Upcoming Speakers 2026-2027 Season

Sarah Jean Stewart is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, curator, and arts educator whose work is rooted in curiosity, connection, and close observation of the world around her.

Working across photography, cyanotype, mixed media, sculpture, fibre arts, performance, and community-based art, Sarah is particularly interested in the places where art and everyday life overlap. Her creative practice often begins with noticing: unusual light, overlooked details, unexpected compositions, natural patterns, tiny creatures, abandoned objects, and the extraordinary hiding inside seemingly ordinary places.

As an arts educator and community facilitator, Sarah creates accessible creative experiences that encourage people to experiment, play, and develop confidence in their own way of seeing. Rather than focusing on a single “right” way to make art, she encourages artists to follow curiosity, change perspective, and pay attention to what captures their attention.

Sarah develops and facilitates arts programming throughout the Ottawa region and beyond, working with artists, schools, community organizations, galleries, cafés, youth, families, and other creative communities.

Looking Closely: Seeing the World from New Angles/strong>

What happens when we stop looking for photographs and start paying attention?

Looking Closely: Seeing the World from New Angles explores photography as an act of noticing. Multidisciplinary artist and photographer Sarah Jean Stewart invites participants to reconsider how they move through and visually interpret the world around them.

Through photographs, stories, creative exercises, and examples from her own practice, Sarah will explore ways of finding compelling images in ordinary places: changing physical perspective, getting unusually close, isolating details, noticing light and shadow, looking for natural abstraction, playing with scale, and allowing curiosity to determine where the camera goes next.

The session focuses less on equipment and technical perfection and more on developing the photographer behind the camera. Participants will be encouraged to experiment with perspective, question their first interpretation of a scene, and discover how even familiar environments can become visually surprising when we learn to look again.

Suitable for photographers working with everything from phones to professional cameras, Looking Closely is an invitation to slow down, get curious, and rediscover just how much there is to see.

Emily Brown is an award-winning professional portrait photographer and the owner of Diamondview Photography, a full-service portrait studio in Ottawa specializing in newborn, maternity and family photography.

Emily’s love of photography began early, growing up with an avid hobby photographer for a father and rarely being without a camera herself. In 2009, she purchased her first DSLR and quickly discovered that a lifelong interest could become something more. She began building her photography business while working full-time in business operations, photographing clients on evenings and weekends and travelling to their homes with a car full of newborn props and equipment.

In 2012, an unexpected layoff gave Emily the push to pursue photography full-time, and she never looked back. She opened her first home studio in 2013 and moved Diamondview Photography into its current commercial studio in 2022.

Emily is an Accredited member of the Professional Photographers of Canada (PPOC) and currently serves as Chair of its Eastern Ontario Branch. She is also the Area Coordinator for Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (NILMDTS) in Eastern Ontario, providing remembrance photography to families experiencing the loss of a baby

From a Camera in My Camry to a Commercial Studio: Lessons from 16+ Years in Photography

What does it really look like to turn a love of photography into a career?

Professional portrait photographer Emily Brown shares the story of her journey from photographing newborns in clients’ homes while working a full-time day job to building Diamondview Photography and eventually opening her own commercial portrait studio.

Through stories and images from more than 15 years behind the camera, Emily will share some of the milestones, mistakes and lessons that have shaped both her photography and her approach to business. She’ll discuss finding your own photographic voice, learning to stop comparing your work to others, understanding the business behind a creative career, and why longevity in photography requires much more than simply taking beautiful photographs.

Emily will also share her work with Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep and reflect on how providing remembrance photography to grieving families has influenced the way she sees newborn and family portraiture—and reinforced her belief in the lasting importance of photographs.

The presentation will conclude with an open Q&A about photography, portraiture and the realities of running a professional photography business.

Tom Sharp is a photographer, a photographic artist, a professional artist or a gentleman artist, depending on when you ask him and what mood he is in at the time. In 2024 he received his Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from the Bath School of Art, Film and Media, in Somerset, England. His work has been featured in exhibitions, print and online in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Tom’s practice is largely hands-on and analog. He gravitates towards black and white film photography, developing the film and printing his own final works on a vintage Besseler darkroom enlarger.

Developed in Darkness: Dance Photography In A Modernist Tradition

This presentation will focus on dance photography created between December 2023 and September 2024. This work culminated in a Degree Show collaboration with the dancer Lucy Hopkins pulling together technology, history, photographic traditions and dance, creating something beautiful out of darkness.

Online resources:  tomsharpphotography.com  – in particular, see Motion Picture Studies