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Victoria College

2025-2026 | Upcoming events

We have an exciting calendar of events for the 2025-2026 academic year, including Creativity Night and our regular Alumni and Faculty Reading Series.  

Are you a Vic Alumni interested in reading as part of our series, a current Vic student looking for support on a creative event, or an artist in the community interested in participating in one of our cross-disciplinary events? We’d love to hear from you! Please send us an email at vic.creativity@utoronto.ca to be considered for inclusion in our events series. Applications are assessed on a rolling basis; we endeavour to reply to all applications within three weeks of receipt.  

More events are added on an ongoing basis. Please check back often for updates.

Registration is available for all of our upcoming events via Eventbrite here.  

2025-2026 Events

Feb. 12, 2026 | Creative Care Practices: A Convergence
About the Event  

How do art and health interact? Can an engagement with an artistic practice improve our doctors’ and our own connection to our bodies? What can a deeper understanding of our physical and mental health add to our creative practice? Are there ways to creatively address the barriers that some experience when connecting with the arts?

The C4C welcomes three guests who live a “double life” as artists and health professionals. Alisha Kaplan is an award-winning poet, educator and practitioner of narrative medicine. Aaron Lightstone is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and music therapist working at the intersection of arts, health care, and community practice. And Eva-Marie Stern is an artist, art psychotherapist and medical educator whose work focuses on art and trauma.

Together they will discuss their experiences cultivating expertise in the parallel fields of art and health. This will culminate in a workshop to provide participants a sense of how these practices interact, and the possibilities they reveal.
 
About the Speakers

Alisha Kaplan is a poet, educator, and narrative medicine practitioner. Using the arts, she works with health professionals and patients to reinvigorate medicine with care and humanity. Her degrees include an MFA in Poetry from New York University and an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. She teaches Health Humanities at the University of Toronto and is the poetry editor of Parchment. Her debut poetry collection, Qorbanot, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from the League of Canadian Poets. Other honours she has received include the Hippocrates Prize in Poetry and Medicine, a Post-Graduate Fellowship in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and a Rona Jaffe Fellowship. Alisha lives on a farm in Hillsburgh, ON, where she grows garlic, harvests honey, and hosts barn dances.

Aaron Lightstone is an award-winning composer, music therapist, psychotherapist, producer, and educator working at the intersection of arts, health care, and community practice. He is best known as the bandleader of Jaffa Road, a two-time JUNO-nominated ensemble recognized with Canadian and Ontario Folk Music Awards, and is currently working with producer Gavin Brown on the band’s fourth album.

Aaron is the founder and Clinical Director of Music Therapy Toronto, specializing in neurologic rehabilitation, mental health, addictions, dementia, and end-of-life care, and has served since 2015 as Music Director of the Bliss iBand, an inclusive ensemble for adults with complex disabilities. In collaboration with Grammy-nominated producer Justin Gray, he co-created six intercultural relaxation albums for hospice and palliative-care settings with the Room 217 Foundation, recognized with Innovation of the Year at the McGill International Palliative Care Conference (2022).

Eva-Marie (EM) Stern is an artist, art psychotherapist, medical educator, adjunct faculty in the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry, and a past Harvard Fellow in Art Museum-Based Health Professions Education. She was a co-founder of WRAP and the Trauma Therapy Program at Women’s College Hospital, where she learned and taught for over 20 years. She likes to live in a Venn diagram of art, therapy, and learning stuff by doing it – and loves to share all the cool and meaningful parts of that world. She practices and consults at artandmind.net in Toronto. (Portrait credit: Haven Hughes)

Registration is available here.

Feb. 25, 2026 | Freedom to Read: Why Society Needs Intellectual Risk

About the Event  

Join us for a timely conversation about the freedom to read and why intellectual risk is necessary in society.

Moderated by leading journalist and editor, Jessica Johnson, the event brings together two award-winning writers, Ray Robertson (The Right to be Wrong) and Ira Wells (On Book Banning) to examine why independent thinking is important, why access to books and ideas matter, and what’s at stake when reading is constrained. The evening also celebrates the publication of the speakers’ recent works.

Ray Robertson's The Right to be Wrong is a vigorous defense of independent thinking in an increasingly conformist, intolerant, and fundamentalist world.

Ira Wells' On Book Banning provides a lively history of literary repression and argues that today's censorship consensus trivializes art and undermines democracy.

This event is open to the public and light refreshments will be served. Book sales are courtesy of TYPE BOOKS.

About the Speakers

Jessica Johnson is an award-winning journalist and writer. In 2025, as a senior fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, she released “What Should the CBC Be?”, a major research project on the future of public media in Canada. From 2017 to 2023, she was editor-in-chief of The Walrus, Canada’s leading longform general interest magazine. Her columns, articles and essays have appeared in the Guardian, the Globe & Mail, National Post, the New Republic, and many other publications. Jessica teaches journalism and media studies as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.

Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, seven collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. His work has been translated into several languages. He’s also contributed liner notes to three Grateful Dead archival releases. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto.

Ira Wells is an associate professor at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where he teaches in the Northrop Frye stream in literature and the humanities in the Vic One program. He is also a writer and critic and the President of PEN Canada. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Globe and Mail, Guardian, and many other venues. His most recent book is On Book Banning: How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy.

PEN Canada is a nonpartisan organization that celebrates literature, defends freedom of expression, and assists writers in peril at home and abroad. Based in Toronto, the English-language Canadian centre was founded in 1983 and is proud to be one of nearly 140 centres of PEN International.

Registration is available here.

Mar. 30, 2026 | Creativity Night

About the Event  

The Centre for Creativity is seeking submissions from current Victoria University students to participate in Creativity Night! Occurring on March 30, 2026, the C4C and CRESA will be hosting Creativity Night—a celebration of all things creative at Victoria University. Any and all creative works are welcome, even if they didn’t originate in a CRE course. Please submit your works for consideration by Sunday, February 22, 2026 before 11:59pm at the link here.