Welcome to our Winnipeg Arts Incubator Hub

As one of our most urban hubs, Winnipeg plays a vital role in bridging digital innovation with community-rooted practice. We work out of physical and virtual spaces scattered across the city, offering a base for project development, skill-sharing, and artistic experimentation. The city’s unique location—situated between northern communities, prairie farming regions, and major academic institutions—makes it an ideal connector for diverse collaborators.

Our team in Winnipeg is made up of artists, coders, musicians, youth leaders, climate organizers, researchers and facilitators with lived experience in systems that often exclude them. This is not a hub about gatekeeping—it’s a place to test prototypes, host popup exhibitions, run participatory media workshops, and ask what it really means to build inclusive, equitable arts infrastructure in a time of rapid change.

What We Do

From our Winnipeg hub, we focus on making digital tools and creative expression accessible to people who don’t usually see themselves in tech or the arts establishment. Our work is hands-on, collaborative, and driven by real community needs.

• Build tools, not barriers: We create simple, open-source tools—like AI-powered art prompters and artist bio builders—that help creators tell their stories, access funding opportunities, and explore new media without needing a design degree or coding background. This work sits at the intersection of creative technology, media arts, and accessibility in design.
• Support emerging creators: We offer mentorship, workspace, and project incubation to young and emerging artists, especially those from Indigenous, northern, and underserved communities. We focus on low-barrier programs that include zine-making, public art installations, generative media, and story-based digital fabrication—empowering participants to move from concept to production.
• Work across disciplines: Our projects bridge the gap between visual art, oral history, digital storytelling, and experimental sound. Whether we’re exploring AI as a cultural tool or building multimedia archives with Elders, our goal is to foster hybrid practices that reflect lived experience and disrupt extractive models of creation.
• Lead from the North: We build in deep collaboration with rural and northern partners, including community artists in places like Dyment, Borups Corners, and Arviat. These connections strengthen our commitment to place-based arts, decentralized cultural infrastructure, and regional resilience. We don’t replicate southern models—we design systems that grow from the ground up.

As part of a growing ecosystem of arts and technology organizations, the Winnipeg hub contributes to national conversations about digital equity, climate culture, and intergenerational knowledge transfer. From AI-powered curriculum development to land-based art retreats, we are creating space for artists to imagine—and build—the futures they want to live in.

We’re not here to compete for attention—we’re here to collaborate for impact. Our programming is designed to foster peer-to-peer learning, co-creation, and interdisciplinary exchange. The arts don’t thrive in silos, and neither do we.

Our Community Promise

We operate on principles of care, reciprocity, and creative sovereignty. Our model doesn’t rely on prestige or production quotas—it relies on people. Everyone who contributes to the hub, from visiting artists to youth interns, is part of a co-learning environment grounded in shared responsibility and mutual support. We recognize that community-engaged work is slow, relational, and often invisible—but that doesn’t make it any less essential.

Through partnerships across northern Ontario, Manitoba, the U.S. Midwest and beyond, we are developing frameworks for distributed leadership, mobile arts infrastructure, and shared digital tools. Whether through storytelling, AI training, fieldwork documentation, or regional gatherings, the Winnipeg hub helps activate what already exists: local knowledge, collective intelligence, and a will to build something better—together.

The Heart of Our Program

Winnipeg Arts Incubator is more than just a space—it’s a launchpad for transformative art. We connect local voices to global platforms and equip tomorrow’s Indigenous and urban artists with leadership tools that transcend traditional boundaries.

What sets the Winnipeg Arts Incubator apart is not equipment or funding—it’s the way it insists that artists are also planners, facilitators, technologists, and caregivers. We invest in creative leadership that is place-based, interdisciplinary, and deeply political—not in the sense of partisanship, but in the sense of reimagining power, voice, and belonging.

From pop-up poetry readings in a back alley to youth-led programs using participatory arts for northern food systems innovation, we prioritize responsiveness over polish. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all programming. Instead, we prototype what works here, with the people who are here. That’s the heart of this hub: not just making art, but making space.