Emelia Angnatok is a beadwork and embroidery artist from Nain, Nunatsivaut, NL, who is currently based in St. John’s, NL, for school.
Angnatok taught herself how to bead in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and started making traditional earrings and selling them through her business, Kuviasuk Designs, in 2022. “My dad always picked up shedding caribou antlers, and I figured I might as well try and cut them up and use them as middles for beaded earrings,” she says. Her earrings often feature centres with antler and dried flowers encapsulated in resin, with rings of beads surrounding them. After moving to St. John’s for school, she expanded her practice to embroidery, which she taught herself how to do. “I just picked it up, saw what worked and kept going with it,” she says.
Angnatok is inspired by artists like Tammy Hannaford and often features cultural symbols in her work. In 2025, she worked on beading an image of a caribou against a background of flowers. She used various shades of brown, white, and grey beads to create the caribou’s body, and the pale green background with little white and sage flowers suggests springtime.
In 2022, she was named Young Inuk Woman of the Year by Pauktuutit Inuit Women of Canada for her business. In 2024, Angnatok participated in the Sustainable Nunatsiavut Futures artist residency. During this program, she produced a piece titled Puijinniatik (2024), which is a scene of a person seal hunting, representing the sustainability of Nunatsiavummiut. Angnatok used beads, resin, and embroidery floss to create the scene. “I had no idea what I was doing coming into this…but I’m glad I did it.…It just improved me as an artist,” [2] she says. This work has been displayed in the Queen Elizabeth II library at Memorial University, St. John’s, and will be displayed at The Rooms museum, also in St. John’s, in 2026. “It’s really cool to see how one little application turned into so much more,” she says.
Alongside her artistic practice, Angnatok often teaches beading workshops. In the past, she has run workshops at the Juniper House in St. John’s, a resource centre for Indigenous students, as well as at the Makkovik Craft Centre and through Sustainable Nunatsiavut Futures. “It’s pretty cool to teach others how to bead,” she says. In the future, Angnatok hopes to work on larger projects and intends to do a bachelor’s of education, which she hopes to eventually use to work as a teacher in Nain to help other Indigenous with life skills and to teach them how to create their own artwork.