Work Placements

A work placement at The Only Animal is an opportunity to learn arts administration skills, interface with the local arts community and gain knowledge about tangible practices that challenge climate anxiety. The Only Animal provides flexible mentorship opportunities for emerging artists to take the lead on projects while developing values-forward approaches to event creation. Weekly meetings tie together our remote team, and in-person events offer a space to explore and celebrate where we are in the process of learning—while putting on a killer show ;).

Students seeking internship or work placement opportunities at The Only Animal are encouraged to contact us at info(at)theonlyanimal.com. Tell us a bit about yourself and why you think you'd like to join our team.

Summer/Fall 2025

Annie Simms

Annie Simms is a multi-disciplinary artist, performer, poet, and art educator currently living in qathet BC in Tla’amin territory. Her creative practice, in all its emergent forms, seems to follow and circle back to the intersection of spirituality, community, storytelling, and ecology. Her visual arts practice and research is rooted in place and expresses connection to landscape by using locally harvested plants, leaves and bark to create colours, fibres and prints. Annie’s practice is inspired by a deep desire to experience kinship with her inter-species community and seeks opportunities to advocate for more than human life.

This summer Annie has facilitated and led public open studios, supported featured artists in the production and facilitation of Slow Social Club events, performed material research, created interactive public artworks and helped to co-create company exhibitions and educational materials.

Brags: Annie is developing skills curation, community outreach, event production, and creating meaningful relationships with the waterways, forests and interspecies communities on the Lower Sunshine Coast.

anata laylay

anata laylay (they/them) is a trans nonbinary Filipinx curator, ancestral medicine worker, and artist from the rivers and hills in Hagonoy, Bulacan and Catanauan, Quezon. anata laylay is currently living on stolen and unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ land. As a curator, their practice centres Filipino history, healing, Kapwa, and the QTBIPOC experience led by community collaboration and slow, intentional creation.

With curation and storytelling at the heart of their practice, their art mediums have extended into working with photography, graphic design, colour-grading, community research, and most recently, fibre-arts, weaving, and cyanotype. Their exhibitions such as, "bahay na babalik-balikan" or "lagi akong uuwi" have been shown in the Lower Mainland and their digital art has been shared in Canada, the Philippines, California, and New York. Through different iterations, anata laylay continuously works with themes of shared histories, liberation, connection, climate justice, and ancestral practices.

Outside of art, anata laylay is deeply focused on community organizing, activism, and continuing to learn as a Filipinx healer and ritual worker. They are committed to honouring their ancestors, community care, decolonization and fighting for national democracy and genuine liberation!

Brags: anata is developing skills in accessible educational materials, working with dye plants, strengthening their artwork about climate justice, and helping build TOA’s visual world.

Stevan Oostenbrug

BRAGS: Stevan has developed his eco-printing practices, administrative techniques, artist portfolio, and teaching abilities, taking a lead role in social media management and organizing a series of Slow Social Club events.

About Stevan

Stevan Oostenbrug is a queer interdisciplinary artist, songwriter, and event organizer based in Vancouver, the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Stevan explores media including instrument building, mono-prints, fibre arts, and sculpture. His artistic practice touches on navigating relationships with mental illness, the interaction of humans and more-than-humans, gentleness, and collective action.

Stevan creates lyric driven indie-folk music and sound work with a focus on curiosity and interconnection between the individual, their community, and their environment. His sonic material emerges alongside Stevan’s intrinsic knowledge of harmony from church-going as a child, his curiosity for sound created from physical materials, and his deep need to connect authentically.

As an organizer, Stevan has co-curated and co-produced music events at Simon Fraser University and contributes to his student community as the current President of the Music and Sound Union. Stevan has performed at the 2023 and 2024 West Coast Composer Symposiums, participated in SFU’s student music and sound compilations, and SFU’s School of Contemporary Art’s Music and Sound Festivals. At The Only Animal, Stevan is facilitating a series of community events called Slow Social Club, with activities including cordage making, soundwalks and mediations, and varied eco-printing techniques.

Camila Rueda

BRAGS: Camila is developing her skills in community engagement, teaching and event production, sharing her love for working with upcycled materials at Slow Social Club events and through student engagement.

About Camila

Camila Rueda Furuzawa is a Mexican-Colombian writer, multidisciplinary artist and event organizer currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her art employs different materials such as painting, sculpture, drawing and manipulation of textiles to showcase her multicultural background, focusing her work on the syncretism of social and cultural aspects that influence her life. Her family being Colombian and Mexican of Japanese-Spaniard descent, has pushed her to participate in discourses related to racism, colonialism, and exploring the intersectionality of cross-cultural ideologies and concepts, balancing the involvement of activities and principles, while building and managing a personal identity.

She is part of the @yarnspinnersociety and recently organizing and assisting events such as the Community Cafe in Burnaby Neighborhood House (BNH), and other venues. These art collectives are highly interested in community oriented projects, such as interacting with people, where through different activities with recycled materials, community interaction is encouraged and advocates for environmental consciousness and involvement. She considers her art and writing a political space to discuss international and current concepts, focusing on gender and sexual violence, especially in Latin America, as alongside multicultural intersectionality and environmental topics.