Matheuszik identifies as an intersectional feminist, dealing with questions of identity in terms of gender and race. Her work often deals with binaries and attempts to transgress and expand the boundaries of binary ideas as it relates to femininity and racial identities. Being of mixed Jamaican and white heritage Matheuszik’s work often directly and indirectly addresses issues of self-representation and the dissonance between personal and perceived identity.

Anahita Jamali Rad was born in Iran and now lives on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka peoples. Informed by anti-imperialist marxist-feminist theory, her work is primarily textual and explores materiality, history, affect, ideology, violence, class, collectivity, desire, place, and displacement. She has published many chapbooks including Patterns, History, Heart/Felt/Poems, and say what you want about my glasses, but i never get drunk and drank confused when i’m out with the working classes. She has also published one full-length book of poetry, for love and autonomy (Talonbooks 2016).

Together with Danielle LaFrance, she organized the materialist-feminist reading and discussion series for self-identified women called About a Bicycle, which took place on unceded Coast Salish territories. They co-edited the art and poetry journal of the same name, of which there were 5 issues. Her work has most recently appeared in Text Means Tissue, Literatura 2, and Tripwire. She has performed in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco,Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Tijuana, and London, England. Her most recent project, Fear of Intimacy, is a text(tile)-based small press, which explores the aesthetics of marginality, labour, and negative affect.

As an Alaskan native, partially raised in Chicago, Illinois., I draw from a wide resource of experience, insight and connection in doing what I believe that I was born to do...creating to express myself and tangibly convey my perceptions. I make art in many variations because it brings me awesome joy, solace and satisfaction.

My visual creative research explores subjects of the Divine Feminine in lushly rich 2-dimensional, and complex organic, ethereal 3-dimensional forms from the perspective of contemporary women of color and their ancestral, spiritual connectivity within the context of African and Afro-Latin Diasporic cultures. This work is highly influenced by social issues, colorism, identity nuances, stereo-typical assumptions, indigenous wisdom's- folklore, nature, memory… ritual, myth and magic, depicting allegorical females in a state of self-discovery, insight, mystery, empowerment and affirmation. I facilitate this utilizing traditional and unconventional media and materials "steel to stone - paint to paper." My artworks have been exhibited internationally and are held in private and corporate collections.

I am a published journalist, arts editor, author and poet, and I identify as being an independent AFROLatino bohemian Woman spirit.

My name is Deborah Eddy, I am 64 years old and live in Brisbane, Australia. I am a mature age Fine Arts post graduate candidate who only recently returned to study after a long career in administration and financial services. Like many women, I have had many different lives.

My art practice speaks of the inequalities suffered by aging women, in the home, in the work place and on the street. I do so with humour, believing that will open more lines of discourse than anger. I utilise sculpture, costume making and video performances to talk about these issues. My doctoral work is focusing on the invisibility of aging women and how this aids and abets ageism. I identify politically as an aging feminist. I occupy an intersectional space where the issues affecting young women feminists collide with those affecting aging women. Issues such as sexism, inequality in employment and wages and body image do not go away as women age. These issues become deeply troubling for many older women. Discrimination and stereotyping takes on a nasty edge, jobs dry up, wages are less, and body image becomes a battle to hold back aging at all costs. Ageism is another ‘ism’ to add to the grab bag of ‘isms’ that adversely affect women and this needs to be recognised.

Emily Norry is a Toronto based intersectional feminist artist who takes inspiration from her experiences as a queer woman to create multi-media art that explores queerness, femininity, identity and history. Through the use of textiles, embroidery and watercolour printmaking she has made it her goal to create a representation of queer ancestry that is so often forgotten from history and culture. Emily is a graduate from OCAD U with a BFA in Drawing & Painting and a minor in Art & Social Change. She is also the winner of the Donna Mclean Award for Portraiture and Life study. She recently took part in the Xpace Cultural Centre Graduate Residency where she had a solo show entitled The Love of Loring and Wyle. This exhibition used installation combined with textile prints and pressed flowers to create the experience of faded memories of Toronto’s own queer sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Emily is also the creator of Whose Art Counts, an event funded by the OCAD U Diversity & Equity Office’s Big Idea Fund Grant, where speakers and participants in the arts community came together to talk about inclusivity in art and art history. In addition Emily has done a series of talks and lectures, including the Conversationalists III at Scrap Metal Gallery, focusing on queering art history and rethinking the ways we teach art history. Emily is a member of Akin Collective and continues to explore histories of lost queer women and non-binary people.

Photography was Emma Reasoner’s first love, but her relationship to images is complicated by a generational position: growing up awash in immaterial images that are not her own, like a thick choking amniotic fluid. As a digital native, her body is situated in an immediate and visceral relation to the technologies that have marked, changed, imprinted and brutally reconstructed it. Our abstracted notions of digital space are imaginary, but their invention has real and measured effects in the arrangement of bodies and worlds. Living within a networked matrix of abstracted time (the clock) and space (the screen), she feels alienated from her own body’s subjectivity.

In sincere, earnest search for the humor and pathos of existence, Reasoner offers objects, actions, and images that return us to our bodies, as phenomenological sites to locate central perspective in the “here” of bodily dwelling. Reasoner collects and chisels moments, images, and conversations to build lo-fi, often diaristic, sensory-scapes of atmospheric voice, sound, smell, and tactile material installed in spaces that would typically weight and privilege sight.

When Reasoner does employ image, it serves a need to mirror one’s self, to describe women’s worlds, queer worlds otherwise rarely described. She uses durational and relatively static moving image, which demand patience and redirect attention back to corporeal senses alternative to sight. By under-utilizing visual modes of showing, subjects and identities resist fixed representation under the camera’s oppressive and flattening eye.

Hannah Whisenant is a filmmaker and photographer from the Texas hill country who has a passion for storytelling through the use of images. She graduated with a BS in Radio Television and Film from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2016. Her short narrative film, Makeup (2015), which explores the complexities of female maturation within a broken household, played at festivals such as SXSW 2017, Palm Springs Adjacent Festival,The Chain NYC Festival, SouthSide Film Festival and was shortlisted for the 2016 Bath Film Festival IMDb New Filmmaker Award. After graduation she traveled by herself in South America for four months, improving upon her Spanish and taking agency over her ambition and independence. She identifies as a cis-gendered woman and intersectional feminist. It is her ambition to explore the nuances of socio-political issues and to not prescribe to the ideals of one set political party. Having grown up in white liberal family, in a small conservative town, she has found herself dissecting her own upbringing and strives to challenge her views and inherent privileges on a daily basis. Currently based out of Brooklyn, Hannah aims to continue telling creative and collaborative stories with a focus on women issues and social equality. She wrote and directed another short film called Lines (2017) that is currently in post production. The film reveals the blurred lines of consent and sexuality that comes with being a young woman exploring her sexual encounters.

Katie Ott is a furniture maker, artist, and teacher based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ott identifies as a queer intersectional feminist who defies the masculine conventions of the woodworking ‘boys club,’ and the world at large. Her work uses furniture as a vehicle to explore subconscious gender biases still alive and well within the American patriarchal system. Ott’s practice is driven by her own experience as a queer woman navigating the patriarchy, as well as issues faced by the greater LGBTQ+ community. The sculptural forms Ott builds challenge the negative connotations of queerness by using our expectation of the function of furniture as a platform to question the roles that gendering continues to play in our society. She brings struggle to our mundane interaction with furniture in order to initiate discussions about the serious repercussions caused by systemic gender bias and the degradation of those who identify as women in our patriarchal society. Ott reclaims “the queer” in her work by challenging gendered assumptions and discovering ways to transform furniture into true conversation pieces that raise awareness of gender bias and women’s and LGBTQ+ rights issues.

Ott received a BFA and BS. Ed in art education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and spent several years teaching elementary school in Las Vegas, Nevada. Currently an MFA candidate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Ott splits time between the rural town of Indiana and the urban center of Pittsburgh. Her work has been shown nationally and frequently appears at regional venues, including a two-person exhibition curated by Hannah Altman at Point Park University in downtown Pittsburgh. Additionally, she was selected by juror Dorothea Rockburne as one of 15 national MFA students to be exhibited at First Street Gallery in New York City.

I am a queer and disabled multimedia artist, maker, activist and educator based in Toronto. As a gender-nonbinary intersectional feminist, and a settler of Jewish/Eastern European descent, I am particularly interested in the idea of reconciling complex identities through exploration of the concept of borders and liminal spaces. My work spans a range of media, including, but not limited to: photography, street art, drawing, painting, and most recently fibre art and printmaking. It touches upon a variety of themes, such as outsider narratives, gender and sexuality, trauma, chronic illness and dis/ability. In addition to sustaining my personal art practice, I volunteer with multiple local arts-based initiatives, including teaching art to youth in the Child And Adolescent Mental Health unit at a hospital, and serving as Artistic Director for Frolic’s Haunt - a volunteer-run wheelchair- and disability-accessible Halloween Haunted house, which is free for visitors to attend. I am passionate about social justice and equity, maker culture, and sustainability. I often use recycled materials in my art and teaching. I am a graduate of the Bachelor of Fine Arts program at York University (Summa Cum Laude), and a recipient of the 2017 Robert Tiffin Leadership Award, for my contributions to the to the growth, development and vitality of the York University community.

Kristi Poole-Adler’s work explores the phenomenon of ambiguous loss or living loss, a term developed by Pauline Boss to describe the experience of grieving for those who are still alive. Ambiguous loss relates to the experience of losing someone psychologically while their physical presence still remains. Through her work, Kristi explores ambiguous loss as a constant battle between absence and presence. Currently, she is experimenting with image transfers onto different materials. The imagery she uses consists of ironed on fabric transfers onto multiple layers of found textiles that are typical of a home/domestic environment, such as bed sheets, tablecloths, napkins, curtains, and handkerchiefs. The imagery used on these materials are snapshots from family photographs, parts of which have been erased both digitally and physically in an attempt to communicate a chaotic, fragmented and non-linear narrative of the grieving process. Kristi uses embroidery to enhance or veil certain parts of images, as well as text to incorporate a personal narrative of loss. Through her use of textiles, she is reclaiming women's craft, blurring the distinction between craft and fine arts. Her work explores how to cope with ambiguous loss through the rumination of memory, by ritualistically collecting, editing, obscuring, and distorting images. Through her process, she communicates a non- linear perspective on grief as part of a living death experience.

Writer and new media producer, Lauren Brown, an American woman of Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean descent, uses her journalism background and media production prowess to smudge the line between events and entertainment, creating custom, yet, immersive experiences driven by social technologies. Lauren takes great pleasure in designing and producing gatherings, online and off, with the ability to bring folks together around policy, action and change.

Constantly foraging a career that fuses her love of culture, art and media with her passion for activism, Lauren led the Digital Moving Image Salon at Spelman College under the direction of Dr. Ayoka Chenzira, producing two Reel Women Film Festivals, Digital Doyennes: Wisdom from the Women who Lead in Social Media and Digital Innovation and the live social media portions of the National Visionary Leaders Project and the annual ARCUS Foundation Symposium. Continuing her work with Dr. Chenzira, Lauren provided outreach coordination and was Lead Installer for Ayomentary’s new media production, “Ordinary on Any Given Day”, which debuted in Istanbul during the 2011 ISEA Conference.

Lauren is an alumni of New Organizing Institute's New Media Bootcamp, has been named a New Media Institute Fellow by the National Black Programming Consortium, and New Leaders Council, going on to serve the latter as National Communications Director from 2011-2013. Lauren’s current makings and musings explore art as activism, the politics of technology, media and agriculture, and their continuous impact on rural and low income women.

Lauren McCartney is a multidisciplinary artist, who identifies as an intersectional feminist. In her artwork she primarily uses performative painting to parody histories of objectification and conventions of appropriate feminine behaviour. She creates situations where her body is humorously exaggerated to the degree that she becomes a spectacle, an object of laughter, whilst simultaneously disrupting
patriarchal ideas and myths about femininity and misbehavior. McCartney’s practice offers the concept that through failing with her materials and her body, she succeeds in creating her work. Ironically, this can be perceived as a feminine means of thinking - what may be seen as physical weakness, where the failure of painting and performance is inevitable, is in fact, where the success of her work lies.

McCartney lives in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours Class I) from the University of Wollongong and has recently submitted her PhD through Curtin University. Her practice-based doctorate explores how women have engaged with humorous and playful approaches to performative anti-painting. It reveals artworks that are created by and for women,
where both painterly materials and the female body misbehave. In the process it establishes forms of feminist performative painting that not only provoke patriarchal hierarchies in painting, but also reveal a corporeal feminism that defies them.

McCartney’s work has been collected by the Art Gallery of Western Australia and she has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia. She has also presented her research and practice at conferences in Australia and internationally. McCartney also teaches painting, sculpture and art theory through Open Universities Australia, Curtin University, where her teaching philosophy is to engage her students in understandings of art that do not primarily draw from the dominant, white, masculine canon. She bases her teaching on exposing her students to alternative histories and practices in art, established by women and minorities and actively encourages them to explore their own identities and challenge established norms in their research and artmaking.

Born and raised in a rural part of southern Germany, I have lived and worked in Berlin since 2004. I identify myself as an intersectional feminist with pronoun she. I studied Photography (at Neue Schule für Fotografie Berlin – with Eva Bertram and Marc Volk and at Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie Berlin – with Sybille Fendt) and I have an academic background in Gender-Studies (at Humboldt Universität, Berlin). In my artistic work, I bring together feminist and queer theory with visual image formulation. I move in the field of documentarism, mainly with photography and short video productions. In a constant process, I consider and explore a critical approach to documentary image production, which takes into account the constructedness of images and different practices of looking. I see my work as both artistical and documental as I work with subjective and situative images and adopt a process oriented approach. To do so I use different visual languages. For me the contact and social interaction with my protagonists has a high significance for my way of working. To improve my skills in the field of documentary video I took part in a workshop by the 2470 media agency in Berlin, which I did in 2015. Content wise I‘m interested in power structures in society and the constructedness of biography and identity as well as questions of social privileges and issues of standardization. Currently I ‘m doing a photographical series about migrational care work in Germany. In this project, I am working with Danuta Banasiak, a live-in care worker from Poland who attends a 90 years old demented woman. In this work, I want to take a closer look at the social localization of care work and its political dimensions. The series will be exhibited in Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin in March 2018 (see examples of this work in the attachment). In addition to my artistic work I‘m take on commissions in the field of antidiscrimination and empowerment. I have done video workshops with minor unaccompanied refugees in Germany for the Goldbekhaus Hamburg as well as numerous workshops in the field of media and political education. Since 2016 I have been responsible for public relations for the antidiscrimination information center ADAS (Anlaufstelle für Diskriminierungsschutz an Schulen) in Berlin. Moreover, I work as a freelance photographer and video maker, mainly for social and political organizations.

I’m Mia, 27 and I’m from Nottingham England, I’m a mixed race lesbian identifying female, I’m working class and this is huge part of my identity I don’t feel like I see enough artists from the same background as me I also feel there is a lack of female artists of colour being represented within the LGBTQIAPK communities. I’m just at the beginnings of my journey as a solo artist, but I’m very interested in the lines between experimental theatre and live art. I aim to create work that is engaging, representative and strays from the norm as well as being bold and experimenting with form.

Theatre holds a lot of stigma, most people I know who don’t really associate with the arts always assume theatre is one or more actors on stage exchanging dialogue for 2 hours and is only watched by rich middle class white people unfortunately this perception has a lot accuracy, too often I’m saddened by the lack of diversity amongst theatre goers and as an artist of colour and someone who identifies on the LGBTQIAPK spectrum I want to make a change in the way “theatre” is viewed and represented, I’m finding a new way to vent my thoughts and feelings in an artistic way. I want my work to be performed in different spaces and locations, I have experienced performing in more intimate venues that aren’t traditional in their setting and I have found audiences to be more engaged, curious and open to questions about the work.

This year I have been working with another artist on a piece of work “Chessboard Society” which explores being mixed race and the complexities that come from trying to live through two cultures. The work has been commissioned by Serendipity in Leicester and supported by the Curve and Derby theatre it was showcased this month as part of BHM it was also shared at Battersea arts centre earlier this year. I have started working on my first solo piece Pink Lemonade which will explore female masculinity within lesbian culture and will look at several concepts within the piece social stigmas being one of them, I will be developing the work in December with support from Talawa Theatre in London.

Michaela Bridgemohan is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Calgary Alberta. She has completed her BFA in Drawing with Distinction from the Alberta College of Art + Design. Spoken through secrecy and perseverance, her practice incorporates her “coming of age” story in Canada by investigating cultural identity through race, femininity and sexuality. She recently gave an artist lecture on her graduation paper The Mistress of Multiple Colour Theories in the Divisions of Discourse Symposium. Her artwork has also been showcased at the Marion Nicoll Gallery Duppy at Art Commons, Hear/d Residency Waves Through Fog, The Closet Gallery Unsentimental Postures and internationally in Brisbane Australia at The Jugglers ArtSpace Paint it Red and Queensland Conservatorium The Lounge Series.

Identifying as an Intersectional Feminist, Michaela finds province with transculturalism, gender equality and sexuality awareness. By interacting with the fluidity of these subjects, the unexplored territory of the “other” creates a compelling and inclusive space for others.

I am a cisgender, queer, white, feminist, artist, mother, author, professor, psychoanalyst, and activist. I am the Fuller-Maathai Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies and a Fellow at the Ammerman Center for the Arts and Technology at Connecticut College and a practicing psychoanalyst in Connecticut. I am interested in the ways in which hegemonic ideas surrounding gender, race, class, nation, and sexuality get deployed through affect as forms of social control and the complex ways in which those deemed “marginal” or “deviant” negotiate this in deeply complicated ways in their everyday lives. Over the last two years, I have undertaken two art projects—the first was a series of oil paintings queering the traditional mother/child portrait to include new complex family formations; the second entitled, “Home Place,” involves a series of portraits examining migration, race, gender, and the complexities of home. This work has been featured in three juried group shows—Picture Social Justice and Human Rights at Gallery 1851 in Boston, MA; Mark It at the Otto’s Abode Gallery in Wannakena, NY; and the St. Lawrence County Arts Council Members Show at the Roland Gibson Gallery at the State University of Potsdam in Potsdam, NY. I am also the author of two books, Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships between Exotic Dancers and their Regular Customers (Palgrave 2006) and Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of Girls and Sexualization (Polity 2013) and the co-author with Gail Hawkes of Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (Palgrave 2010) as well as numerous peer reviewed articles.

Shelby Lisk is a photographer, writer and artist from Kenhteke (Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, in Ontario). She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a minor in Gender Studies from the University of Ottawa (2015). She has worked as an artist and commercial photographer for 5 years, while living and travelling across North America. She now lives near her home community and is completing a diploma in Photojournalism at Loyalist College.

Shelby’s writing and photography have been printed in Red Rising Magazine, Hart House Review and "Voices of Native American Women", published by Annick Press. Shelby has exhibited work in Ottawa, Toronto and Chicago. She is the recipient of the Emerging Indigenous Reporter Scholarship from JHR (Journalism for Human Rights, 2017), the Helen Nininger Scholarship in Fine Arts (University of Ottawa, 2015) and the Daïmôn Prize for Photography (University of Ottawa, 2014)

I politically self-identify myself as an active feminist with a focus on aging women. One of my focus areas is social issues of seniors and old women. The abuse and discrimination targeting seniors is horrifying & unjust and very close to my heart. I care for my elderly parents and am active in two guilds (Weaving & Pottery) in my community. Seniors form the majority of our guilds’ members (more than 80%). Having close relationships with our aging population I see and feel ageism and discrimination frequently. Through my art and design practice I explore and draw attention to abuse and discrimination targeting seniors especially women.

My other focus area is the notion of gender fluidity, which I studied with the help of my OCAD U professor “Robert Teixeira”. Since then I actively engage my community in discussions about gender and gender fluidity to educate my network. Coming from a culture with taboos such as gender fluidity or just being different from the mainstream “straight” image, I understand the fear and hesitation of my community in opening up and learning. I engage my audience and challenge them to find answers within themselves and bring awareness to my social groups. I believe my purpose is to make my community and people around me educated on social issues close to my heart and keen to make a difference in their community themselves.

Susan Aydan Abbott is a single mother and mature visual artist native to Port Arthur, Ontario, currently living and working in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Holding lived experience with mental illness, homelessness, addiction and abuse, she is a strong vocal advocate for social justice. Also a trained Canadian Mental Health Association and United Way speaker as well as a member of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority Mental Health Advisory Board, Abbott shares her life story and experiences to affect positive attitudinal change. The activist side of her is evident from her advocacy for the MMIW movement, for her involvement with victims and survivors of crime through Candace House and from her volunteer work for the homeless through 1JustCity.

Likewise, her art practice most often explores themes pertaining to rape culture and violence against women. Abbott works primarily in painting, but has recently expanded her repertoire to include printmaking, sculpture and installation where video is incorporated. In the last 9 years, she has studied at the University of Manitoba School of Fine Art, presented solo exhibitions and group exhibitions throughout Winnipeg and a recent group exhibition in Vancouver, participated in the Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba / Manitoba Printmakers Association monitorship program and been artist resident at Centre [3] Print Studio in Hamilton, Ontario. She is currently amidst the research and creation process of a new body of work titled Booby Hatch (Wo)manifesto: A Feminine Perspective of Century Manor (Hamilton Asylum for the Insane). This project is supported by her participation as a selected mentee in the 2017/2018 Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art Foundation Mentorship Program and by awarded project grants from Winnipeg Arts Council, Manitoba Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.