Banquets and Belonging: Diasporic celebrations in the Greater Toronto Area

March 23 – February 2, 2025

Guest Curated by Sneha Mandhan

Gatherings and celebrations are an important part of many immigrant cultures in the Greater Toronto Area. These celebrations allow family and friends to come together, to pass on cultural traditions to younger generations, to participate in ritual and ceremony, and to create new memories and belonging in new places. This crowdsourced photo exhibition tells the stories of these moments of celebration and joy across a broad cultural diaspora.

This is an ongoing photo story project.

If you'd like to submit a photo story to the exhibit, please visit: https://form.jotform.com/230824032925047.

Bio:

This exhibition is curated by Sneha Mandhan (she/her). Sneha works at the intersections of planning, urban design, research, and community engagement. She collaborates on projects with Monumental Projects, People Design Co-operative, and the Department of Words and Deeds, and teaches at the University of Toronto. She holds a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an undergraduate degree in architecture from India.

Sneha’s work focuses on incorporating culture into the planning and design of cities. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Planning at the University of Toronto, where she is working to discover and share the stories of banquet halls as important sites of cultural celebration in the Greater Toronto Area.