NARRATIVE HEALING

The selected exhibition
& performing artists
of the 2020 Feminist
Art Festival

The 2020 Feminist Art Festival’s ‘title’ and curatorial focus is Narrative Healing, as inspired by the work submitted by this year’s exhibition artists. In our review of the 2020 submissions, we found that there were three common themes running through much of the work: relationships (between self / state, self / others, self / environment, self / self), memory (cultural, personal, diaspora) and the body (representation, identity, the gaze). These categories can be interpreted as sites of trauma, pain and fractures being explored and potentially healed via feminist artistic practice.

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Allison Morris is a fine art photographer based in Montreal, Quebec. Her artistic practice explores themes of female representation, the construction of femininity, beauty, youth, identity, and performance through a feminist lens. She uses self-portraiture as a tool with which she can control her images and challenge the male gaze by consciously performing for the camera and herself. Allison has exhibited internationally in Canada, Italy, and Serbia and has had two solo exhibitions in Toronto, Ontario. She recently completed her first artist residency in 2019 in Sardinia, Italy. Her work has also been featured in multiple online and print publications including The Huffington Post and Photo Vogue Italia’s Top 100 Images of 2016.

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Since completing her Bachelor of Fine Art degree at the Alberta University of the Arts, Alyssa Ellis has embarked on a constant ongoing, revolving and dissolving love affair with botanical life forms. Alyssa and her plant collaborators work together, play together and by all means narrate together in order to further develop their complicated relationship.

While multidisciplinary in nature, the experimental research of their stories fluctuates between textiles, drawing, performance and installation. She currently participates yearly as an exhibition leader of the Ayatana Germinate residency in Ottawa, Ontario.

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Almond (she/her) is a queer, fat, Mad, (dis)abled, spoonie, francophone, sex worker, porn maker and interdisciplinary artist. She’s a student of fine arts, sociology and electronics; committed to pleasure activism, neuro-inclusivity, slut-celebration and the expansion of video art. Based out of Toronto and Berlin, she’s a team member at the Images Festival, the Toronto Queer Film Festival, the Berlin Porn Film Festival and Sex School Berlin.

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My name is Amy Hanes, I am 28 years old and I am currently a Master's student in the Socio-cultural Studies of Sport, Health and the Body program at Queen's University. Ever since I can remember, I have lived with epilepsy. It has been something that has shaped every aspect of my life, including other parts of my identity, such as my relationship to my gender, my relationship to sexuality, my relationship to education and my relationship to the expectations of what someone my own age is "supposed to do" or "should be able to do" independently in accordance with mainstream ideas of productivity and progress.

The influence that epilepsy has had on my life has led me to explore epilepsy and invisible disability within an academic context, which includes employing artistic media to better understand this relationship. I believe that, although epilepsy may pose its challenges, it has brought a tremendous amount of awareness, curiosity, connection and a passion for learning into my life. I see these attributes as having come not despite living with epilepsy but because of a life lived with epilepsy, and that to me is an extremely powerful distinction that I hope to emphasize within my work.

The intention of my art work is to share my story and start or continue a dialogue focused on challenging myths and misconceptions that exist about disability; I believe that my openness and honesty (within both my artwork and writing that accompanies my artwork) are good steps in continuing to push back against the view that being disabled holds nothing but despair, negativity and hopelessness, and instead show a more nuanced understanding of life lived with disability.

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Anahita Jamali Rad is a text-forward artist born in Iran and currently based in Tio’tia:ke on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka. Informed by anti-imperialist materialist theory, her work is primarily textual and explores materiality, history, affect, ideology, violence, class, collectivity, desire, place and displacement. She has published many chapbooks, and one full-length book of poetry, for love and autonomy (Talonbooks 2016). With Danielle LaFrance, she co-edited the journal About a Bicycle, of which there were 5 issues. In 2018, she co-founded House House Press with David Bradford.

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Andra Ragusila is an emerging artist from Toronto who is passionate about drawing, painting and ceramics. I have studied with artists Ed Pien, Brian Smith, and Elly Smallwood. I have shown my work through the 2016 Cabbagetown Art Fair and the 2018 Queen West Art Crawl. In 2016, I was awarded the Emerging Toronto Artist Character Award. 

I identify as a queer tomboy, a settler and an immigrant, having arrived from Romania 16 years ago.

I use art as a way to connect with other people and create a sense of community through shared experiences. I have volunteered as an arts facilitator at CAMH, with at-risk youth through Smile Kids Japan and most recently at Sketch Community Arts where I helped facilitate a youth arts collective. 

My work focuses on narratives of identity. Who are we at our core? How do we connect with ourselves and with those around us?  There are many sides to each of us, some of which we keep hidden away, but all of which are integral to the story of our lives. By overlapping multiple images of the same person, I create abstracted composite figures to form more complete images of the subject, while at the same time rendering them unrecognizable.

As an artist and community-based social worker, Andrea Westbrook brings a creative lens to her clinical practice, and a social justice lens to her artistic practice. While she doesn’t identify as an Art Therapist, the artist does identify as a socially engaged artist who wants to promote social and political change through community collaboration and the creation of participatory art. As an artist, she hopes to inspire social workers, mental health clinicians, and community service providers to include community-informed participatory art in their own practice. The artist feels privileged to be invited into the communities she gets to work in and to have personal stories of strength and resiliency shared with her. She doesn’t take this privilege for granted. (She/Her)

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Annapurna Malla is a community organizer, educator, musician, dance-theatre artist and performer of mixed Kashmiri and English ancestry. She has performed during Pride Toronto, at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Artscape Gibraltar Point in Toronto, and internationally in Mexico, the USA, and Switzerland. Anna is a founding member of The Switch Project, a collective of interdisciplinary Queer, Trans & Two Spirit performers co-creating new methodologies and socially engaged performance materials for the public sphere. She was a Buddies in Bad Times Theatre artist in residence as part of The Switch Project (2018), and completed residencies as a solo artist with The Feminist Art Collective (2019) and at the International Laboratory with renowned Argentinian theatre artist Cristina Castrillo at the Teatro delle Radici in Lugano, Switzerland (2019). Annapurna’s solo and group performance has been recognized and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. 

Anna makes mixed media work for traditional performance venues and for interventions in public spaces, incorporating dance-theatre, live and pre-recorded soundscape, textile and found object installation, and video projection. She draws embodiment practises from Butoh, Contemporary, Hip Hop, Flamenco, everyday gesture, Kathak, and bodily impulse. In her solo movement practice, Anna works with bodily sensation/emotion and movement impulse, while also drawing from natural patterns of movement (in water, fire, plants, insects, animals) and of sound. She is also a classically trained pianist and a digital soundscaper. Her live and pre-recorded soundscapes incorporate keys, vocals, looping, narrative, and found sounds. Anna is currently working on a new mixed-media durational performance piece in collaboration with Toronto-based choreographer and dancer Maxine Heppner.

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Annina Rüst produces electronic objects and software art. She creates technologies that are artistically and socially motivated. Her projects happen at the intersection of activism, algorithm, data, electricity, humor, politics, and pop culture. Her work has been reviewed in such publications as Wired and the New York Times Magazine. The Huffington Post called her recent robotics work a "Badass Feminist Robot".

Rüst's projects have been shown internationally in galleries, museums, and festivals such as Zero1 Biennial and ISEA, as well as at the Edith Russ Haus for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany. In 2014, she received an Art+Technology Lab grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She has a diploma from the University of the Arts in Zürich, an M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego and an M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

Annina currently works at Florida Atlantic University where she is an Associate Professor of Art at the Harriet Wilkes Honors College.

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Awarded as the “Artist For Peace 2018” by the Quebec-based artist collective “Les artistes pour la paix,” Aquil Virani orients his art practice towards social justice, responsible representation and community impact. He often uses simple public participation to inspire his socially-conscious artwork, challenging the traditional divide between artist and viewer. Virani’s work is rooted somewhere between fine art and activism. His portraits are as much political statements as they are intimate gifts to real people.

His path has been anything but ordinary. After receiving early acceptance into the BFA program at the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, he chose to engage in academic studies at McGill University with the prestigious J.W. McConnell Major Scholarship ($20K). While pursuing his artistic passion concurrently, he worked for over three years in marketing and graphic design, eventually transitioning into his role as a full-time artist. To date, his creative projects have been featured on television, radio, print and online both nationally and internationally by the CBC, The Globe & Mail, Le Devoir, La Presse, Urbania, NPR, Global News, CTV, Breakfast Television, the Montreal Gazette, UPPERCASE Magazine, Applied Arts Magazine and many other media platforms.

His latest project, CelebrateHer, a large-scale portrait series and feminist sound play, created in collaboration with Imago Theatre, centred the stories of 12 inspiring, publicly-nominated women, exploring themes of gender, representation, activism and allyship. His portrait of Zébida Bendjeddou won a “Certificate of Achievement” (Top 10) from this year’s Portrait Society of Canada competition.

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Ashley A. Jones is a visual artist and educator from Duquesne, Pennsylvania whose work challenges the notion of identity and beauty standards among African-American women and girls. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally across the USA, Canada and Indonesia. Jones' work is also in the collections of the National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Centre in Wilberforce, Ohio. She has received her MFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Central State University in Ohio. Jones teaches art in the community and has previously taught as a drawing professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her artwork and research on colorism and discrimination among women within the African-American community has resulted in numerous requests for presentations and lectures. Her work has been favourably reviewed and recognized in several publications. Jones currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Becky Alley is an artist, curator, creative collaborator and educator. Her artwork is process and materials focused, often manifesting itself in private or intimate performance elements and installations that are never really finished. Themes of enduring interest are ritual, memorial, empathy, decay and the sacred. She loves collaboration and, through her creative work, is particularly interested in expanding the roles of self-reflection and meaning in everyday life.

Alley earned her BFA in Printmaking/Drawing from Washington University (2000) and her MFA in Studio Art from the University of Kansas (2005). Since completing her studies, she has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, has worked as a gallery/exhibitions director in university and non-profit galleries, and has taught courses including drawing, professional practices, exhibition practicum, and gallery/curatorial studies. She has curated dozens of exhibitions, designed and implemented a variety of community based arts programming, and led a number of public lectures and discussions regarding art and art-making. In 2017 she was named the inaugural Kentucky Fellow as a finalist in Southern Prize and in recent years has been awarded two travel grants from the Great Meadows Foundation, one to research the gendered aesthetics of war memorials and monuments in Washington DC, and another to attend the Feminist Art Collective international residency program in Toronto. In 2018 she was awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from Kentucky Foundation for Women to create new work. She is currently the Bolivar Art Gallery Director at the University of Kentucky.

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Becky Thera is an artist living and working in Edmonton, Alberta. Thera recently completed her MFA in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta in March of 2018. Thera embraces storytelling and art creation as praxis for feminist research. Thera is from Regina, SK where she completed her BFA at the University of Regina in 2013. During her BFA she began the practice of embroidery which has since become essential to her artistic methodology. Her MFA research, which explored trauma in relation to personal, intergenerational and systemic sexual violence, was awarded a SSHRC (CGS M) grant. With an extensive history in synchronized swimming, Thera has been working as a coach and choreographer since 2007. This experience influences the involvement of performance and water in her artistic practice. Thera’s current work explores themes of matriarchy, empathy, intimacy and feminist politics. Thera’s work has been featured nationally and internationally at venues such as Nuit Blanche Regina, the FemLab Gallery in Edmonton and The Zuckerman Museum in Kennesaw, Georgia.

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Cara Gwizd resides and works in Ontario, Canada. Her fluency in graphite is the result of hours spent with a pencil in her hand. Graphite, which is her strongest medium, has become the means through which she portrays her view of the world; communicating the messages embedded within her heart. Instead of receiving formal art training, Cara chose to abandon her love and dedication to the art of stained glass to live and travel in Central America. It is here that she was most inspired while learning the language and the culture.

Her work reflects her journey as a woman as well as both the simplicity and complexity of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and loss. Such transformative passages have been enriched through her doula and midwifery work. 

Cara's work has been exhibited in galleries within Canada and the United States. Cara also spends her time illustrating for various publications. Cara is the mother to four children whom she raises alongside her incredible partner.

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Carmen Alemán is a visual artist living in London, U.K. 

Her work uses photography, video art, installations and performance. She has worked on several community projects, arts residencies and curatorial collaborations, exhibiting her work both in U.K. and abroad. 

Her main area of interest, and the focus of her current work, is women’s rights. This refers to the position and means of expression of women, both socially and politically; from identity, power and sexuality to their fight for gender equality.

Carmen Alemán currently works as a senior lecturer in photography at the University of East London and has recently completed her Professional Doctorate in Fine Art on the topic of violence against women.

Catherine Tammaro has been involved in a wide array of interdisciplinary collaborations, ongoing special projects and themed exhibitions, as originator, curator, performer and exhibitor. She is leading one of the banner designs at Native Women's Resource Centre of Toronto working with volunteer Indigenous women. She has been working with the academic community of late and is currently involved with several projects such as The Daughters of Aataentsic, The Star Collective, Walking With Our Sisters and others. She is a seated Tradition Keeper for the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation; Speckled Turtle Clan. Catherine is Akin Studio’s premiere Indigenous Elder Artist in Residence, on the Council of the Children’s Peace Theatre, is the Elder for the Toronto Indigenous Business Association and is working with many agencies, citywide and beyond, to advise and facilitate art making/teaching workshops, as well as maintaining her own art practise regarding spiritual and ever-changing realities as they pertain to our connection to the sacred multiverse.

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Christina Hajjar is a queer femme first-generation Lebanese-Canadian artist, writer and organizer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty 1 Territory and Homeland of the Métis Nation. Her multidisciplinary practice grapples with diaspora, intergenerational inheritance, food culture, relationality and labour. Her memoir cookbook, which is currently in progress, cultivates her visual arts and performance work through themes of memory and translation. Hajjar co-runs Flux Gallery for emerging artists and is co-creator/co-editor of zines Whiny Femmes and Carnation. Her poetry is accessible online and her column Feeding Diaspora is published at the Uniter. Hajjar works at Rainbow Resource Centre to develop and deliver programming for 2SLGBTQ+ youth.

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Dawn Iehsthóserinon:nha Setford is First Nations sitting under the Iroquois Confederacy as Mohawk, Bear Clan. Her family originates from St.Regis/Akwesasne territories. Her family was one of several Akwesasne families that settled on the banks of Moira Lake, Madoc, Ontario.

From childhood, Dawn is a Feather Keeper; one who collects, protects and gives feathers. Haudenosaunee cultures are traditionally matriarchal; women serving as community leaders and Chiefs, carriers of Clan, keepers of family, knowledge holders, property, crop and community managers.

Dawn is a graphic/web designer and photographer. As a community-engaged visual and media artist she advocates for equality and facilitates the creation of informed opinions of Indigenous cultures. Dawn's background in the arts, business marketing and management is combined with her creativity to bring customers the very best representation.

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Deborah Eddy employs sculpture, currently in the form of craftivism (craft and activism), and video performances in her work to speak of feminist issues. She favours a hi vis palette and utilizes building supplies and safety equipment juxtaposed with feminine fabrics to make domestic items such as tea pots, saucepans, quilts and costumes for her video performances. Eddy is currently undertaking her Visual Arts Doctorate at Queensland College of Art (QCA). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and attained First Class Honours also at QCA.

Eddy’s exhibitions include many group shows, most notably inclusion in Regional Gallery shows at Pine Rivers Art Gallery and Caboolture Art Gallery. In 2018 she attended a Residency organized by the Feminist Art Collective of Toronto. In 2019 one of her videos was shown in a group exhibition in New York. The 2019 International Women’s Day saw Eddy exhibit in three feminist exhibitions, the most notable was her inclusion in the Herland exhibition at the Women’s Library in Sydney. Also in 2019, she was a finalist in the Moreton Bay Art Prize and this work was subsequently acquired by Moreton Bay Regional Council Art Collection. Her recent solo exhibition at POP Gallery focused on women’s invisible and unrelenting domesticity. This has been an important milestone in her Doctoral journey.

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Dynesti Williams inspires people to reconnect to their higher selves through bold and unapologetic live performances, lyrics, videos, workshops and sonic ex­pe­ri­ences. She is known as a fierce entertainer with a contagious energy that can raise the vi­bra­tion of any space she performs in. Nicknamed The Dyna for de­liv­er­ing en­ergy like food for the soul, Dynesti Williams in­vites you to feast on the bal­ance of unity and chaos through the fla­vour she describes as “Hip-Hop/​Soul with a dash of Reg­gae.”

Being of half-Jamaican and half-Trinidadian heritage, Dynesti was constantly surrounded by Caribbean music. She began singing and songwriting at the age of eight performing reggae gospel in church. Growing up in a low-income community housing block in Toronto's west end, her experiences offered painfully beautiful inspiration for her art. As a child, Dynesti’s mother was diagnosed with depression and her understanding of balance was altered. Her mother’s condition motivated her to find joy in adding more entertainment, healing and laughter to the world. This led her to fo­cus on men­tal health sta­bil­ity, raw honesty and freedom as the foundations of her art. 

“This world, and all of the peo­ple in it, are f**ked up, but they are beau­ti­ful. Everyone and every­thing is beau­ti­fully f**ked up. That con­trast is art. That art is what I make mu­sic about.” - Dynesti Williams

This con­trast is em­bod­ied by her reg­gae-in­flu­enced jazzy singing, and tough-love rap flow. She has been com­pared to a dynamic range of artists from Missy Elliott to Lauryn Hill as she treats her songs like var­i­ous food dishes for her au­di­ence, val­i­dat­ing The Dyna.

Dynesti is currently working on the release of her debut album. She is partnering with DatGas Music Entertainment in N.Y.C., and Coalition Music in Toronto on the release of her debut album entitled The Dyna. 

Eladia Smoke is an architect, member of the Ontario Association of Architects, founding principle of Smoke Architecture, whose work was featured in the exhibition, Unceded, Canada's entry to the Venice Biennale, 2018. KaaSheGaaBaaWeak | Eladia Smoke is Anishinaabekwe from Obishikokaang | Lac Seul First Nation, with family roots in Alderville First Nation, Winnipeg, and Toronto. Eladia has worked in architecture since 2002 and founded Smoke Architecture as principal architect in 2014. She is a Master Lecturer at Laurentian’s McEwen School of Architecture. Her career includes principal architect with Architecture 49, Thunder Bay, and architect with Prairie Architects, Winnipeg. Eladia has served on the RAIC’s Indigenous Task Force since its inception, 2015. Current professional work includes a community centre, office, and multi-family residential projects working with First Nation clients. Her submission to Red Embers uses road kill bones transformed into a thunderbird, created in collaboration with intern architect Larissa Roque, who works with Eladia at Smoke Architecture.

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Emily Norry is a multidisciplinary artist working in Toronto. Her work centres on issues of history, memory, identity and sexuality. Through the use of watercolour, printmaking, embroidery and textiles she creates portraits of queer women from the past to build a found ancestry. She has a BFA from OCAD University and is currently working towards her Masters of Information in Archives & Records Management as a way to further her understanding of historical research. Emily has had the pleasure of showing her work at Xpace Cultural Centre, Artscape Gibraltar Point and the ArQuives for Nuit Rose.

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Gabriela Noujaim is inserted in a tradition of exploring the limits and possibility of engraving, with names like Fayga Ostrower, Anna Letycia, Anna Maria Maiolino, Anna Bella Geiger and Leya Mira Brander, to name a few. Graduated in Printmaking from the School of Fine Arts of UFRJ in 2007, the artist has been structuring her poetics from the interest in the technical image constructed from videos, photographs and, more initially, the engraving, and by the idea to fix an image in time.

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Ghazaraza is an artist and illustrator based in Toronto. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design with a Bachelor of Design. In 2016, after years of working in the Web and Design industry, she ventured back into the world of fine arts. Since then, she has created spot illustrations, paintings and murals with a variety of themes but her main focus remains women’s rights and empowerment through acceptance of one’s body and sexuality. She was featured on CBC Art’s Exhibitionist with a focus on her GIF art. She creates colourful and whimsical work and is influenced by her Iranian background. She finds inspiration in nature, people, music, poetry and spirituality.

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Gloria Swain is a Black multi-disciplinary feminist artist and activist whose practice incorporates aspects of various disciplines; taking the form of paintings, drawings, photography, storytelling and performance-based artworks. She is particularly interested in considering the connections between art and healing, often using her work as a vehicle to confront ongoing colonial violence against Black women.

In the critically acclaimed exhibit Mad Room (2016), on the theme of mental disability and intergenerational trauma, Gloria explored her own experience as a marginalized Black woman in the mental health system and addressed the stigma about mental illness in the Black community. Swain’s exhibit Black Women’s Lives Matter (2018), drew attention to the #SayHerName movement and opened conversation that addressed the overall overlooked victimization of Black women and trans folks with police brutality.

She holds a certificate in Community Arts Practice and a masters in Environmental Studies and was awarded the York University Robert J. Tiffin Student Leadership Award. She is a recipient of the 2019 artist-in-residence for Feminist Art Collection and 2016 artist-in-residence for Tangled Art & Disability. Her work has shown at the Gladstone Hotel, the Art Gallery of York University, Tangled Art & Disability Gallery, the Public Studio, Artscape Sandbox, the Theatre Centre, YYZ Gallery, Black Artist Network in Dialogue [B.A.N.D.] and other venues.

Gloria has a rich history of community arts practices, working particularly with women and trans people and is well known for her art activism within movements like Black Lives Matter-Toronto and various Indigenous grass roots social justice groups. She is a published author on disability arts and her practice also includes work as a community arts facilitator and coordinator of art making workshops for Black women, 2-spirited and the LGBTQ2 community. Her art is also an opportunity to focus on her own experience with deep-rooted racism, mental illness and systems of violence, erasure and oppression.

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Hanan is a Lebanese- Canadian multidisciplinary artist, creative writer, community arts educator, and writing instructor living in Toronto. She has a Master of Arts degree in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. Hanan’s primary mission as a literary arts instructor and community arts educator is to provide accessible and inclusive arts education to marginalized communities with a special focus on crafting safe spaces for Muslims, individuals with mental health challenges, folks with disabilities and BIPOC youth to discover and enhance their writing and art skills. Her hope is that through their writing and art, these marginalized voices will be amplified and empowered. Hanan’s writing has appeared in a number of publications including Feckless C*nt: A Feminist Anthology, The Windsor Review, Generation Magazine, and the these pills don’t come in my skin tone anthology for BIPOC writers. Her writing has also won several awards including the Alistair & Anita MacLeod Prize in Creative Writing in 2011, and the Dr. Eugene McNamara Award for poetry in 2013. Her debut poetry chapbook “Aorta” was recently published by ZED Press in April 2018. She is currently working on her first novel. Hanan’s mixed-media art has appeared in several exhibitions including Being Scene, (Mus)interpreted, and in the Bursting Bubbles exhibit as part of the 2018 Rendezvous with Madness Festival. Hanan identifies as a mad, disabled, Muslim woman of colour and uses the pronouns she/her.

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Hangama Amiri received her BFA (Major in Fine Arts) from NSCAD University in Halifax NS (2012). She was a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences in New Haven, Connecticut (2015-2016). And currently, she is a M.F.A graduate student at Yale School of Art (Painting/Printmaking) in New Haven, CT.

She has exhibited her paintings nationally and internationally, recently in New York City, Toronto, France, Italy, London (UK) and Sofia, Bulgaria. She has won the 2011 Lieutenant Governor's Community Volunteerism Award, the 2013 Portia White Protege Award and in 2015 her painting Island of Dreams won a runner-up honourable mention at RBC Canadian Painting Competition. Amiri was also an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Fall 2017), Joya AiR Residency Program in Almería, Andalucía, Spain (Winter 2017), World of CO Residency program in Sofia, Bulgaria (Spring 2018) and at Long Road Projects in Jacksonville, Florida.

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Hannah Rothschild is a mixed media artist and therapist based in St. Catharines, ON. She was born in Israel and immigrated to Canada in 2003.

Hannah holds degrees and certifications in Industrial Design, Art Therapy and Social Work from institutions in Jerusalem and Ontario.

Having specialized in the areas of trauma and abuse, her work is influenced by her role as a therapist and guided by self-reflection. She has exhibited internationally, from Toronto to Israel, and is a founding member of the O-MA-NOOT gallery.

Hillary Brighthill is from Penetanguishene and has Menominee/Métis/ Spartan roots. She has a Fine Art/Indigenous Visual Culture BA from OCADU. Hillary works culturally with First Nation families and communities on a regular basis. This close relationship informs the work she makes through oral traditions, medicinal knowledge and acknowledgment of the importance of spirit and healing. "Everything I know as an artist and person has been taught/given to me by someone/something else. It is very important to me this is established. We all come to this earth with gifts and I am thankful I get to grow/share mine.”

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Indu Antony is an artist based out of Bangalore and Kerala, India. Born and raised in a conventional Indian family, she overcame various social obligations to pursue her forms of expressions.

She has hence been working with individuals from the fringes of society. She is known to explore tonalities of inward discussions which later on burst out into communal spaces. Her work primarily revolves around the notion of spaces and their intangible character in relation to the gendered body as a site of representation by understanding feministic stands which give way to performances and installations.

Indu Antony has participated in several group exhibitions including the Serendipity Arts Festival, 2018; Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Collateral), 2018-19; Foto Fest Biennale, Houston, 2018; Queer Asia Photo Exhibition, London, 2017 and Photo Kathmandu, Nepal, 2015. She won the Toto funds Award for photography in 2011.

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James Knott is an emerging, Toronto-based artist, having received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Integrated Media from OCAD University. Their performance based practice combines theatre, video and audio art to create immersive experiences for the viewer. Explored themes include paradoxical and queer identity, collectivism, inner dialogue, anxiety and mental illness, and camp theatrics. A recent alumni of The Roundtable Residency, they’ve exhibited/performed at Xpace Cultural Centre, OCAD’s Festival of the Body, Feminist Art Conference, The Artist Project Contemporary Art Fair, the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, The Art Gallery of Hamilton and the AGO’s First Thursdays.

Jamie Magnusson (photographer) teaches in the Adult Education and Community Development program at OISE. She has been involved in sex worker-focused harm reduction with the All Saints Community Centre for about 12 years.

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Jamilah Malika works words (whether published, performed or projected, sometimes sound or still) into a balm – by us for us (black womxn) – and finds solace in many mediums. former lead vocalist of feminist, mixed media electro dub hop band (Toronto Independent Music Awards - Nominee ‘Best Electronic’ 2012.) Currently completing an MFA (2019) in Writing at SAIC (Chicago) to explore text off-page throughnobjects, sound and digital video projection. her interactive sound installation listen to black womxn is on view at the Art Gallery of Guelph until January 2019. she asks you to “pay” attention to the margins by reflecting race, gender and belonging back at you. I am a cis hetero able-bodied immigrant of mixed origins (nigerian and indo-trinidadian.) My name is Muslim but I was raised in a hindu temple. I speak french and spanish. Nobody sees me coming.

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Janet Tran is an emerging Toronto based artist creating relational works that examine social issues within multiculturalism, racism, feminism, mental health and cultural identity in the Canadian context. Her works usually call the audience into participation or interaction. Currently exploring the transformation of space with furniture, found objects, light and sound; as well as further experimenting with methods of storytelling by appealing to senses beyond visual and aural.

Tran identifies as a Canadian of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. Born and raised in Ontario, she majored in Integrated Media at Ontario’s College of Art and Design University, receiving her Bachelors of Fine Arts in 2017.

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My (Janina Anderson’s) Practice is about looking really hard. I use collage as a way to think, to play, and experiment in order to generate meaning and insight into visual culture; how we read it, how we use it and the context and conventions that dictate how we interact with and understand it.

My studio is equal parts laboratory and playground where I crack imagery open and test new ways of putting it back together. I explore how much of our understanding goes away through this process, and what messages stubbornly stay behind. In this way, my work is the result and record of diligent play and uncorroborated experimentation into how images work and how we use them to tell ourselves stories about who we are.

Born in Asunción, Paraguay and raised outside in the US, Anderson is an interdisciplinary, Latinx artist based in Toronto. In 2019 Anderson completed her MFA at Concordia University. Her work is unified by its relationship to collage methodologies and Anderson’s commitment to “looking really hard”.

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Jessi Eoin, whose last name is pronounced like “Owen,” is an agender, body positive artist whose work focuses primarily on representing fat and disabled bodies in celebratory ways. They live in Brooklyn, New York, on the occupied and unceded land of the Canarsie, Lenape, Delaware and Montauk people who have stewarded this land for generations. Recognizing the need in the respective communities for positive representations of both, but especially for disabled people, Jessi makes it a point to explore the beauty of the concept “Disability is normal,” creating a unique space in the illustration industry for prominently and unabashedly featuring fat and disabled people. 

Highly influenced by nature and femme aesthetics, Jessi frequently includes these elements in their pieces to bring a sense of naturalness and spirituality to their work, evoking the notion that disability, as well as fatness, is normal, beautiful and something to be celebrated. Their work typically includes the use of traditional mediums such as paper and pen, as well as watercolours and acrylic inks. 

Jessi has been accepted for publication in Rebel Mountain Press’s upcoming Disabled Voices Anthology, to be published in early winter 2020, and accepted as well for publication in Issue 2: Roots/Routes of Stonecrop Review and Nature with Apéro. They have also been awarded first place in an annual local art contest in Queens, New York, with plans to enter again in early Fall of 2019.

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Joan Lobis Brown is a visual activist whose portrait and landscape photographs have been widely shown in group and solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. She has five solo exhibitions scheduled for 2019–2020. In the last six years, she has been selected for 98 international juried competitions. Her work has been published online and in print magazines such as The Huffington Post, Zeke, Mic.com, Hyperallergic.com, The International Photo Review, Featureshoot, POZ and others.

Her portrait projects highlight members of our society who have been subjected to intense stigma. Her landscape projects include subjects as diverse as global warming, the creation of a phantasmagorical world and the extinction of African animals.

Brown studied photography in the advanced studies program at the International Centre of Photography and has continued studying with today’s influential photographers and editors.

She lives and works in New York City.

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Jody Chan is a writer, drummer and organizer based in Toronto. They are the poetry editor for Hematopoeisis and the author of haunt (Damaged Goods Press, 2018) and sick, winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award. Their work has been published in Third Coast, BOAAT, Yes Poetry, Nat. Brut, The Shade Journal, and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from VONA and Tin House, and they are an apprentice with Raging Asian Women Taiko Drummers.

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Joy Gregory is a graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. She has developed a practice which is concerned with social and political issues with particular reference to history and cultural differences in contemporary society.

As a photographer, she makes full use of the media from video, digital and analogue photography to Victorian print processes. In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her the time and the freedom to research for a major piece around language endangerment. The first of this series was the video piece Gomera, which premiered at the Sydney Biennale in May 2010.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and has exhibited all over the world showing in many festivals and biennales. Her work is included in many collections including the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia and Yale British Art Collection. She currently lives and works in London, UK.

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Kahsto'serakwathe Paulette Moore is an independent filmmaker, artist and affiliated professor of Indigenous media and philosophy at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. Moore is Kanien'keháka (Mohawk) and an enrolled member of Six Nations of the Grand River territory. Currently she is collaborating with Free Speech TV to complete a series of films about the 2016/17 Standing Rock water protection actions. 

Moore spent two decades based in Washington DC working as a director, producer and writer with Discovery Channel, National Geographic, PBS, ABC and other media outlets. In 2004 she began making independent, community-based films as Shenandoah University's filmmaker-in-residence in Winchester, Virginia. Her 2007 film Wit, Will and Walls documents the history of desegregation in the Shenandoah Valley and has been used extensively to facilitate dialogue about race. In 2009 Moore began work as an associate professor of media arts and peace-building at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA. There, she collaborated with students to create To Wisconsin with Love, a film about Ojibwe resistance and envisioning in response to what would have been the world's largest open-pit taconite mine.

In 2016 Moore collaborated with Northland College (Ashland, WI) students to create From Wisconsin with Love which focuses on the spiritual, economic, physical, and legal aspects of the act of harvest from the perspective of Ojibwe prophecy and practice. Her work includes art pieces linked to her films, including several incarnations of a collaborative, community embroidery project. 

Moore is a second-year student at Onkwawenna Kentsyohkwa – a two-year Kanien'keha adult language immersion program at Six Nations. Moore is a PhD candidate in Continental and Haudenosaunee philosophy with European Graduate School based in Saas Fee, Switzerland.

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Kamee Abrahamian was born into an Armenian family displaced from the SWANA (southwest asian, north african) region, and grew up in an immigrant suburb of Toronto. They arrive in the world today as a queer and feminist mother, interdisciplinary creative, scholar, writer, producer and facilitator. They have a BFA/BA in film and political science (Concordia University), an MA in expressive art therapy (European Graduate Institute), and soon to be MA/PhD in community, liberation, indigenous and eco psychologies (Pacifica Graduate Institute).

Their work is steeped with relational, generative, visionary and liberatory practices oriented toward ancestral reclamation, diasporic futurism and radical imaginaries. They have published both literary and academic work, facilitated workshops and exhibited and curated art, films and staged performances internationally. Most recently, Kamee has been working freelance under Saboteur Productions (founder) and collaboratively through Kalik Arts (co-founder).

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Kate Welsh is a white settler, cis queer crip activist, feminist artist and educator. As a community organizer she has many projects on the go, she is the founder of Equity Buttons and the Community Resistance Intimacy Project – CRIP. Kate frequently speaks on panels at conferences and runs workshops titled Unpacking Ableism, which focuses on being an ally to disabled folks and DIT (do it together) access. She is passionate about building communities of care and striving to create safer, anti-oppressive spaces.

Living with both visible and invisible episodic disabilities, Kate navigates complex experiences through art, activism and community care. Kate explores ways to make disabled lives better now by creating giftable art that tackles hard to talk about topics, such as chronic illness.

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Katrissa Singer is 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. My work 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, free to visitors. 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.

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Kristi Poole-Adler is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto who primarily focuses in textiles. She holds a BFA with honours from the University of Alberta, specializing in Painting and Printmaking. Her work has been exhibited in group shows provincially and internationally. She volunteered with Friends of University Hospitals in Edmonton as a part of the Artist on the Wards Program, helping patients and family members relieve stress through the process of making artwork. Her work has been presented at World Suicide Prevention Day conferences and community Mental Health workshops taking place throughout the Howe Sound Corridor in BC. In 2017, she received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant to assist her while working towards her Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art Media and Design at OCAD University, where she graduated in 2019.

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Kristy Blackwell uses figurative realism to depict her concept of the human condition. She is often experimenting with materials and palettes but her subject matter remains consistent – the depiction of strength alongside vulnerability and the psychological barrier between the inner mind and the infinite. There is common understanding in these personal images: beauty in sadness and in fortitude, beauty in the exposed and in the protected.

Trained in fine art at the University of Guelph and in computer animation at the University of Toronto, Kristy has had an accomplished career as a digital matte painter and compositor on over 50 feature films. Her passion remains rooted in fine art and her experience creating photo-real digital images has inspired her to experiment with various traditional techniques and materials to both create and deconstruct reality on canvas or other supports.

Kristy was raised in small town Manitoba and Ontario and has spent the second half of her life living and working in Toronto with her husband and two daughters.

Kristy's work has won various awards and been featured in print and online art magazines and is held in numerous collections.

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Lauren McCartney is a multidisciplinary, feminist artist and academic who is based in Dharawal Country/Wollongong, New South Wales. In her artwork, she primarily uses performance 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 misbehaviour. 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’s 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 holds a PhD (2018) through Curtin University, Perth and a Bachelor of Creative Arts (2010) (Honours Class I) from the University of Wollongong. Her work has been collected by the Art Gallery of Western Australia and she has exhibited her work and participated in presentations on her practice both nationally and internationally.

Lindsey is a Haudenosaune/ Anishinaabe multi-media artist, facilitator, Indigenous community advocate originally from Six Nations of the Grand River with ancestral roots to the Mississauga’s of the Credit First Nation. Artistically she specializes in contemporary painting, beading, and leatherwork. Lindsey is also an arts and culture facilitator, with expertise in Indigenous governance, and not-for-profit program and community development. Her traditional name is ‘Mushkiiki Nibi Kwe’, which translates to ‘Medicine Water Woman’ and she is of the turtle clan. She is a graduate of OCAD University and has sat on a number of community advisory boards and committees in the Toronto area over the last 10 years. She is currently the President and Chair of the Board of Directors for the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto (NCCT) serving her second term, an Indigenous Representative (Ontario) for the Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion and Society’s (IRIS) –National Committee for addressing Violence Against Women, and Indigenous Representative on the Toronto Counter Human Trafficking Network Committee (TCHTN). Lindsey also passionately continues her commitment to the arts through her own practice and contributing to organizations like the Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council as a juror. In late 2017 she was shortlisted and awarded a public arts project for the Region of Waterloo and will be creating a permanent public instillation for the Block Line –LRT stop that will highlight Indigenous storytelling and the importance of authentic stewardship of the land. Lindsey is currently the Trauma Support Manager at Native Women’s Resource Centre of Toronto and is the Indigenous Anti-Human Trafficking Liaison for Toronto-GTA. When not entrenched in professional commitments she can be found supporting the community as an Oshkaabewis, or watching her favourite Haudenosaunee sport lacrosse-the Creator’s Game.

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Mahlikah Awe:ri Enml'ga't Saqama'sgw (The Woman Who Stands and Walks in the Light), a TAF TD Arts Diversity and OAC KM Hunter Award Finalist, is Haudenosaune Kanien'kehà:ka, Okwáhowak (Wolf clan) & L'sitkuk, Mi'kmaw First Nations, based in the one dish one spoon Wampum Tsi' Tkarón:to, with Afro-Native & Irish ancestry.

Mahlikah is a slam poet, musician, hip hop emcee, recording artist, arts educator, keynote speaker, artist mentor, actor, festival curator and emerging knowledge keeper and medicine carrier. She is the Deputy Executive Director of Programming for Neighbourhood Impact for the Toronto Centre for Community Development & Learning in Regent Park and founding member of Red Slam, an Indigenous Art 4 Social Change Movement. 

Red Slam is celebrating a decade of contemporary performative art & music with a message. Collectively, Red Slam represents artistic expression as resistance through co-creative resiliency and the reimagining of what it means to be “in-relation” to the land and to each other. Opening for such notable artists as: Tanya Tagaq, Martha Redbone, Veronica Johnny and The Johnny’s, Plex, Inter-tribal, Kinnie Starr, Digging Roots, Malik Al Nasir and, most recently, hip hop legends Main Source. They have also headlined at Gathering of Nations, Ago, Summer Works, Unity Festival, the Feminist Art Conference and Nuit Blanche. Red Slam released their debut LP Right Level in 2017 and are working on a new musical project for an upcoming EP. 

Published in 10 literary publications, as an arts educator Awe:ri has been providing artistic mentorship through TDSPCreates, Louder Than a Bomb and AGO Learning Days for close to 7 years.

Mahlikah will be making her debut with the prestigious Prologue to the Performing Arts roster for the 2019/2020 season. Awe:ri is a cultural arts leader who utilizes her platforms to shift colonial paradigms across Turtle Island, with a focus on access, equity and resiliency for BIWOC & LGBTQ2S emerging artists.

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Marissa Sean Cruz (born 1996) is a video and performance artist whose work has been displayed in venues like Xpace, Struts and Faucet Media Centre, Studio 303, the VAV, thirtyA gallery, ThirdSpace and START gallery. Her various projects have been displayed internationally through the US and distributed digitally through spaces like the Centre for Art and Thought, North Fork Arts Projects, Public Parking and the Roundtable Residency.

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Luyos MC (MaryCarl Guiao) is a daughter of Maharlikan lands (particularly, the region currently known as the Philippines), birthed from a Kapampangan lineage of dedicated carpenters, land-tenders, benevolent engineers, kitchen goddesses, cleaners, Sinawali purveyors, public-spirited politicians and so many more guides that she holds in her heart.

For many years she engaged in bottom-up community care-work including: hosting Migrant Matters Radio for community radio, co-founding Fuerza/Puwersa, a migrant worker advocacy group, and offering both economically accessible yoga and self-defense classes, prioritizing non-status people, migrant workers and low-income, racialized and Indigneous people. MaryCarl continues to communicate an appreciation for culture where building respectful, non-judgmental, present, consensual, mutually empathetic relationships with all life prevails amidst the pervasiveness of interlocking, colonial, imperialistic, capitalistic systems and dynamics such as racism, classism, and patriarchy.

She contributes writings (poems, interviews, straight news, features and editorials) to several independent magazines, books and online outlets, and performs her music across Canada, the UK, the USA and in the Philippines and Ireland. MaryCarl has found place in tapping into her soft power to weave truth into her inter-arts practice with an emphasis on story-witnessing through cross-genre music composition and production and precolonial cultural regeneration (specially with Obo Manobo kulintang arts).

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Michaela Bridgemohan is a Canadian visual artist of Australian and Jamaican descent. She is currently residing in Mohkinstsis, also known as Calgary Alberta, and has received her Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2017. Her practice explores cultural intersectionality through a lens based medium. She also works with other methodologies such as sculpture, costume making and drawing. Using her own body as a spectral, she explores these interactions by collaborating Caribbean folklore with personal narratives such as ‘otherness’ and confronting issues with hegemonic ideologies linked to racial dichotomy. She is focused on creating a space where viewers can identify the women in her work as ambiguous ‘others’ that can fluctuate between racial boundaries.

She has shown throughout Canada, (Artscape Gibraltar Point in Toronto, Marion Nicoll Gallery, Stride Gallery and Art Commons) and internationally, including the Queensland Conservatorium and Jugglers ArtSpace in Brisbane Australia. She also participated in FemmeWAVE 2018 and the Feminist Art Collective Residency in Toronto, Ontario funded by the Alberta Foundation For The Arts.

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Morgan Sears-Williams is an interdisciplinary artist working in Toronto and holds a BFA in Photography from OCAD University. She is interested in experimenting with image making, installation, publications and mixed media works as a tool for self-exploration and defining and re-inventing perceptions of your self. Her practice often explores larger themes of feminist queer histories, collective memory and questioning institutional archiving practices. Recently she has been conducting interventions with archival and older technologies ( such as rotary telephones ) and altering perceptions of their usage and the stories they hold. She has exhibited her works in Toronto, Kingston and internationally and was the recipient of the Pandora Y. H. Ho Memorial Award and the Artscape Youngplace Career Launcher Opportunity in 2017.

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Over the past short while, artists Sarah Cullen and Alison Thompson have come together to organize/create/co-found the project MOTHRA – An Artist-Parent Project.

Sarah Cullen is an artist currently based in Toronto. She has a BFA from OCADU and an MA in Geography from Queen Mary, University of London. Her work has been exhibited in Toronto and internationally. She has attended artist residencies at the Banff Centre, NES Artist Residency in Iceland and NKD in Norway.

Since the birth of her daughter (and now son), the focus of her art practice has turned to ways of incorporating her child(ren) while she is their primary caregiver.

In 2017, Sarah was awarded an OAC grant to work with her then two-year-old son, and that’s when MOTHRA was born. MOTHRA is comprised of a zine, a social network, workshops and artist residencies for artist-parents/carers and their children. Sarah facilitated the OAC funded pilot residency at Artscape Youngplace in September 2018, and the next planned residency will be at Artscape Gibraltar Point, Toronto Islands, June 2019. MOTHRA recently facilitated a workshop at Cedarbrae Library as part of XYZines, through TACs Artists in the Libraries program. 

Alison Thompson, MOTHRA’s co-organizer, is both an artist and a craftsperson who frequently works in textiles. After the birth of her first child, Alison began seeking ways to maintain her practice. Due to the structure of her life, she needed to work at home alongside her child. When she and her son participated in Lenka Clayton’s Artist Residency in Motherhood, she found herself pushing her art practice in unexpected directions. Working on MOTHRA has given Alison the opportunity to research, explore and share the kind of meaningful parenting and arts experience she has already discovered.

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Nelly is a queerab femme witch trying to stay radically soft and tender while healing + resisting patriarchy and white supremacy. She is currently studying to become a therapist and sometimes she likes tattooing her friends.

Marcia is a queer white cis girl from a small town in the Alps. After doing a B.A in photography and a M.A in gender studies, she currently lives in Paris and works as a social worker.

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Pamela Dodds was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, grew up in Toronto, and was transplanted south of the border to the USA as a teenager. She began her art practice in Boston, Massachusetts, where she first exhibited at the artist-run Bromfield Gallery. Early in her career, the Prints and Drawings Dept. of the Boston Public Library began collecting her works on paper.

She later spent several years in Cleveland, Ohio where she found a vibrant art scene and where her work was championed by galleries including William Busta Gallery. In 2007, the Cleveland Museum of Art purchased her 6-print suite Ebb.

In 2008, she returned to Toronto. She received a generous grant from the Gottlieb Foundation, NY and a Nick Novak Residency at Open Studio Printmaking Centre, Toronto. In 2014, her work was supported by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant for feminist art, and the Hexagon Fellowship at Open Studio.

In 2016, the work was featured at Lesbian ARTivisms in the Age of Globalization Colloquium, University of Ottawa. In 2017 she received a project grant from Ontario Arts Council;  The Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, ON, presented a 15-year retrospective of her work in print, including the newly completed Undertow installation in the gallery’s loft-like upper level.

An installation of Undertow was exhibited at the Impact 10 International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference in Santander, Spain, 2018. Other international exposure includes FiLiA Feminist Conference, London, UK, 2017 and Haugesund Museum of Fine Art, Norway, 2019. She is a citizen of both the USA and Canada and currently lives and works in Toronto.

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Queen Kukoyi: She is Mother, Advocate, Graphic Artist, Photography enthusiast and Melanin Celebrator. Queen is the Director of Arts and Cultural Projects with Stolen from Africa and newly appointed Coordinator for Black Speculative Arts Movement Toronto. Queen has used visual arts, mindfulness and storytelling to affirm that blackness exists outside of stereotypes, debunking the misconception that people of the African Diaspora fit into one ideal, Since 2011.

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Rachel Asevicius is a multidisciplinary painter and digital artist living in Toronto. She is a queer, mad, multimedia maker invested in justice, exploring the leaky adaptability of medium, and examining how bodies exist between multidimensional spaces.

With a technical background in painting, works include multimedia collage, digital sculpture, collaborative intervention, and zines, exploring the ways in which digital art, public art and multiples can shift the institution of gallery and museum spaces, and how the queer, femme, disabled self can be represented in abstract art and cyberspace.

Critiquing the value of aesthetics in relation to trauma, the ways trauma interrupts identity and recognizing digital space as allocation that forms, aids and gives autonomy to identity is crucial to the artist’s process. How is bodily knowledge translated or obscured through digital space? Utilizing both motifs of natural material alongside digital textures, Rachel Asevicius explores the double bind of cyberspace for marginalized identity, contrasting the bodiliness of the painters’ hand with the cyborgian aid of the machine/computer.

Rachel Asevicius is currently pursuing a BFA in Painting and Drawing at OCADU and thematically focusing on digital space as art and archive, accessibility and surveillance, and tying personal experience to queer, feminist and post-internet theory.

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Ramune Luminaire was born in Montreal and moved to England at the age of 10, where she lived and trained as an artist before returning to Canada 18 years ago. Now she works in her studio in the woods north of Peterborough. She attended both Central St. Martins School of Art and Design and Camberwell College of Art in London, England and has an honours degree in visual arts specializing in sculpture and ceramics. Her current chosen media are sculpture, installation and drawing.

Luminaire’s subject matter usually revolves around finding a place for the female and giving concrete form to emotions and experiences which are usually suppressed. She has shown her art in galleries and museums in Southern Ontario, Toronto, Montreal, various parts of England and Norway.

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Red Embers is a large-scale, community-based, public art installation that honours the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and the strength of community resilience.

Thousands experienced this celebration of the power of art and design at Allan Gardens in 2019. For the first time in the City of Toronto's history, monumental art by Indigenous womxn artists was displayed for free to the public.

Red Embers will host a community panel discussion with the artists and designers about the creation of the Red Embers project and its impact on community 

About Red Embers

Red Embers consists of 13 banners that follow the cycle of the 13 Grandmother Moons within the Lunar System. The Grandmother Moon is the leader of feminine life. For a woman who has experienced domestic violence or sexual assault, it is the Grandmother Moon that provides healing and a rebalancing of energy.

The banners raise the profile of the Indigenous creative sector while demonstrating non-hierarchical partnerships between Indigenous design principles in the built-environment led by Indigenous womxn.

Red Embers was made possible by the design team consisting of Tiffany Creyke, Larissa Roque and Lisa Rochon. 

Red Embers artists exhibiting at the Feminist Art Fest:

Hillary Brighthill

Eladia Smoke

Lindsay Lickers

Catherine Tammaro

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Regan Henley is an American multimedia artist and Computer Art Master of Fine Arts Candidate at Syracuse University, in Central New York. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Intermedia Art at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. 

In October of 2016 she debuted her first solo show C@tharsis, exploring the use of digital technologies as emotional aides in the mourning and grieving process, which included several video installations as well as experimental digital media. In May of 2018, she participated in the international Feminist Art Collective artist residency program in Toronto, along with 21 other artists from around the world. In October of 2019 she was a residency artist at the Mortem Ayatana Residency in Ottawa, an intensive artist research residency for artists making work on topics of death and dying.

Her work investigates intersections of emotional intimacy and art as therapy in conjunction with new digital technologies and internet culture. She currently resides in Central New York.

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Renee Dumaresque is a Newfoundland & Labrador-born queer white settler living in Toronto. They are a community organizer, writer, emerging artist, and PhD student of Social Work at York University. Renee maintains a transdisciplinary approach in both their scholarship and creative work, which serves their commitment to plurality and embraces their tendency for chaotic thought. Renee’s doctoral research excavates chronic vulvar pain, also known as vulvodynia, as a critical site of inquiry into race, colonization, gender, madness, disability, and neoliberalism. They are a Sound Practitioner-in-training and the co-founder of crip rave™, an electronic music collective and event platform showcasing crip talent and prioritizing crip, sick, mad, and disabled folx within safer and more accessible rave spaces.

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Rora Blue is a conceptual artist based in California. She actively produces artwork that is defined by colour, text and interactivity. Her work relies heavily on colour to communicate a feeling to the viewer. Participation and documenting the experiences of others is also essential to her artistic process.

Rora Blue is best known for her series Handle With Care and for The Unsent Project, which has received over 47,000 submissions. Her work has been featured in news outlets such as The New York Times, Good Morning America, Teen Vogue, and Cosmopolitan. She has exhibited her work globally in 8 countries and 12 different states. Her major commissions include Bumble in the UK. Rora Blue has received multiple awards and has had the pleasure of speaking at events in California, New York, Canada and Germany.

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Rosemary Meza-DesPlas currently lives in Farmington, New Mexico. The cornerstone of her artwork is the female experience within a patriarchal society. As a woman, daily navigation of our world is a precarious tight-rope walk. The use of portraiture to discuss gender-based burdens personalizes the political. Intricate drawings are created by meticulous stitching of human hair. The dichotomy of human hair, depending upon context, is it can be engaging or off-putting: long, luxurious hair is sexy, but a hair in one’s soup is unappealing. Meza-DesPlas seduces the viewer with elegant, sensual marks of hair in tandem with a persistent advocation for gender equality and women’s empowerment. Through on-site drawing installations and watercolor paintings, Meza-DesPlas evokes intellectual and visceral responses to socio-cultural burdens endured by women; these burdens and their subsequent impact on contemporary culture are interpreted through a global lens.

She earned a MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art (Hoffberger School of Painting) and a BFA from the University of North Texas. Her artwork has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Her work has been written about in several publications including the Huffington Post, Dallas Morning News, The Durango Herald, Wall Street International, and Interview Magazine. Ms. Meza-DesPlas parallels the themes in her visual artwork with the written word and spoken word performances.

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Ross Unger is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores themes of queerness, immigration, neurodiversity and other inter-sectional feminist ideas. In 2015/2016 Ross immigrated to Turtle Island (Canada) and co-founded a social justice community arts nonprofit called Dramatic Changes. Ross has created queer children’s books, full length musicals, jazz compositions, performance art pieces, immersive experiences and an anti-oppressive improv troupe.

Dramatic Changes is a not-for-profit organization that aims to:

• Create and present story-based art such as films, musicals, websites, songs and games to raise awareness of social justice issues.

• Amplify marginalized voices by supporting collaborations between community members and professional artists.

• Support diversity in the arts industry

• Provide arts mentorship to our communities

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Sabine LeBel is a queer environmentalist dedicated to smashing the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. She has been making short videos on queer themes, often dealing with difficult emotions like revenge, loss, anxiety and remorse. When not making videos, Sabine is an educator, researcher, artist, curator and collaborator.

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Sage Szkabarnicki-Stuart is a 24 year-old emerging photographer living in Toronto. She mostly uses herself as the subject of her photographs. Sage graduated with a degree in animation from Concordia University in 2018. Her work was recently exhibited at Art Toronto and she had a solo show in the Distillery District in Toronto for the CONTACT Festival.

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Samantha Lyn Aasen is an artist adapting to the Southwest as she holds on to her Midwestern mentalities. Her suburban upbringing has her questioning female relationships and societal standards. She looks at reality television, pornography, social media and fashion trends for her research. Samantha identifies herself as a feminist artist. Often she uses lens based media to form her artwork. Samantha also works with embroidery, beading, performance, web processes and found objects. The idea or intent of the work drives the outcome of material.

Samantha Lyn Aasen has had exhibitions in Indiana, Arizona, Illinois, Nebraska, Maryland and the UK. She attended the Feminist Artist Conference Residency in Toronto Canada in 2017 and has taken several workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University and a Studio Art MFA with an emphasis in Intermedia from Arizona State University. Currently she teaches at the Maricopa Community College and sits on the board of Girls Rock! Phoenix.

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Sarah Stefana Smith (b. Brooklyn, 1982) works predominately in photography, photo-based weavings, sculpture and installation. Abstraction, materiality, space and ecology are explored using barrier materials — deer, bird and safety netting, chicken wire and fishing line — to comment on boundaries between human and species, lines of demarcation around difference — race, gender, sexuality, and how modes of difference are used to constitute and congeal belonging.

Her work has exhibited in many spaces including the Arlington Art Center, Borland Project Space (State College), Waller Gallery and Gallery CA (Baltimore), David Spectrum (Toronto) and Hammond House (Atlanta). Smith recently was an artist-in-residence at Merriweather District AIR (2019) and has published writing in Women & Performance (2018), The Black Scholar (2019), Liquid Blackness (2017), The Handbook on Race in the Arts in Education (2018), Drain Journal of Art and Culture (2015), and Ruptures: Anti-colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing.

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Born in New Brunswick, Shantell Powell grew up all across Canada, primarily in rural areas and wilderness while living off the land in a hunter/gatherer/farmer family. It was not unusual for her to help bring in the winter's wood with a dogsled or pony sleigh, to go mushroom or berry picking for meals, or to practice stealth by stalking deer in the forest. Now, she is a city dweller who continues to obtain her wilderness fix through sporadic camping trips. She is a bisexual, two-spirited artist of Mi'kmaq/Inuit ancestry and has studied art and writing all her life. She is a compulsive learner and creator and constantly has her nose buried deep in books, articles, and flowers and her fingers are oftencovered in paint, charcoal, or soil. She is equally at home on the internet or in the forest.

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Shelby Lisk is an artist, writer and photographer, born and raised in Belleville, close to her roots of Kenhtè:ke (Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory). She started in the arts as a painter and found her way to photography while completing her BFA at the University of Ottawa (2015). She has worked as an artist and photographer for 5 years, while living and travelling across North America. She now lives near her home community after completing a diploma in Photojournalism at Loyalist College (2019).

Shelby 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). Her writing and photography have been printed in Red Rising Magazine, Hart House Review and Voices of Native American Women, published by Annick Press. She was recently awarded 1st place in the Indigenous Arts and Stories writing competition for her poem Invisible Indian (Historica Canada, 2018).

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Shohana Sharmin is a Bangladeshi-Canadian emerging writer and performer. Born and raised in Bangladesh, Shohana is a proud Muslim queer woman of colour who is fluent in three languages: Bengali, Hindi and English. Shohana is a member of the 2019 Emerging Creators Unit in Buddies in Bad Times theatre under the mentorship of Catherine Hernandez (b current theatre). In June 2019, Shohana presented her first solo show "Come Here Often?" (directed by Akosua Amo-Adem) as part of Queer Pride at Buddies in Bad Times theatre. In March 2019, she was selected for the Solo Character Sketch Showcase for Just for Laughs as part of the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival. Shohana's short stories have been selected for publication with The Vault.

She is a current Featured Player at the Bad Dog Comedy Theatre, and an alumna of the Second City’s Improv and Longform Conservatories. Shohana has performed in comedy and theatre festivals across North America, including the Toronto Fringe Festival, Toronto Queer Pride, Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival, Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival, Big City Improv Festival, SheDot Festival, Detroit Improv Festival, Ottawa Fringe Festival, LadyFest Montreal, Seattle Sketch Comedy Festival, Hamilton Fringe Festival and more. She can regularly be seen performing comedy across Toronto with her award-winning troupe Not Oasis (2017 The Toronto Fringe Patrons Pick, NOW Critic’s Pick) and The Kweendom (Yas Kween, Ottawa Improv Festival, LadyFest Montreal). She wishes she could be more like her mother.

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Simone Wright is a businesswoman in the field of Market Research and Insights. She is an activist bringing attention to black histories, black hair and the black identity in Canada and enjoys taking cultural dance classes during her free time. Simone started Parting the Roots as her first large scale art project in 2017. She is passionate about using her art to push forward conversations about Black Women and their hair in the Canadian context.

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Winnipeg artist Susan Aydan Abbott creates deeply personal photographic, film and installation works which speak to memory, resilience, trauma, violence and survival. She tackles social issues in a visceral yet sensitive manner, questioning unresolved trauma and shame through her personal lens. Using casts of her body and face, her work links the architecture and landscape with her personal history as she directly transfers the pain of her experiences against and into her environment. Flashes of memory and raw emotion inform her work, revealing glimpses of the process of coping and living with unresolved trauma.

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Suzanne Broughel is a white artist who makes work that explores whiteness as a racialized identity. Using everyday objects as art materials, she mines history, contemporary life and autobiography to examine race in the United States, with a particular focus on structural racism and the construct of whiteness. She has exhibited at P.S. 1/MOMA, Marlborough Gallery, Columbia University, The University of Memphis, Rush Arts Gallery and Longwood Art Gallery, among other spaces. She was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2008, as well as the Emerge 8 Program at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art. Broughel is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and A.I.R. Gallery, and was a resident artist in the 2010 Triangle Artists Workshop. In 2014, she completed The Laundromat Project’s Create Change Fellowship. In 2015 she was a participant in the New Museum’s R&D Seminar: Persona, as well as The Art & Law Program. Broughel is a member of the tART feminist art collective. In 2017, she was a participant in Toronto’s Feminist Art Conference Residency. Broughel was born in Yonkers, New York and is based in New York City.

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Tara Krebs is a Toronto-Based artist and story-teller who’s work addresses themes of nature, identity and narrative. Though Tara’s visual language extends to a number of creative mediums, she is probably best known for her pop-surrealist paintings and as the writer/author of the interactive storybook "You'll Distract the Boys!": A Choose-Your-Own Compendium of Female Existence.

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Teri Donovan is a Toronto-based artist. She holds a Fine Arts degree from York University and a Bachelor of Education from the University of Toronto. She studied at The Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, the Ontario College of Art and Design and the Toronto School of Art. She is represented by The Red Head Gallery in Toronto.

Donovan is an artist whose practice spans painting, drawing and photo-based work. She engages issues of perception, memory and identity, and is interested in patterns that shape thoughts and behaviours. Using photographs and digital references, she juxtaposes elements to create a visual dialogue that addresses these themes as well as the ongoing influence of the past on the present and the future. 

In addition to The Red Head Gallery, Donovan's work has been exhibited at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Hermes Gallery, Halifax, Hamilton Artists Inc., The Latcham Gallery, Stouffville and ARC Gallery, Chicago, and the Art Gallery of Mississauga. Donovan‘s work is in corporate and private collections and was featured in Carte Blanche Vol.2: Painting, a survey of contemporary painting in Canada.

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With a voice that weaves together the rawness of our reality and a smoothness that only she can exude - TIAYL (formally performing under her birth name "Xolisa") is a force, all within herself, passionately dedicated to celebrating our individual and collective healing – with an unapologetic emphasis on the continued upward ascension and beauty of Black women and men. TIAYL delivers her message of love by any means necessary – lyrically potent as singer, emcee, songwriter and producer, creating music that is a juxtaposition in itself.

Her songwriting is strikingly raw, uncut and unfiltered – yet her production possesses a deeply nurturing and instinctive groove, together creating a sound that invites (and at time commands) listeners to face themselves and all their truths, while being comforted and held every step of the way. Flowing intuitively between Soul, Neo-Soul, Hip Hop and Afro-House, TIAYL's music has a magical way of uprooting our deepest hurts, fears and traumas – while guiding us to a place where we can grant ourselves the permission to sit with those experiences, in love, despite the discomfort.

TIAYL, which stands for "Trust In All Your Light", personifies her choice to hold herself accountable in believing in her purpose, while simultaneously inspiring others to do just the same, and as the Trinidadian-Canadian songwriter pens us songs dedicated to her name sake, we sit back and experience just who this young woman is, in all her creative abilities.

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Valeria Arendar (1994) studied Photography at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía. She has a bachelor’s degree in Social Communication by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Her thesis was about the independent candidate to the presidency of Mexico María de Jesús Patricio and the women of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. Since she was 18 years old she’s participated in numerous diplomats regarding photographic and multimedia language in social investigation, history of cinema and the analysis of the evolution of photography in Latin America. Her work has been exhibited in México and Guatemala.

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Vanessa Crosbie Ramsay is a multidisciplinary artist & Arts-Educator. Her work centres on women’s identity and experience, highlighting feminist issues, social equality and intersectionality. Vanessa’s practice includes film/video, storytelling, visual art, installation, sculpture and community engagement. In 2018, she received the City of Hamilton Arts Award in Media Arts.

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Vanessa Godden is a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts and recipient of the Melbourne International Research Scholarship. She received her BFA from the University of Houston (2012) and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2014). Her artistic practice uses performative gestures to explore how personal histories of sexual assault, her cultural heritage and the body in relation to geographic space can be conveyed through material engagements with the body.

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Yvonne Stanley is a first generation Canadian born to Jamaican parents. After attending Centennial College and the Ontario College of Art and Design, she started her career in graphic design at a magazine company in 2012. Less than 3 years later she picked up photography and shortly after opened her own photography business Elevated Vision that focused on empowering female entrepreneurs through visual branding photography.

After 6 years of passionately working on her photography, Yvonne’s portfolio includes work for HBO, Warner Brothers, Celebrities, tier one food companies as well as work published in international publications like Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Glamour. Recognized for her bold and vibrant photography with a mission and love for charitable work, she strives to educate, inspire, uplift and support her community and communities around the world with her Elevated Vision brand.

Influenced by female empowerment and civil rights movements, along with universal teachings, Stanley has been described as a love activist. In her business, art and life she challenges herself to use love-based language, marketing and copywriting practices in exchange for the more widely used fear-based practices. Her hope is to lead by example and create small ripples that lead to a big change in the way people in the world love and appreciate themselves and others.

The most recent of her creative work is The Boob Book Project, a bold, conscious, international photojournalism series which aims to shed new light on breasts and the stories that come with them. Through artistic anonymous portraits and stories, Yvonne believes that the diverse representation and unraveling of untold stories can contribute to the health, happiness, empowerment and beliefs about women’s potential and their political efficacy in the world.