For over 30 years, curator, writer and Program Director of grunt gallery, Glenn Alteen has played a central role within the British Columbia and Canadian arts communities. As Director of grunt gallery in Vancouver, Alteen has been active in creating sustainable administration practices through the purchase of a facility, the Blue Cabin Residency Program and the creation of the grunt gallery Legacy Fund, an endowment held by the Vancouver Foundation. His writing on performance art has been published in Wordless Rebecca Belmore, grunt; Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, MOA; Making Always War, Stride Gallery; Caught in the Act, YYZ Books. Alteen was a recipient of the 2018 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, Outstanding Contribution Award.
Kay Armatage has enjoyed a distinguished career as a filmmaker, academic and programmer. Her films have been sold for broadcast and shown at festivals, cinematheques and galleries around the world. She has won a number of awards and grants, including SSHRCC research grants (1995, 2003, 2007), Canada Council Senior Artist’s Grant (1992), YWCA Woman of Distinction Award (1989), Toronto Women in Film and Television Award of Merit (1988 & 2004), Clyde Gilmour Award (2004) and numerous film festival prizes and arts council grants. Armatage is professor of Cinema and Women’s Studies at the University of Toronto and a long-time programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival. Her writing on cinema has been published in Take One Magazine, Canadian Forum, Fireweed, Spirale, Atlantis and Canadian Women’s Studies.
Grant Arnold is Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where he contributes to the exhibition program and development of the collection. Recent exhibition projects include: Mowry Baden; Dana Claxton: Fringing the Cube; Kevin Schmidt: We Are the Robots; Pictures From Here; Susan Point: Spindle Whorl (with Ian Thom); Jerry Pethick: Shooting the Sun/Splitting the Pie and Residue: The Persistence of the Real. His writing has appeared in a number of exhibition catalogues and anthologies over the past 25 years.
Jordan Arseneault is a translator, performer and film curator in Montréal. By day, he coordinates the Queer Media Database Canada-Québec project; by night, he attacks stages in his drag persona, Peaches LePoz. His two social practice workshops, Fear Drag (2010- present), and Disclosure Cookbook (with artist Mikiki) address criminalization, stigma, HIV/AIDS, addiction, queerness and community. In addition to the privilege of writing on A. Duke, Arseneault’s essay “How to Have an HIV/AIDS Lecture Series in an Epidemic” features in the Aug. 2019 issue of On Curating, edited by Theodore Kerr. Born: Saint John, Canada, 1980.Christina Battle’s (Edmonton, Canada) research and artistic work consider the parameters of disaster; looking to it as action, as more than mere event and instead as a framework operating within larger systems of power. Through this research she imagines how disaster could be utilized as a tactic for social change and as a tool for reimagining how dominant systems might radically shift. [www.cbattle.com]
Scott Miller Berry is a cisgendered, able-bodied, white, queer, Jewish settler with lived mental health experiences. A full-time cultural worker and part-time filmmaker, currently Managing Director at Workman Arts, an arts + mental health organization and previously Director at the Images Festival and proud recipient of the 2015 Rita Davies Margo Bindhardt Award for cultural service in Toronto. Most of his films address themes of mortality, grief, memory and collective histories; his film ars memorativa (2013) screened in competition at Oberhausen after debuting at Experimenta India. Recent screenings include Jakarta, Ottawa, Lisbon, Montréal, Seoul, Vienna and a fall 2015 solo screening with Colectivo Toronto.
Santiago Bose (1949–2002, Philippines) was a mixed-media artist whose works addressed difficult social and political concerns in the Philippines. Bose co-founded the Baguio Arts Guild, and was also an educator, community organizer and art theorist. He was granted the Thirteen Artists Award by the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1976 and exhibited in major international events such as the Third Asian Art Show in Japan, the Havana Biennial in Cuba, and the First Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Australia. In 2000 Bose’s work was included in the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’s exhibition At Home & Abroad, 20 Contemporary Filipino Artists. In 2006, he was posthumously shortlisted for the National Artist award.
Deanna Bowen is a Toronto based artist and educator whose artistic/educational practice examines history, historical writing and the ways in which artistic and technological advancements impact individual and collective authorship. She is a 2016 Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and recipient of the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. She has worked for the Images Festival, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, the Canadian Women Studies Journal, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, and Point of View Magazine. She frequently presents her research, writings and artworks about the connections between race, history, and contemporary arts production in international publications, graduate seminars and academic conferences in Humanities disciplines in and outside of the arts. Recent writings and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, Transition Magazine, Towards an African-Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, PUBLIC Journal, North: New African Canadian Writing – West Coast Line, and FRONT Magazine.
Joella Cabalu is a Filipino-Canadian documentary filmmaker. Her first credit as a producer and director was for It Runs in the Family (2015), which won Audience Choice Awards at the Seattle Asian Film Festival and Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Since then, she has developed a track record as a creative and collaborative producer working with emerging women directors on compelling short documentaries, including FIXED! (2017), Do I Have Boobs Now? (2017), and Biker Bob’s Posthumous Adventure (2019). She is currently producing her first feature documentary Back Home with support from the Telefilm Talent to Watch fund.
Mark V. Campbell is a DJ, scholar and curator. His research explores the relationships between Afrosonic innovations and notions of humanism. As co-founder of the Bigger than Hip Hop radio show in 1997 and as founder of Northside Hip Hop Archive in 2010, Mark has cultivate a community engaged praxis focused on hip hop culture and blacklife. Since 2010 the archive has partnered with major cultural institutions such as the Royal Ontario Museum, The McMichael Art Collection, the Toronto Public Library and the Ryerson University Archives to celebrate and preserve hip hop in Canada.
Mike Cartmell (1954–2014) from Hamilton, Ontario, began making Super 8 films in 1973 with his own equipment. He studied philosophy and politics at the University of Toronto 1971-1976, and cultural studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo, 1976-1979. In 1979 he began shooting and exhibiting photography, and became more serious about his filmmaking. He programmed Zone Cinema in Hamilton from 1981 to 1984, then moved to Toronto and joined the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and the Funnel. —bio by John Porter, Cache du Cinema Notes
Cassils is a visual artist working in live performance, film, sound, sculpture and photography. Cassils has achieved international recognition for a rigorous engagement with the body as a form of social sculpture. Drawing on conceptualism, feminism, body art, gay male aesthetics; Cassils forges a series of powerfully trained bodies for different performative purposes. It is with sweat, blood, and sinew that Cassils constructs a visual critique around ideologies and histories.
Chris Chong Chan Fui is an artist who works with varying materials in an installation format whose works are curious about the definition of authenticity. Chong has exhibited his works at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Palais de Tokyo, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, and Singapore Art Museum. He has also premiered at prestigious film festivals such as the Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, BFI London, and Toronto’s Wavelengths. Chong is a Smithsonian Institute Fellow and a Ford Foundation Fellow, and most recently, he has been awarded the 2019 Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Arts Fellowship.
Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist and filmmaker. She works in film, video, photography, single and multi channel video installation and performance art. Her practice investigates beauty, the body, the socio-political, and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally and she the Head and Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art, Art History and Theory at the University of British Columbia. Her family reserve is Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in beautiful Southwest Saskatchewan.
María Alejandrina Coates is a Uruguayan-born, Ontario-based curator. Her research interests include the poetics of data, feminism and socially engaged practices. Her curated exhibitions include Terraforming, presented by the South Asian Visual Arts Centre and Trinity Square Video, Toronto; Voz-a-Voz at YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto; and Feelings, presented by the aluCine Latin Film and Media Arts Festival, Toronto. Coates received a bachelor’s degree from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies from York University (Toronto). She has been published in the Journal of Curatorial Studies and is currently researcher-in-residence at SAVAC.
Allison Collins is a Vancouver-based curator, writer and researcher, working since 2015 as Curator of Media Arts, Western Front, where she focuses on the production of new artistic projects. She is part of Kamias Special Projects Collective (with Patrick Cruz and Su-Ying Lee) which organizes the Kamias Triennial, in Quezon City, Philippines. Curatorial research projects include Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage, 1972–1982 (w/ Michael Turner), grunt gallery; Suspicious Futures: Selected works of Susan Britton, Vtape, Toronto; and Hold Still Wild Youth: The Gina Show Archive, Or Gallery, Vancouver. Her education includes a BFA in Visual Art, UOttawa, and an MA in Art History (Critical and Curatorial Studies), UBC.
Roland Sintos Coloma is professor and assistant dean of Teacher Education and co-director of the Kaplan Center for Research on Urban Education at Wayne State University in Detroit, USA. A scholar of history, cultural studies, and education, he has published three groundbreaking books on postcolonial studies, race/ethnicity, and diaspora, including the Asian Canadian Studies Reader (2017) and Filipinos in Canada (2012). In progress are a book project on history, empire, and education; and an encyclopedia on diversity, democracy, and social justice. He is president of the American Educational Studies Association (2018-19) and past editor of the Educational Studies journal (2015–17).
Alexandra Cousins is a disciple of the language of visual culture and of the impact of images to educate and communicate. Cousins is a photo-based artist engaged in the daily struggle of striving, fighting, and fluctuating to survive. Her goals are fluid to the whims of obsession, following the threads of thought which entangle us, using whatever tools necessary for momentary liberation: a method of negating the pervasive alienation of our lives. As a fine art production specialist, Alexandra has held positions at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the AGO. On a freelance basis she offers art direction and project management for exhibitions and publications through her production company Vivid Simulacra.
Shaun Dacey is currently Director of the Richmond Art Gallery. Previous to that he has held positions at Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Access Gallery, Burnaby Art Gallery, and Oakville Galleries. Dacey holds a master’s degree in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia. He has written for various publications including E-flux and Blackflash among others.
Erika DeFreitas is a Scarborough-based artist whose practice includes the use of performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, works on paper, and writing. Placing an emphasis on process, gesture, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, she works through attempts to understand concepts of loss, post-memory, inheritance, and objecthood. DeFreitas’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was the recipient of the TFVA 2016 Finalist Artist Prize, the 2016 John Hartman Award, and longlisted for the 2017 Sobey Art Award. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.
Leilah Dhoré is a freelance photographer based in Toronto. Her first photography exhibit Exposed was with Nia Centre for the Arts. Leilah now majors in Photography at OCAD University, with a minor in Art and Social Change. Some highlights of her work experience include How She Hustles, The CBC’s HerStory in Black, Ryerson University and, Northside Hip Hop Archive. Always expanding on her artistic practice, Leilah recently secured her first gig as a Director of Photography and Editor for a professional short film, The Story Maa Never Told which premiered September, 2019 at the CineFAM Film Festival.
Michael Douglas’s distinctive cinematic style and effective techniques of telling stories has led to numerous nods and nominations in local film circles including six MuchMusic and MTV Video Award nominations. He has won multiple awards as well as been featured in the television show Men Of Music. Douglas has worked with numerous recording artists in both the film and still photography mediums including Sean Paul, The Fugees, The Roots, Chuck D, KRS One, Jelleestone, Choclair, Kardinal Offishall, Saukrates, Ray Robinson, BrassMunk, Kim Davis, Ghetto Concept, and Master T & Suga Prince.
Alison Duke is an artistic activist, award-winning filmmaker and producer. Duke established Goldelox Productions to produce social issue content. In 2016, she produced the Akua Benjamin Legacy Project, a digital web series, which celebrates the legacies of Toronto-based black activists. Inspired by Ava Duvernay, #metoo and the reality that opportunities for women behind the camera in Canada are long overdue, Duke hired five black female Canadian directors to helm the films. Alison has worked as a segment producer/director for several internationally renowned syndicated documentary series and award-winning feature length social issues documentaries which have received Canadian, USA and European television broadcasts as well as film festival awards. Her first film, Raisin Kane: a rapumentary (2001) won the HBO best documentary award at the Urban World Film Festival.
Francisca Duran is a Chilean-Canadian experimental media artist who creates films, video installation, and 2D, photo-based, mixed-media works about history, memory and violence. Duran has exhibited at film festivals and venues including International Film Festival at Rotterdam, HotDocs, Arkipel, Images Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Forum, John Hansard Gallery and Gallery 44. Duran holds an M.F.A. from York University and a B.A.H. from Queen’s University. Her practice has been supported by research, travel, and production grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.
A tri-citizen of Canada, Germany and Jamaica, nichola feldman-kiss is a multi- disciplinary artist exploring body and citizen, collectivity and hybridity, and empathy and belonging. The artist’s practice is socially engaged and performative. Her hybrid media installations—pristine as laboratory craft, ask us to reconsider the hard questions about being conscious social bodies among the tattered boundaries of the digital age. feldman-kiss’ art and technology innovations and institutional interventions have been hosted by the National Research Council of Canada, the Ottawa Hospital Eye Institute, the Canadian Forces and the United Nations, among others. feldman-kiss holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. She lives and works in Toronto.
Richard Fung is an award-winning artist and writer, born in Trinidad and based in Toronto. His single-channel and installation works, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012) and Re:Orientations (2016), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada, the United States and Trinidad and Tobago. A Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University, his lifetime achievement honours include the 2000 Bell Canada Award, the 2001 Toronto Arts Award for Media Art, and the 2015 Kessler Award from the City University of New York.
Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Toronto-based artist and writer. His multi- disciplinary critical practice spans drawing, performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites since 2005. His work draws from experiences of migration and queerness by using conceptual approaches and abstraction as strategies to structure the work.
Barry Greenwald is a Canadian documentary filmmaker, and co-founder of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus. While in his final year as a student at Conestoga College, he directed the 1975 film Metamorphosis, inspired by Czech documentary filmmaker Vaclav Taborsky, which won the Short Film Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Upon graduation, he worked with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) as a film editor, before directing documentary films independently. Greenwald’s films include the 1990 one-hour documentary Between Two Worlds, about Inuit Joseph Idlout. Produced by the NFB and Investigative Productions Inc., the film is included in the 2011 Inuit film collection, Unikkausivut: Sharing Our Stories.
The Gulf Labor Coalition or Gulf Labor is the name of a coalition of international artists and activists which was founded in 2011 to bring awareness to issues surrounding the living and working conditions of migrant laborers responsible for building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and Sheikh Zayed Palace Museum on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, United Arab Emirates, along with other buildings on the island including a New York University Abu Dhabi campus.
Sylvia D. Hamilton is a Nova Scotian writer, filmmaker and artist whose awards include a Gemini, the Portia White Prize and honorary degrees. Her films include Black Mother Black Daughter (1989), Portia White: Think on Me (2000), and The Little Black School House (2007) among others. Her poetry collection, And I alone Escaped to Tell You was shortlisted for the 2015 League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the 2018 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Award. Her solo installations have been featured at galleries and museums in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario. She lives in Grand Pre, Nova Scotia.
Dipna Horra is of Indian ancestry, born in Nairobi, and immigrated to Ottawa in 1976. Her multimedia work intersects architecture and cultural studies. Her practice and research investigates storytelling and hybrids. She has participated in exhibitions and conferences worldwide, including the Subtle Technologies Festival, Toronto (2015), La Presencia del Sonido at Botin Foundation, Spain (2013), The Open Sound Project at Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada (2011) and Deep Wireless Festival, Toronto (2011). These projects have been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa.
Vanessa Kwan is a Vancouver-based artist, writer and curator with a focus on collaborative, site-specific practices. She is currently Program Director at grunt gallery.
Jason Edward Lewis is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary and Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. Lewis founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he leads research exploring computation as a creative and cultural material. He directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, an international research partnership focused on how Indigenous people are imagining the futures they want. Lewis’ creative and production work has been recognized with the inaugural ELO award for Best Work of Electronic Literature and six solo exhibitions. Born and raised in northern California, Lewis is Cherokee, Hawaiian and Samoan.
Steven Loft is Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) of the Haudenosaunee, based in the settler nation of Canada. He is a curator, scholar, writer and media artist. In 2010, he was named Trudeau National Visiting Fellow at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he is researching, writing and lecturing on Indigenous art and aesthetics. Formerly, he was Curator-In-Residence, Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada. Previous to that, he was the Director/Curator of the Urban Shaman Gallery, Winnipeg, Canada’s largest Aboriginal artist-run public gallery; Aboriginal Curator at the Art Gallery of Hamilton; and Artistic Director of the Native Indian/Inuit Photographers’ Association. He has written extensively on Indigenous art and aesthetics for various magazines, catalogues and arts publications. Loft co-edited Transference, Technology, Tradition: Aboriginal Media and New Media Art, published by the Banff Centre Press in 2005.
Ken Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture and photography. Lum holds an honorary doctorate from his undergraduate alma mater, Simon Fraser University. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hnatyshyn Foundation Visual Arts Award and is a Penn Institute of Urban Research Fellow. He was offered a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University in 2011, which was not exercised. In 2017, Lum was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2018, he was granted a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.
Born in Nova Scotia, Mike MacDonald (1941–2006) was multi-media artist of Mi’kmaq ancestry. Principally self-taught, MacDonald meticulously explored the interdependence of migrating butterflies. He planted gardens using traditional native medicine plants to attract butterflies and create healing environments. He created more than twenty site- specific gardens on the grounds of galleries and museums across Canada. His works have been featured in exhibitions worldwide at such venues as the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona and the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, France. In 1994, he was awarded the prestigious Jack and Doris Shadbolt Prize from the Vancouver Institute for Visual Arts and in 2000 he received the first Aboriginal Achievement Award for New Media presented at the Toronto imagineNATIVE Festival.
Âhasiw Maskêgon-Iskwêw (1958–2006) was a Cree and French Métis theorist, curator and artist. Maskêgon-Iskwêw was a significant figure in the field of contemporary Indigenous arts, and a formative proponent of digital media within Indigenous communities. In their 2015 book dedication to him, Steven Loft and Kerry Swanson describe Maskêgon-Iskwêw as “one of the foremost thinkers and practitioners of Aboriginal new media art.”
Pamila Matharu (1973– ) is an immigrant-settler of North Indian descent, born in Birmingham, England, based in Tkarón:to (Toronto). Primarily, she works in visual arts (installation, new media, social practice), arts education, and advocacy. Pamila is a graduate of Visual Arts and Fine Arts Education BEd programs from York University and a grant recipient of the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Art Councils. She has exhibited her work locally, regionally, and nationally—recently she was awarded the 2019 Images Festival Homebrew Award for her solo exhibition One of These Things Is Not Like The Other at A Space Gallery in Toronto.
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation, and drawings. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its relationship to site-specificity, invisible histories, archives, and memory work. She has exhibited, performed and screened her work in Canada, US, and Asia. Exhibitions include the Frye Art Museum (Seattle, Washington), Yonago City Museum (Yonago, Japan), The New Gallery (Calgary), Hamilton Artists Inc (Hamilton), and Koganecho Bazaar (Yokohama). She has most recently performed as part of 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto) and the Richmond World Festival with Cinevolution Media Arts Society (Richmond).
Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist, and an Assistant Professor in theFaculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Her curatorial practice considers the varied values and functions of elements such as time, sound, and knowledge. Recent curatorial projects include the touring exhibitions Recast (2014) at Gallery 44, wnoondwaamin | we hear them (2016) at Trinity Square Video; Carry Forward (2017) Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery; and Beads, They’re Sewn so Tight (2019) at Textile Museum of Canada. Myers has an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial practice from OCAD University. She is based in Toronto and Port Severn and is a member of Beausoleil First Nation.
Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and Bethlehem. Her video, photography and sound works deal with violence of settler colonialism. Nazzal’s work has been exhibited in Canada, Palestine, and internationally in both group and solo exhibitions. She holds a PhD from Western University in London, ON, an MFA from Ryerson University in Toronto, a BFA from the University of Ottawa. She has received awards and scholarships from Western University, Ryerson University, and the University of Ottawa. She also is a recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral award.
Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn is an artist using archives and a broad range of media to investigate issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics and multiculturalism via feminist theories. Nguyễn completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 2011, having obtained her MFA and a post-graduate diploma in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2005, and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2003. Born in Côte-des-Neiges, she is currently based in Stockholm.
Kim Ninkuru is a multimedia artist from Bujumbura, Burundi, currently residing in Toronto, Canada. Find her work and thoughts scattered amongst selfies on instagram via @sista_betina.
Shelley Niro is a multi-disciplinary artist, and a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk. She works in a variety of media, including beadwork, painting, photography and film. Niro has received considerable attention for her work in film, including her short film The Shirt, which was presented at the 2003 Venice Biennal. She is a recipient of a 2017 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and received the Scotiabank Photography award, and the Hnatyshyn Foundation REVEAL award in 2017. Niro was the inaugural recipient of the Aboriginal Arts Award presented through the Ontario Arts Council in 2012. Recently, she received an honorary doctorate from Ontario College of Art and Design University.
Louise Noguchi is a visual artist based in Toronto. Her artwork has been exhibited in Canada and internationally, including exhibitions at The Power Plant, Toronto, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Centre A, Vancouver, Neuer Berliner Kuntsverein, Berlin, Prince Takamado Gallery, Embassy of Canada, Tokyo, and the Deutsches Museum, Munich. Noguchi is an artist and a Professor in the Art and Art History Program at the University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. Her work is represented by Birch Contemporary in Toronto.
Midi Onodera is a recipient of the 2018 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She is a moving image artist who has been making work for 35+ years. She has produced over 25 independent shorts ranging from film to digital video to “low end” toy camera formats. In addition to this she created a theatrical feature film, Skin Deep (1995) and 500+ online videos. Since 2006 she has produced an annual online video project, which can be viewed at: www.midionodera.com. She currently teaches video at UTSC in the Department of Arts, Culture & Media.
Aliya Pabani is a Toronto-based freelance audio producer and artist and former host of The Imposter, an arts and culture podcast from Canadaland. Pabani’s work has also appeared on Short Cuts and In the Dark Radio . She presented a Late Night Provocation at the 2018 Third Coast Conference on why podcasts aren’t funny. Currently, she’s helping to launch a searchable database of POC audio producers and working on a doc for the CBC.
Liz Park is Curator of Exhibitions at UB Art Galleries in Buffalo, New York. Prior to her tenure at UB Art Galleries, she served as associate curator of the 2018 Carnegie International held at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. She has curated exhibitions at a wide range of institutions including the Western Front in Vancouver, the Kitchen in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon. Her writing has been published by Afterall Online, Afterimage, ArtAsiaPacific, Performa Magazine, Fillip, Yishu: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Pluto Press, and Ryerson University Press, among others.
Performance artist, new media artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and educator Archer Pechawis has exhibited across Canada, and internationally in Paris, France and Moscow, Russia. His practice examines both the intersection of Plains Cree worldview, culture and digital technology and the colonial predicament. Archer has worked extensively with Native youth since the start of his art practice, originally teaching juggling and theatre, and now digital media and performance. He is currently a member of the Indigenous Routes collective, teaching video game development to Native girls: http://www.indigenousroutes.ca/. Of Cree and European ancestry, he is a member of Mistawasis First Nation, Saskatchewan. He also made this website.
Jeremy Podeswa is a Canadian film and television director. Podeswa has collected three Emmy nominations, and directed episodes of Boardwalk Empire, True Detective, The Walking Dead, Six Feet Under, True Blood, American Horror Story, and Game of Thrones. As a filmmaker, his 1999 film The Five Senses won Genie Awards for Best Picture and Director, and his 2007 film Fugitive Pieces opened the Toronto International Film Festival.
Niranjan Rajah is faculty at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, SFU. He has served on the Board of Directors of Centre A, Vancouver and the Inter Society for Electronic Art (ISEA); on the advisory board of BANFF New Media Institute; and on the Media Arts Advisory Committee, Canada Council for the Arts. He was conference convenor for the New Forms Festival 2004 & 05, Vancouver. His contribution to Southeast Asian New Media art was acknowledged in a two-man retrospective titled Relocations at ISEA Singapore 2008. His Koboi Project has been exhibited internationally, including the Singapore Biennale 2016. https://koboiproject.com.
Chick Rice is an artist educator. Graduated in photography from Emily Carr, Rice holds a BFA from the University of British Columbia, with advanced studies in photography at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and film direction at NFB Studio D in Montreal. She is a VIVA award recipient and has instructed in photography and design at Emily Carr University since 1991. Chick Rice has served on local and national cultural boards and is the co-founder of the VADA award. Rice has been exhibiting and widely published in North America and Europe, both as a commercial/editorial photographer, and a fine art photo-based artist.
Maya Wilson-Sanchez is a writer, researcher, and curator based in Toronto. She has worked in collections, programming, and curatorial research roles at Gallery TPW, the Art Gallery of Ontario, OCAD University, Onsite Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, and the Royal Ontario Museum. Maya’s writing has been published in journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogues. In 2019, she was awarded the Canadian Art Editorial Residency, and she also became the inaugural recipient of the Art Museum Curatorial Residency Award at the University of Toronto.
Amanda Strong is an Indigenous multimedia artist based out of the unceded Coast Salish territory also known as Vancouver. Her work explores ideas of blood memory and Indigenous ideology. Strong’s films Indigo (2014) and Mia’ (2015) challenge conventional structures of storytelling in cinema and have screened internationally, most notably at Cannes, TIFF, VIFF, and Ottawa International Animation Festival. Amanda has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the NFB. In 2013, she was the recipient K.M. Hunter Artist Award for Film and Video, and most recently the recipient of the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Awards for Emerging Film and Media Artist.
Tess Takahashi is a Toronto-based scholar, writer, and programmer who focuses on experimental moving image arts. She is currently working on two books, Impure Film: Medium Specificity and the North American Avant-Garde (1968-2008), which examines artists’ work with historically new media, and On Magnitude, which considers artists’ work against the backdrop of big data. She is a member of the experimental media programming collective Ad Hoc and the editorial collective for Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media. Takahashi’s writing has been published there as well as in Cinema Journal, the Millennium Film Journal, Animation, MIRAGE, and Cinema Scope.
Kim TallBear is Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. TallBear is author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her Indigenous STS work recently turned to also address decolonial and Indigenous sexualities. Building on lessons learned with geneticists about how race categories get settled, TallBear is working on a book that interrogates settler-colonial commitments to settlement in place, within disciplines, and within monogamous, state-sanctioned marriage. She is a citizen of the Sisseton – Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota.
Ricky Varghese is a Toronto-based art writer and psychotherapist in private practice. His work has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, esse arts + opinions, TOPIA, PUBLIC, and Modern Horizons, and he serves as an associate editor for Drain Magazine. He has guest edited special issues of Drain Magazine (2014 and 2016), Porn Studies (2019), and GLQ (forthcoming in 2020). He is the editor of RAW: PrEP, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Barebacking (University of Regina Press and ZED Books, 2019). In September 2017, he commenced his clinical training at the Toronto Institute of Psychoanalysis to become an IPA-affiliated psychoanalyst.
Zainub Verjee is a media artist, critic, curator, writer, arts administrator and public intellectual. Working on the frontlines in 1980s and 1990s, Zainub has shaped culture policy at all levels of governments and contributed to building of cultural institutions and organizations in Canada and internationally. She is invited to speak nationally and internationally, on cultural policy, contemporary art and cultural diplomacy. Her artwork has been shown internationally, including at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the Venice Biennale. Currently Zainub is the Executive Director of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, Toronto.
Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer interested in issues of ethnocultural representational spaces in Canada. Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogue, and alternative BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) futurities and healing. She is a curator and board member at Younger than Beyoncé Gallery and a member of the ad-hoc collective We Critique, We Curate. Wallen holds a BFA in Art History (Concordia University) and an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice (OCAD University).
Jayne Wilkinson is a Toronto-based writer, editor, and curator. She holds an M.A. in Art History and Critical Theory from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver). Wilkinson has contributed critical essays to a variety of journals and publications, including C Magazine, Prefix Photo, Inuit Art Quarterly, InVisible Culture and others. She has worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery, was Editor/Publisher at Prefix Photo, Director/Curator at Prefix ICA, Assistant Curator at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga and has held teaching positions in Cultural Theory at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto St. George. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief at Canadian Art.
Cornelia Wyngaarden is a media artist. Her single channel videotapes and installation work are located around such issues as gender, sexuality, technology, invisibility and the facelessness of identity. She has exhibited extensively and has videotapes in several collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, and the National Gallery of Canada.
Andrea Zittlau is Associate Professor at the department of North American Studies at the University of Rostock, Germany. Her work looks at structures of normativity and possibilities to queer those structures and forms of perceptions. Her monograph Curious Exotica (2016) explores the display of othered bodies and associated material culture. Currently, she focuses on poetry and its possible manifestations which include visual work as well as community outreach programs.