Christie Denomme will tell you she never thought of herself as an artist. The past year, learning what it takes to make art happen on a community scale has made that distinction a little harder to maintain.
For years, her role alongside husband Jeff Denomme and The Haunted Zoo was logistical, not creative. She would plan projects, organize installations, and occasionally lend another set of eyes to a colour palette or composition. “[Jeff]’s the actual illustrator,” she says. She points to his creativity and passion for the project, contrasting her strengths in communication and organization.
But when The Haunted Zoo’s upcoming The Zookeeper docuseries was greenlit last summer, those boundaries started to dissolve.
“My role went from backend support to full-on producer for the TV series,” Denomme says. And from then on, “whatever needed to happen to execute, I was doing.”
Sometimes that meant outreach to collaborators and community partners. Other times it meant lending a hand spray-painting or doing fabrication work. “For someone who doesn’t consider themselves a creative professional,” she says, “it’s been a year of creating.”
That evolution is core to a series that reveals, in part, the layers of collaborative work behind a finished piece of art.
From Punk Kid to Community Partner
The Haunted Zoo began nearly two decades ago out of Jeff’s love of punk, skateboarding, and street art, developing into the instantly recognizable collection of slightly macabre, “Tim Burton meets Hello Kitty,” white-eyed characters seen today. After a decade spent with the project primarily on hiatus, Jeff returned to The Haunted Zoo with renewed energy following a trip to Miami Art Week in late 2023.
Jeff, Christie, and family at the WETRA Immersive Sensory Room
Photo courtesy The Haunted Zoo
He came home with a readiness to focus full-time on The Haunted Zoo. Over the next year, the project rapidly expanded in scale: from murals and merchandise to increasingly ambitious collaborations with public and private organizations. Increasingly, those projects were designed around what art could contribute to the community.
“The evolution of The Haunted Zoo from its punk and skate roots into a brand focused on community impact has been the best thing to happen to both me and the work we create,” says Jeff. Becoming a parent, he says, made that purpose more intentional. “We could use creativity to support the village around us, bring people together, and inspire others through what we share and teach.”
“If we’re going to do art, how can that art have a positive impact on the world?” says Christie, of The Haunted Zoo’s driving philosophy.
That philosophy was at the centre of the original pitch Jeff and Christie made for a Haunted Zoo television series in July 2024. The couple imagined a series following them as they installed murals and worked on projects with community-rooted organizations around Windsor.
Bell saw opportunity for another story that might better attract the interest of a national audience: the people and process behind the work. The community work was compelling, but they saw the stories of the creators behind the work as the main draw. Who are Jeff and Christie? How and why do they do what they do?
A year passed without much of an update, and then suddenly the series was greenlit in July of 2025. But that presented a new challenge. So much time had passed between pitch and greenlight that many of the projects they’d originally proposed were no longer available. All they had was a rough outline of possibilities for the year ahead, and nothing confirmed.
“When the series was first greenlit, my initial reaction was pure excitement,” Jeff recalls. “Very quickly, though, the reality set in and I realized just how much work lay ahead.”
So with roughly ten months to deliver both the community art projects and the docuseries itself, and only “ideas of what would be cool – but nothing formal,” they knew it wasn’t time to play it safe.
Taming the Beast
In developing the project, they challenged themselves to work across different media and at scales they hadn’t attempted before. One such project involved building an 11-by-16-foot three-dimensional sculpture, despite neither of them working in 3D previously, much less at the immense scale of the planned piece.
The creative challenge suddenly called on Christie’s logistical expertise, too: Where could they assemble something too large for their home studio? Once built, how would they move it when no local rental truck was big enough? How would they even start fabrication of a piece that big? And, after a deadline shift, how would they deliver a three-week build plan in just six days?
The stories of answering those questions, of creative problem-solving, and of community-building around art are just as central to the episodes as the stories of creative design and illustration.
“You see something out in the world [and] you don’t have any idea how many hands were involved in creating it, what kinds of problems needed to be solved in creating it,” Christie says. “I think Windsor, there’s just a lot of community here. People are just willing to hear your ideas and come with a strong pitch. It’s been our experience that people here are collaborative and they’re down to say yes.”
A Project with Deeper Roots
Of all the projects captured by the series, though, Jeff and Christie are most proud of one with a much more personal scale.
At the Windsor-Essex Therapeutic Riding Association (WETRA), they designed and custom-built a fully immersive sensory room supporting occupational therapy programming for children. Haunted Zoo characters populate the space, designed to put whimsy and fun first while serving the specific needs of the children who use it.
For Christie, the project has deeper significance as her family’s connection to the organization began before she was even born. Her brother attended its programs, and she grew up visiting the facility herself.
“I can’t think of a better organization to have partnered with,” she says.
Jeff & his son creating a community mural project
Photo courtesy The Haunted Zoo
The Collaborative Nature of Art
Across six episodes, documentary filmmaker Gavin Michael Booth’s camera follows the experimentation, communication, and problem-solving behind the finished work.
What stood out most to Booth was watching the couple work toward the same goal from different directions. “They share the same goal but approach design differently and I truly believe it elevates each of their art projects. I think the series shows this by example several times over,” he says.
“I think you also get to see a married couple collaborating and understanding each other’s shorthand, understanding when and how to step in and pick up any slack or how they can best improve one another’s workflows.”
For Christie, making that process visible is part of the point. Art doesn’t simply appear on a wall or in a neighbourhood. Someone imagined it. Someone had to figure out how to make it. And often, many more people contributed than the finished object reveals.
“Things don’t show up in your community,” she says. “They show up with intention.”
Christie hopes viewers leave knowing The Haunted Zoo a little better. But she also hopes the series changes how they look at the next piece of art they encounter out in the world.
“I hope they have a deeper appreciation for how that came to be and the need to make sure arts continue to thrive,” she says. “It’s the heartbeat of a community.”
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The Zookeeper, a docuseries about The Haunted Zoo, premieres Saturday, August 22 at 2pm at The Chrysler Theatre, 201 Riverside Dr W. The free community screening is hosted with support from St. Clair College. Advance reservations are required through Eventbrite, with optional in-person donations to benefit WETRA.*
