Canadian Immigrant - November 2023

COVER STORY
MULTIMEDIA
VISIONARY
OCAD University’s President Ana Serrano is playing
a key role in shaping the arts and culture sector in Canada
By Lisa Evans
Ana Serrano was destined to have a career in the arts. Born and raised
in the Philippines, Serrano’s parents, who were graduate students
at Harvard and MIT, had planned to move the family to the United
States. But when her stepfather received a job offer at York University
teaching at the business school, the family decided to move to Toronto.
Serrano and her family immigrated to Canada in 1979 when she was
10 years old. Reading was always an important value in her family. “My
grandmother spent a lot of money buying books from the U.S. for my
sister and I,” says Serrano. “We had every imaginable type of encyclopedia
and reference book about science, geography and history; and my parents
were fiction and poetry lovers.”
She says her taste in literature was wide-ranging in her early years,
from books about Victorian times to different planetary systems. “I think
my passion for film and media was just a natural extension of my being a
bookworm, devouring all the various lives I could inhabit.”
Serrano’s first foray into the world of the arts was in publishing. As a
university student majoring in English Literature at McGill University,
Serrano was the editor of the school’s literary magazine. Having been
raised in a world of literature, Serrano also ran a successful reading
series. “During my tenure running these various literary projects, I fell
into desktop publishing. It made running a magazine more flexible and
affordable and I fell in love with computers,” she says.
While Serrano’s interest in art and publishing was informed by her
childhood, her passion for multimedia was also encouraged and largely
informed by her family. During the 1980s, the “desktop revolution” was
led by several entrepreneurial writers who self-published zines using
this new digital technology. Serrano’s father bought her a copy of Wired
Magazine, a publication that focused on how emerging technologies
affected culture, politics and the economy. “This is the future where you
belong,” he told her. The magazine predicted that the publishing world
would change once moving images and animation were added.
This sparked her curiosity and led to an exploration of new media
as a way of telling stories. Serrano’s mother encouraged her to take
a Commodore Amiga course with her, so they could discover the
multimedia world together. Serrano’s grandmother gave her the funds to
take post-secondary schooling at the University of Toronto in information
technology and design.
That investment certainly paid off. Today, Serrano is one of Canada’s
most well-known individuals in the realm of new media and has received
numerous awards from the digital, media, film and theatre industries
across North America including the 2021 Crystal Award for Digital
Trailblazer from the Women in Film & Television in Toronto, the 2015
Digital Media Trailblazer Award from the Academy of Canadian Film
& Television and the 2012 Best Canadian Feature Film Award from the
International Reel Asian Film Festival.
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CANADIAN IMMIGRANT Volume 20 Issue 5 | 2023