Nuit Blanche Fellowship brings Humber students to Toronto’s largest contemporary arts festival

A team of current Humber students and alumni will take part in Toronto’s largest contemporary arts festival, Nuit Blanche.

The free, all-night event features more than 85 local and international artists across the city on Oct. 4 from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

This year’s theme, Translating the City, encourages artists to explore how art can reflect the complexities of cities and the roles we all play within them.

For the fourth year, Humber Polytechnic’s Lakeshore campus will serve as one of the festival sites. Through the Nuit Blanche Fellowship, a team of six Humber students and alumni will showcase their collaborative project.

The Nuit Blanche Fellowship is a partnership between Humber Galleries and the City of Toronto, allowing Humber students to explore their talents while working together on the ideation and production of a project inspired by Nuit Blanche’s theme.

The project, titled Domus Nexus, explores the intimate relationship between private space and collective identity, examining how individual homes shape the fabric of a community. The work focuses on the often-overlooked details that give meaning to the idea of home.

Domus Nexus and the 2025 Nuit Blanche Fellowship are partially funded by the City of Toronto’s Business Incubation & Commercialization Grant program.

Maya Harry, a third-year student in Humber’s game programming advanced diploma program and one of the fellows, said the diversity of the team deeply influenced the project.

Harry said the fellows are from all over the world — Canada, Jamaica, Brazil, India, Nepal, Iran and the U.S. — and their diversity brings different perspectives to the work.

She said that despite the differences, they found a lot of similarities in what home means as an experience and as a place.

 “I think the communication of the ideas in the project is that there are differences, but those don’t divide us, and these similarities should unite us,” Harry said.

Ashley Aalto, a Humber graduate and one of the project’s co-creative producers, said that in times of division, the group wanted to create something that unites people.

Aalto is a former Nuit Blanche fellow herself and now works as a project coordinator at Humber Galleries. She said the fellowship offers students invaluable experience as they start their careers.

“It creates a lot of exposure, networking opportunities, as well as pushes students to be able to complete projects at a professional level,” Aalto said. “To present students with such challenges, and they have the ability to rise to those opportunities and show off their work, that’s something incredible.”

Aalto said it also makes their resumes stand out.

For Harry, participating in Nuit Blanche is a “dream come true.” As a kid, she would visit Nuit Blanche and think about how incredible it would be to have her art featured in the festival.

“Something that I helped work on is going to be in Nuit Blanche. It’s really astounding,” Harry said.

Domus Nexus will be exhibited at Humber’s L Space Gallery at the Lakeshore campus, featuring fellows Harry, Fabiana Camba, Ravi Kant Ponnada, Yash Rana, Maryam Taghizadeh and Kelsey Wolff Power, with creative producers Aalto and Casey Norris.

The project launches on Oct. 4 during Nuit Blanche and will remain open from Oct. 20 to Nov. 21 and again from Jan. 7 to Feb. 1, 2026.