Tommy Genesis

This self-proclaimed bad girl is making her mark as a model, artist, and rapper. 

- Katherine Brodsky

As a child, all Tommy Genesis needed was a box of crayons. “I was the kind of kid where, if you gave me crayons and paper, you could leave me for hours,” she recalls. “My mom had to yell for me to go play outside.” These days, she uses a different set of tools. A graduate of Vancouver’s Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she is drawn to structural paintings using fabric and glue, but her canvas is even broader than that. “To dress up and get your makeup done and be somebody new for a day, to go into a different character, that part is fun for me,” says Genesis of modeling, an endeavor that she took on when her photographer friends asked her to pose for them.