Bushra Junaid
Bushra Junaid is a Toronto-based Canadian artist, curator, and arts administrator. She uses mixed media collage, drawing, and painting to explore history, memory, and cultural identity. Born in Montreal to Jamaican and Nigerian parents and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, her work often looks at Blackness, the African diaspora, and the history of Atlantic Canada.
Her art has been shown across Canada in galleries and artist-run centers. She also illustrated Nana’s Cold Days for Groundwood Books. Junaid has exhibited at venues such as Painted City Gallery, Harbourfront Centre, the Toronto Reference Library, and the National Film Board, among others.
As a curator, she organized The Rooms’ 2020 exhibition What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic. In 2016, she helped start the New-Found-Lands project at St. John’s Eastern Edge Gallery with Pamela Edmonds, aiming to connect Newfoundland with the Caribbean diaspora. The project featured her piece Two Pretty Girls, a re-enactment with her sister of a 19th-century image of two unnamed plantation workers. Junaid describes the two women as ancestors and brings them into the present.
Two Pretty Girls traveled to other shows, including Future Possible: The Art of Newfoundland and Labrador to 1949 at The Rooms in 2018 and Like Sugar at Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum in 2019. In 2018, her work Sweet Childhood was included in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art, which looked at race, belonging, and Blackness in Canada. Sweet Childhood reimagines a 1903 Caribbean stereoview as a family portrait, using archival photos and text on a backlit fabric panel. The piece later traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and was planned to open at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 2019.
Junaid has also illustrated a children’s book by Adwoa Badoe, using bright collages that blend photographs of the sky, fruit, and faces.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:13 (CET).