Harry Zhao, 2026 Winner of the InterAccess Media Arts Prize
InterAccess is honoured to announce Harry Zhao as the 2026 winner of the InterAccess Media Arts Prize.
Harry Zhao is a Toronto based artist and researcher working across robotics, installation, and digital media. His practice explores the alternate relationship between the human and the artificial. He makes robots that do weird things: some crawl in search of edges, some seek darkness, and others tend to their feelings by staying still. He calls them Iterative Creatures, speculative beings embodied in machines, exploring the physical world and inevitably encountering humans along the way.
Zhao's project AWORM explores artificial life and the role robots can play in shaping their own development. By concealing their inner workings, he invites us to interpret their behaviours and encounter them as beings with concerns of their own. His labour of building, maintaining, repairing, and caring for these creatures challenges the expectation that robots exist to serve humans, opening possibilities for relationships grounded in care, curiosity, and intimacy.
Zhao holds an MFA in Digital Futures from OCAD University and a BFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
As the 2026 prize winner, InterAccess will present a solo exhibition of Zhao’s work, opening in January 2027.
We would also like to congratulate the following prize finalists: Thea Lu & Melaine Garcia. Finalists will be featured through public artist talks and performances in Winter 2027, details to be annouced.
Thea Lu is a designer, researcher, and maker whose practice treats wearables not as technology worn on the body, but as an extension of skin itself. Skin is the body's most communicative organ; it senses, responds, and expresses simultaneously. Her work extends this double capacity: soft, pneumatic structures that read the body's physiological states and return them to the surface as morphological change, making the body's inner life subtly, continuously visible. Thea was trained in traditional haute couture shoemaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she dedicated nearly her entire undergraduate life to studying footwear design, revealing a tension between craft intimacy and industrial indifference that now shapes the questions she asks through research. Central to her practice is a refusal of binary thinking about emotional and physiological states. Heart rate, plantar pressure, and the slow shifts between tension and rest are not switches but spectrums, and the materials she chooses reflect this. Pneumatic TPU structures that inflate and deform gradually, variably, without fixed endpoints, are a philosophical position as much as a technical one: the body does not operate in on/off states, and neither should the objects that extend it.
Melanie Garcia (Mad4u) is a Mexican multimedia artist based in Toronto whose practice moves across 3D animation, moving image, generative media, and immersive installation. Her work explores psychological and spiritual introspection, transforming intimate experiences of love, grief, vulnerability, memory, and transformation into surreal audiovisual environments.
Combining abstraction, sound, virtual spaces, projection, and real-time technologies, she explores emotion as a universal language and the possibilities of making internal experiences visible, spatial, and shared. Situated between surrealism, futurism, femininity, and abstraction, her practice gives form to feelings and states of being that often resist language.
ABOUT THE INTERACCESS MEDIA ARTS PRIZE
Since 1990, the InterAccess Media Arts Prize has been granted annually to a graduating student whose work exhibits excellence and innovation in new media practice. Nominations are adjudicated by InterAccess's Programming Committee, who select a prize winner to be awarded a solo exhibition opportunity, a complimentary one-year studio membership, and professional development and mentorship. Finalists receive a complimentary one-year studio membership to InterAccess and an opportunity for a public artist program.
Header image of AWORM (2026), courtesy of the artist.