlan…
As a transmission and sound artist, Martín Rodríguez’s work emerges from his Chicanx upbringing along the Arizona-Mexico border. He employs performance, intervention, and installation as a process for deciphering aural histories and entangled identities. After recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor, a chance encounter with a radio transmission caught in the pickup coils of his guitar reoriented Rodríguez. Developing his practice from crisis, he examines radio as a transformative medium. Rooting his relationship with radio in healing, his artworks consider transmission as a material through which sound intertwines with affect, acting as a vessel for ulterior forms of communication. Notably, his work has been presented by the Musée d’art contemporain Montréal (CA), Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MX), Darling Foundry (CA), Walking Festival for Sound (UK/PL), Spektrum (DE), as well as various festivals and performance venues across Canada, and the US.
2023 – Anton Pickard was awarded the James Bailey Award for his piece Recent Connections.
Anton Pickard is a media artist and educator based in Tiny Township in Ontario, Canada. He has a background in photography, videography, animation, graphic design, computer game development, user-interface design, media production and management. He is currently expanding his work to include Virtual Reality, digital audio and soundscape recording.
2022 – Shaughn Martel was awarded the James Bailey Award for their piece EMF Turntable.
Shaughn Martel is a Sudbury born and Tkoronto (Toronto) based new media artist focusing in the performance of electricity, electronics and human collaborations with it. Their work extends to grounding the mystification of technology in natural phenomena and attempting to augment sensory perception of spaces and forces normally outside the faculties of the body.
The Andra McCartney Mentorship Award
A $300 award and mentorship residency awarded to an artist who has submitted a work, is new to the field of sound art, and who lives in Northern Ontario. Special consideration is given for an artist who identifies as female / non-binary, and/or indigenous. This mentorship award was established in 2022 by NAISA and an award of $300 was added in 2024 that was made possible with a donation by Kevin Austin.
Andra McCartney (1955-2019) was an internationally recognized sound artist, prolific author and researcher, she was a leading voice in the field of acoustic ecology, or soundscape studies, which uses sound to study the relationship between human beings and their environment. She taught at Concordia University from 2004 to 2016 and published over 50 articles in Organised Sound, Leonardo Music Journal, Perspectives of New Music, Musicworks, Resources for Feminist Research and Borderlines among other journals. NAISA presented her “Canadian Train Radio” series of pieces in May 2019.
The Andra McCartney Mentorship Award Winners
2025 – Stéphanie Dupuis is an emerging Franco-Ontarian contemporary artist based in West Nipissing. She completed her BFA in Painting and Drawing, with a double major in First Peoples Studies at Concordia University in 2019. Her work focuses on the exhibition and dissemination of emerging and established artists in the multidisciplinary arts while her artistic practice focuses on the intersection between our psychology and our environment. Her audio piece “Frozen Whispers” was created for a residency co-presented between NAISA and Near North Mobile Media Lab during the Ice Follies Festival. The piece tells the story of a dialogue between frozen and running water through a journey of sounds. The sonic elements aim to paint an emotional landscape – of hearing inner whispers, following intuitions, and breaking through barriers. The work takes the listener through a state of tension and stillness, followed by rhythmic activations, eventually reaching a state of calm and flow.
2024 – Carly Stasko is a self-titled “imagitator” (who agitates imagination). Her interdisciplinary art practice includes political theater, visual and street art, rap, dance, and film but she is new to the field of sound art. Her piece The Power of Dance used daily improvised dance on the land during the pandemic while isolating with her family near Lake Nipissing, Ontario. This piece tells a story of being mocked by local ice-fisherfolk who filmed her dancing on the frozen lake and posted that video to social media.
2022 – Zoe Gordon is a sound artist living in Thunder Bay Ontario focused on listening, with a practice in field recording, community and studio work. She collaborates with artists and directors on media projects as a sound designer, sound recordist and sound editor. Her work Sound Diary 21 was presented by NAISA in October, 2022 during the SOUNDplay festival.