Midi Onodera wins Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts

The Canada Council for the Arts has announced that Midi Onodera is among this year’s winners of the $25,000 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.  The prestigious awards are funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, recognizing artistic achievement in visual and media arts and fine craft.

Onodera, a JC Toronto media artist, has been making films and videos for over 30 years. She has more than 25 independent short films to her credit as well as a theatrical feature film and short videos. Beginning in 2006, Midi created some 500 short videos or “Vidoodles” for various projects. She has published two essays on mobile cinema for the media journal Jump Cut.

“…a thoughtful, daring filmmaker at a time when there was very little diversity in Canadian art.”

Midi Onodera gained critical acclaim very early in her career with two remarkable films: Ten Cents a Dance (Parallax) (1985) and The Displaced View (1989) which launched her reputation as a thoughtful, daring filmmaker at a time when there was very little diversity in Canadian art. In recent years she refers to herself as a ‘moving image’ artist, combining her deep understanding of filmmaking with 21st century technologies and modes of distribution to make tiny movies, or ‘Vidoodles.’

“My tiny movies have a very different relationship with the viewer than larger screen movies. Unlike conventional cinema that draws on techniques and a visual/auditory vocabulary of over 100 years, tiny cinema’s history is only 5 years old, marked by Apple’s introduction of their fifth generation iPod.” – Midi Onodera, in an interview published in Imaginations: A Journal of Cross-cultural Image Studies, 2010

– Tanya Mars, performance artist and GGArts winner (2008) (nominator)


wording from the Canada Council For The Arts press release.  See: midionodera.com