Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts announced its 2013 awards presented at its Tribute Night, May 9,  2013. 
ARTIST PRIZE $10,000 PUBLIC STUDIO (Elle Flanders & Tamira Sawatsy )
PUBLIC STUDIO is a collective art practice founded in 2007. Flanders,with a rich background in documentary filmmaking, and Sawatsky, a practicing architect, focus on landscapes as an area of cultural struggles.  Elle Flanders is a filmmaker and artist based in Toronto. She was raised in Montreal and Jerusalem and holds both an MA in Critical Theory and an MFA from Rutgers University. She is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program where she mentored with Mary Kelly and Martha Rosler. Flanders’ work has been screened and exhibited internationally including: the Museum of Modern Art; Berlin International Film Festival; The Toronto International Film Festival, the MOCCA and the Incheon Biennial. She is a founding member of Public Studio with her collaborator, Tamira Sawatzky. Her most recent work includes: Road Shots, a series of large-format laser-cut photographs exhibited at O’Born Contemporary in Toronto; Road Movie, a six screen installation on the segregated roads of Palestine that premiered at TIFF (2011) and the Berlinale (2012); Kino Pravda 3G, a series of video installations addressing current public dissent and protests across the globe; What Isn’t There, a 15-year ongoing photo installation project that documents Palestinian villages that no longer exist; and the award-winning feature documentary Zero Degrees of Separation. Flanders is a PhD candidate in the Visual Arts Studio Program at York University where she also teaches.

To learn more, see Akimbo, TFVA and Public Studio.