It is our pleasure to announce the jury members for the 29th annual Best of Canada Awards competition. They are:
Products
- Tessa Bain – House of Digby
- Kaylyn Belcourt – Copernicus Educational Products
- Marti Gallucci – Mason Studios
Projects
- Nicola Casciato – WZMH Architects
- Jude Kamal — Sansa Interiors
- Jordan Sook – Jordan Sook Studio
- Tracy Bowie — Tracy Bowie Projects
Kaylyn Belcourt
Copernicus Educational Products
Kaylyn is president of Copernicus Educational Products, where she champions a design-led approach to rethinking the modern classroom. She has built her career on the belief that the products we use —when thoughtfully designed—can meaningfully shape how people learn, collaborate and grow. Her work bridges design and strategy and she believes that design can be a powerful strategic lever within business. Kaylyn is also engaged in advancing the broader design community. With values rooted in sustainability, she brought the first Climate Designers chapter to Canada, originally starting up the Toronto chapter. She is currently the President of the Association of Chartered Industrial Designers of Ontario (ACIDO) and sits on the Board of the Design Industry Advisory Committee (DIAC). She brings a collaborative and forward-looking perspective to design—one that prioritizes impact, responsibility and innovation.
Tessa Bain
Tessa draws on more than a decade of experience working with prominent and iconic global brands in the interior design world to her role as president and co-founder of House of Digby. She brings this deep understanding of the design industry to her work to deliver practical approaches to industry disruption, brand growth and retail innovation. A seasoned sales leader, business builder and entrepreneur, she’s proven her ability time and again to open up new revenue streams that expand businesses into new territories while remaining authentic to core values.
Marti Gallucci
Marti has been an essential part of Toronto-based Mason Studio since joining in 2013 as the studio’s first full-time team member. Over more than a decade, she has played a central role in shaping the collaborative, research-driven approach that defines the work today. As Design Director, she has guided teams across hospitality, wellness, and residential projects in Canada and internationally, translating complex challenges into intuitive, grounded design solutions. Known for her clarity and care, Marti builds teams that listen closely, think critically, and design spaces that connect deeply with people and place. Her work includes leadership on Runxi Towers and Park View Manor in Shenzhen, as well as contributions to The Saint Regis and the Kimpton Saint George Hotel in Toronto.
Jude Kamal
Jude is an award-winning interior designer and the founder of Sansa Interiors Inc., a Toronto-based studio renowned for its holistic, high-performance approach to luxury residential and commercial environments. With over 12 years of industry experience, Jude has cultivated a distinctive design language that merges architectural rigor with neuro-responsive wellness, ensuring that every space is as psychologically grounding as it is visually striking.
An ARIDO-registered designer and OCAD University alumna, Jude has spent over a decade dismantling the “box” of traditional design. Her portfolio spans high-stakes hospitality, retail flagships, and complex residential gut-renovations. Most notably, she transformed and created acclaimed, colourful cafes that have re-defined how spaces should look and feel, while emphasizing virality in this world of social media. Jude’s “Sansa Way” methodology leverages biophilic principles, colour psychology, and flow-state ergonomics to create “soulful” spaces that actively improve the mental and physical well-being of their users.
Nicola Casciato
WZMH Architects
As a principal at WZMH, Nicola brings a long-standing commitment to human-centred, technically rigorous design to contemporary workplace environments. Since joining the firm in 2005, he has contributed to a wide range of institutional, residential, recreational, and commercial projects, giving him a deep understanding of how complex buildings function and how workplaces can support culture, collaboration, and long-term adaptability.
His leadership includes major civic and institutional projects such as the Edward Drake Building in Ottawa, the Durham Region and Quinte Consolidated Courthouses, the Parliament Street Data Centre, and the Toronto Police Services 41 Division Headquarters. Nicola’s workplace approach is grounded in the belief that architecture meaningfully shapes human interaction and organizational culture. He designs environments that strengthen connection, transparency, and engagement, with a focus on how people move, collaborate, and find balance between focused and shared work. His work emphasizes clarity, flexibility, and identity ensuring workplaces evolve alongside organizational needs while maintaining long-term performance.
Jordan Sook
Jordan is a Canadian contemporary mixed-media artist working in sculpture, installation, and painting. His work focuses on the recontextualization and understanding of the environment around us through use of familiarity and readymade objects. He continually invites us to view the world from a subjective innocence as he takes advantage of colour, texture, form and scale to converse on a western human experience enveloped in commercialism and sociopolitical stimulus. Earning his diploma in Advertising & Business Marketing at Georgian College in 2015, he slowly transitioned into his artistic career in 2017. He has since exhibited works at the Power Plant Gallery, MacLaren Art Centre and Art Gallery of Ontario.
Shifting his focus toward public installation, Sook has developed large-scale works both across Canada and internationally, with notable projects including The Degradation of Luxury (Netherlands, 2024), The Irrefutable Truth of Our Existence (Toronto, 2022) in collaboration with the Toronto Arts Council and Toronto Transit Commission and High Street (2020) at the Vancouver Convention Centre. By bridging his formal education with his artistic practice, Jordan continues to expand into unconventional mediums through unique partnerships with global brands such as Nike, Uniqlo, and Arc’teryx. Most recently, his multidisciplinary reach was further recognized when he was selected to direct the music video for Drake’s “Somebody Loves Me.”
Tracy Bowie
Tracy Bowie Projects
Tracy Bowie has been a passionate advocate of Canadian design internationally for over 30 years through organizing events to bring the design and architecture industry together for networking, inspiration, access to new materials, products and trends and education on key issues such as sustainability, wellness and accessibility.
After a rewarding career leading IIDEXCanada and managing Designers Walk, in her semi-retirement she now leads her own firm, Tracy Bowie Projects where she programs conferences and tours for associations such as ASID, IDC and Restaurants Canada, organizes sales and marketing strategies and special projects for key Canadian manufacturers like Eventscape and helps to launch design events like the Architecture & Design Film Festival in Toronto at TIFF Lightbox Toronto which celebrates seven years in the fall of 2026. She is a recipient of the IDC/IIDA Leadership Award of Excellence (2013), is an honourary member of ARIDO and has also been a DesignTO Ambassador as well as a member of the advisory board of the Ryerson School of Interior Design and the Interior Designers of Canada Foundation.
