Toronto filmmaker and video artist John Greyson is the winner of the Canada Council of the Arts' 2007 Bell Award in Video Art.

Greyson, also an assistant professor of production at York University, will accept the $10,000 honour at a downtown Toronto ceremony on Oct. 17.

A three-member peer assessment committee recognized Greyson as "an incisive social and political critic" and "one of the leaders in the AIDS activist video movement."

Greyson studied visual art in his hometown of London, Ont., before studying at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto.

In the years since, his films and video works have won awards at festivals around the world. His movie Lilies was named best film at Canada's Genie Awards in 1996.

Greyson's work often deals with the themes of censorship, homosexuality and AIDS.

Past winners of the Bell Award include General Idea, Vera Frenkel, Paul Wong, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn.