Melinda Hunt

Canada Council Dept: Calgary-born Melinda Hunt, backed with occasional grants over the years from the Canada Council, has produced a unique series of portraits depicting many of the city's lost souls - anonymous men and women whose lives were rediscovered and celebrated through her art. Her 20 years of devotion to the project have also produced a book, a film, an online gallery and various other works illuminating the little-known story of Hart Island, according to Vancouver Sun. Even so, hundreds of thou-sands of deaths - and the lives that went before - remain undocumented; more than 850,000 people have been "invisibly buried" in the unmarked pauper's graves of Hart Island since the 1860s and a Canadian artist has become the unlikely keeper of the history of Hart Island, site of New York City's main "potter's field" cemetery for the destitute, the unknown and the otherwise forgotten. And through her creation of an archival database of the island's burial information - laboriously updated as new records are unearthed and added, most extracted from municipal files via legal fights and access-to-information campaigns - Hunt has rescued the identities and stories of thou-sands of New York's dead. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.