Carole Wilde Jackson is a feminist, nature-loving artist and writer living in coastal Georgia. Born in 1962, she grew up in Tampa Florida earning her BA of Fine Art. She was awarded the Las Damas de Arte Award at the USF Twelfth Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition. She soon found herself a young mother earning her way in the world working in public education.

After years of struggling against institutional inequalities, Carole now pursues art as change agent. Wilde Jackson believes that creative expression is essential for Woman to reclaim her authentic self from patriarchal systematic oppression. She desires to create communal experiences where women share art, story, ritual, healing.  Her works portray feminine strength and beauty, exploring the tribal stories of women and the magic healing power of feminine energy.

Her recent solo shows featured painting, mixed-media, and poetry honouring the Sacred Feminine. Interview link

Carolyn Ellen Beattie is an artist and art educator based in Toronto. Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses painting, collage, sculpture, video, dance, performance, and installation works, with projects often involving inter-media explorations. Carolyn is inspired by feminist and holistic approaches to art and education, and is currently pursuing graduate studies in art therapy. Carolyn is interested in self-representation as feminist research. Her work explores deeply personal territory, and often contains elements of self-portraiture. Carolyn relies on and references the body in various ways through her artistic processes. The body, often her own body, becomes a way of knowing, a site for storytelling and poetry; the subject and also the medium. Carolyn’s work is informed by her experiences with mental illness, related medical/ physical health issues, and trauma. Her practice is rooted in an ethic of care, and is focused on developing meaningful experiences and healing practices for self and with others.

Clementine Morrigan is a writer, artist, zinester, academic, organizer, and witch.
They are a white settler living and working on Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat,
and Anishinabek land, known as Toronto. Their work explores trauma, queer temporalities, and more-than-human intimacies. They have a special affinity with plants.

Emma Rochester is a context-based interdisciplinary artist who uses her body as a channel to investigate the iconic power of nature – a terminal through which explorations of imagination, memory, and sensorial understandings of gendered landscapes are filtered and structured into multilayered works. Exploring ideas of the feminine as allegory for natural environs and the sacred, she creates site-specific projects comprised of fibre forms, drawings, textile design, sculpture, video art, and performance artefacts.

Her current PhD project in Visual Art at Griffith University (Australia) is an inquiry into the affirmative role that depicting and experiencing the divine as woman can be, titled "The Embodied Artefact - a nomadic approach to gendered sites of reverence through an interdisciplinary art practice." Rochester undertakes pilgrimages to scapes of prayer and petition for those who identify as female. Including but not limited to Black Madonna shrines, caves, springs, lakes, Neolithic fertility sites and Aphrodite Temples.

Jennifer Feagler received a Bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Alaska Anchorage in 2010. Her artwork was in several local galleries from 2009 to 2012. In 2014, she curated an exhibition titled “Erotische Kunst” at the Project Gallery in Tucson, AZ. She received a Masters of Fine Arts degree in 2015 from the Southwest University of Visual Arts in Tucson, Arizona. Jennifer exhibited nationally multiple times from 2012 to 2016.

Jennifer McKinley is a writer, performer and theatre artist from Toronto. She is a graduate of University of Toronto (Hon. B.A., History and English), Humber College (Comedy: Writing and Performance) and the Second City Conservatory. Jennifer studied clown with Sue Morrison (Clown Through Mask, Joey and Auguste).

Jennifer performs at clown, comedy, and storytelling events across the city. She is one of the Artistic Producers of Alumnae Theatre’s New Ideas Festival and she is a lead coordinator with the Feminist Art Conference.

Jennifer is currently developing her solo theatre piece, Operation SUNshine, a dark comedy and coming-of-age story about the time she rescued 179 women from the basement of her childhood home.

Kayla Polan is a Canadian-Czech artist based in Toronto, Ontario. Kayla recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing & Painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, and spent her third year of study abroad in Italy as part of OCADU’s Florence Off-Campus Studies program. Using humour, Kayla’s work aims to give visibility to sexual minorities. As a queer-identified sex-positive feminist, she hopes to remind the viewer that it is incorrect to assume a universal meaning of sexuality for all.

Born and raised in Cobourg, Ontario, Lana Missen is a Toronto based visual artist working with photography to explore themes of the body, identity, and female representation. Through portraiture, she aims to create visibility and a space to share her own and others' stories to a wider audience. A strong believer in collaboration and community, Missen's practice is based on engaging with individuals and her viewers. Her body of work "That F Word" was shown at OCAD University's 100th Graduate Exhibition, and was part of the 'Contact' photo festival in Toronto in May 2015. Her first solo show was held at OISE through partnership with WIA projects in June 2015.

Outside of her fine art practice, Lana enjoys documenting performances of live theatre, dancers, and musicians. Lana Missen graduated in 2015 from OCAD University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with distinction in Photography and a minor in English.

mia susan amir is a community-embedded writer, interdisciplinary performer, and educator. Born in Israel/Occupied Palestine, mia is an anti-Zionist Jew of Sephardic and Ashkenazi descent. She has lived most of her life in Vancouver, BC, unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh territories.

In her creative practice, mia integrates the body, the place, the archive, the imagination, politics, the land, and the ancestors as sites of narrative production, and conduits for narrative expression. She explores the way sociopolitical events inform and are manifest intergenerationally in the spaces of the home and the body; the narrative haunting that emerges when our stories go untold, what she calls Dybbuk Consciousness. Her work, hybrid in form, engages juxtaposition as a critical strategy to bring breath to the unnamed, or unnamable. Prose, poetry, theory, ritual and orality coexist on the page and in performance.

mia received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, Oakland, California, traditional Ohlone Territories. She is the Creative Director of The Story We Be, a co-convener of The Dreaming Wakefulness Collective, and a co-coordinator of the 2016 Allied Media Conference Creative Coping and Grieving Arts Practice Space. mia has been published on, SpiderWebShow, Lemon Hound and Digging Through the Fat.

Nelligan Letourneau is an emerging artist who will graduate with a BFA from Mount Allison University in 2017. Her practice focuses on the creation of persona and examining self-identity. She is invested in documenting the impact that place has on her personal growth and mental health. She uses performance, installation, drawing, painting, sculpture and video to explore these subjects and as a means of embracing/advocating feminism. Letourneau’s varying self-portraits are snapshot representations of her everyday life, in which the mundane becomes immortalized and fictitious. The multiple characters she embodies manifest in witty charades, and overt activism.

Nikkie To was born in Hong Kong in 1992 and has since immigrated to Canada. To’s works unveil alternative narratives of immigrant lives and notions of identity. Identity, cultural globalization and social constructs that shape the conversations and understanding around mental health, minority groups and gender binaries are central to her work. She explores private human experiences within a larger societal context, specifically focusing on the perspective of an individual’s psyche and its metamorphoses.

To received her Honours Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from McMaster University in 2014, participated in Red Gate Residency, Beijing in 2015, has run a successful Indiegogo Artist-in-Residence Crowdfunding Campaign, and has received the Capacity Building Initiative: Travel Grant from Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in Hamilton, Toronto, and Beijing, as well as having been published in Incite Magazine, ON; Fierce Magazine (Digital Publication), ON; and The Artist Catalog, NY.

Niloo graduated from OCAD University in 2015 with a bachelor of fine arts. Her artistic practice focuses on human relations and examines how they are defined through identity, emotions, and varieties of human impressions. Since graduation, Niloo has participated in several group shows and art fairs in Toronto. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Olive-or-Oliver is an award-winning Toronto-based artist whose practice includes music, theatre, performance art, and video. They use the singular gender pronoun “they”, instead of “he” or “she”, as a gender-neutral alternative.

With both humour and heart, Olive’s work reflects themes of trauma and recovery, spiritual emergence, emotion, and queer identities. Over the last 6 years, they’ve engaged audiences across Toronto and internationally at venues such as the Royal Ontario Museum, World Pride, and the Seoul International New Media Festival. A trained vocalist, they compose and perform original songs accompanied by keyboard, percussion and loop pedal, ranging from a playful vaudevillian style to more serious, pensive works. They are a graduate of the Young Creators Unit at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and the SummerWorks Leadership Intensive Program.

Pallavi Govindnathan is a visual artist, a writer, and an educator. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. Pallavi has her Masters and Post-baccalaureate degrees from San Francisco Art Institute with concentrations in painting and new genres – primarily live art and video art, and an Undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from The Savannah College of Art and Design in painting, sculpture and art history.

Pallavi’s research questions how and why the representation of heroic female figures depicted within Western Renaissance and Baroque art failed to represent and discuss the connection to their victimization? She anticipates converting her current research into visual representations that will hopefully challenge historical perceptions of the depictions and affiliations to heroism and victimization. She currently resides in Denton, Texas with her cat Nai.

Sarah Carlson (b. 1987) completed her Honours BFA in Film Production and Visual Art at York University. Her art combines abstraction with representation by way of an explorative approach. From found and repurposed objects to time-based media, weathered walls and studio prepared canvas and wood, Sarah’s work embraces a play between the organic and man-made. Her paintings both reveal and mask, as she employs a variety of painterly techniques to describe both flat and three-dimensional planes. Thematically, Sarah explores the formation of identity in relation to the environment. Her current practice presents personal mythologies and accounts of human-wilderness encounters with themes of growth, decay, symbiosis and regeneration.

Since Su Yang was ten years old, she had been trained by her father on drawing and painting according to the same way of traditional European academy of art. Later she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Design from Tsinghua University in China, where she studied painting, drawing, sculpture, glass art, graphic design, and lacquer art. While pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at The State University of New York at Buffalo, she became interested in the philosophy of feminism. After getting her MFA degree in the USA, Su Yang relocated to Australia for continuing her research of representing women in contemporary Chinese art with feminist methodology at The University of Melbourne.

I am a retired lawyer and teacher living on Denman Island, British Columbia. Before retiring, I developed and taught college courses on environmental law and restorative justice – a paradigm that values interconnectedness, intuition and the feeling-level values rooted in the feminine energy spectrum.

I am fortunate to now live in a community that supports creative and spiritual women and my desire is to help facilitate and bring their work and exploration of the feminine energy spectrum to broader audiences. My enterprise is called Quaternity Platform, which I self-fund. The word quaternity is a Jungian term and involves integrating the fourth dimension, which is often seen as the shadow or the feminine aspect. I help produce shows in the community that focus primarily on the Western Mystery traditions that have the feminine alive in them and that are sometimes discarded or repressed as dark or occult. These traditions are part of our rich Western heritage.

Since childhood, Tanesha Childs has created figurative stories of worlds inspired by her surroundings. While studying at Atlanta Metropolitan State College she began building items and artifacts in these dreamworlds. Mediums Childs has explored in her installation works have gone from ceramic, paper, shoes and cotton candy. Her work is all mystically placed in a Childish Reality, a play with her last name, which is based on our individual change in reality based on our perception. She wants viewers to see where misunderstandings can impact situations and ideas. By placing the audience in a child’s point of view, she is giving them fresh eyes to see dilemmas, or people.

At The University of Alabama concentrating on her photographic work, Tanesha currently explores the black experience incorporating Afrofuturism, Trap Culture, and Black Consciousness. Creatively displaying black people in the art world, she’s also awakening political statements with her recent works that capture different opinions from those of different backgrounds. The ominous narratives of her photography keep viewers in their present reality while simultaneously detaching them from what they may have thought they were viewing. While the images are visually interesting, she wants her audience to pull further in the contemplation of “what they thought” v.s. “what they see”.

Artist~   person who creates art: one who professes and practices an imaginative art

Activist~   doctrine or practice that emphasizes direct vigorous action especially in support or opposition to one side of a controversial issue

Feminist~   the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests

Aboriginal~   of or relating to the people and things that have been in a region from the earliest time