Deborah Wang, co-founder and artistic director of TO DO, Toronto’s largest offsite design event, says her degrees in art and architecture have fuelled her expansive interest in all aspects of design, from creating work to curating it.

The artistic director of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival and a senior architectural designer at the firm Superkül, Deborah Wang splits her time between two distinctly different streams of activity – championing the work of others and producing creations of her own. “My interest in art is definitely wrapped up in my interest in architecture,” says Wang, 36. She earned her BAS from the University of Waterloo in 2005, acquired an MFA in criticism and curatorial practice from OCAD University five years later and then returned to Waterloo for a Master of Architecture, picking up a prestigious 2016 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Student Medal.

Gradient House, a laneway home Wang worked on at Superkül, showcases small-scale residential design.

Along the way, she has worked a dizzying array of office, gallery and curatorial gigs, including presenting a 2014 exhibition at the Textile Museum of Canada, Urban Fabric: Portraits of a City, which focused not on textiles but on the way cities are stitched together. Her master’s thesis at Waterloo – an examination of the relationships between the living and the dead, told through sculptures, photographic works and essays – was just as genre-defying.

“It was something totally different than a building, an urban project or a design problem,” she says, crediting the school’s focus on independent thesis work with giving her the flexibility to find her own path. “My interest in art had room to breathe,” she says, even while she engaged her preoccupation with cities. “These things sound separate, but I think they’re all connected.”

An artist as well as architect, Wang showed her Earth Plug sculptures during an exhibition last year called Loose Ends.

Since she co-founded the Toronto Design Offsite Festival, which launched in 2011 with just seven events and shows, the annual happening has grown to offer more than a hundred exhibitions, events and installations across the city each January. Running it with executive director Jeremy Vandermeij requires almost full-time dedication from Wang, even as she continues to design cutting-edge homes, offices and academic spaces on a part-time basis at Superkül. But the professional rewards of maintaining such a hectic lifestyle are clear.

“Architects need different ways to think, work and have creative output,” she says. “For me, the festival is just that – a different way of working creatively in the world.”

Degrees

Master of Architecture,
University of Waterloo, 2015

Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial Practice,
OCAD University, 2010

Bachelor of Architectural Studies,
University of Waterloo, 2005

Extra Credit

Co-founder of the Toronto Design Offsite Festival (TO DO), held every January during Toronto Design Week

Current Jobs

Artistic director of TO DO and senior architectural designer at Superkül

This story was taken from the November/December 2017 issue of Azure. Buy a copy of the issue here, or subscribe here.