Poet, community-engaged artist & arts manager.
About her
Elizabeth Mudenyo is a Scarborough-based poet, community-engaged artist and arts manager. She has worked all sides of the film festival circuit, with groups like the Regent Park Film Festival, Hot Docs, and the Racial Equity Media Collective, among others. She managed Home Made Visible, an award-winning nationwide archival project capturing the joys of BIPOC home movies. She continues to immerse herself in arts programming engaging the voices, imaginations and knowings of BIPOC, queer and trans and other communities on the margins.
Get in touch for collaboration, organizational consulting, creative projects, facilitation, public engagement, or speaking and reading opportunities.
Writer
Elizabeth is a fellow of The Watering Hole and the Poetry Incubator, and a participant of the Hurston/Wright Poetry with Danez Smith and Diaspora Dialogues Short Form Mentorship with Olive Senior. Her work has appeared in Write Magazine, The Black Joy Unbound Anthology, The Ex-Puritan, Obsidian Literature and Arts, CV2, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 8th annual Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition. Elizabeth is author of the chapbook With Both Hands (Anstruther Press, 2020). She is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.
(Photo Credit: Tender Possibilities)
Community Arts
Elizabeth works professionally in event production and project management with a focus on community engagement and programming. Her main areas of interest include film, theatre, literary and community arts, as well as placemaking.
A Home for Scarborough Creatives
For five years, from 2019-2024, Elizabeth was a co-founder of The Group Project (TGP), a collective formed in 2019 with the vision of creating an accessible, multi-use, and community-focused hub for BIPOC youth artists in Scarborough. TGP’s space-making practice engaged a cross-sector network of local artists, community stakeholders and organizational partners through surveys, meetings, and a virtual series of public consultations called ‘The Group Chats’ and gatherings with a Scarborough supercollective. They also built internal capacity around city building through collaborator meetings and a 2021 mentorship with ULI Toronto, where they formed relationships with public and private sector stakeholders. Collective members included Marianne Rellin and Ferozan Nasiri (2019-23) and Melissa Daly-Buajitti (2023-24).
(Photo Credit: Green Yang)
“when we can,
we take joy
with both hands”
— from clear throat (let us)