Alla Myzelev is an Assistant professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the State University of New York at Geneseo where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary visual culture.  She is also a coordinator of Museum Studies minor.  In her capacity of a faculty member of the museum studies and art history, she had developed several courses that encompass gender and digital humanities. She is currently exploring opportunities that Digital Humanities and Virtual Reality provide for teaching museum studies and art history.  Prior to coming to SUNY Geneseo Myzelev taught at the University of Guelph, University of Waterloo, OCADU, and the University of Toronto in Scarborough. 

Myzelev received PhD in visual and material culture from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. Her dissertation was dedicated to the revival of the peasant crafts in the early twentieth-century Britain and Russia. She held two post-doctoral fellowships: SSHRC and Paul Mellon.  Myzelev has published extensively on feminism, activism, and material culture. She is currently writing a manuscript on masculinity and fashion in the Soviet Union. Myzelev is the author of Architecture, Design and Craft in Toronto 1900-1940: Creating Modern Living (Ashgate 2016). Her edited collection of essays Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm has been published by Routledge (2017). Her research interests always revolve around gender and contemporary culture.  She published extensively on DIY culture and fibre art.  Myzelev also curated several shows including a yearly exhibition of Feminist Art Conference International exhibition in Toronto (2014-2017). 

During the FAC residency in Florence Myzelev hopes to work on the collection of article and artists’ discussions that document the history of FAC. 

Alexis Bullock is a print- and collage-maker who identifies as a queer woman. These identities guide most of her artistic practice, which has developed around themes of sexuality, the body, gender-based stereotypes, and dominant discourses. Her work pairs found text with literary, historical, and popular culture imagery to comment on the ways in which queer communities and women are ostracized, attacked, and objectified by dominant cultural narratives. Through her work she investigates bodily autonomy and restriction, and how language is used to define how the body is supposed to exist. Initially working in wood and metal, Alexis brings her sculpting skills to her printmaking practice to create intricately carved linoleum and wood blocks. Her screenprints bring advertisements and news photography together to spark discussion about the different media outlets where we consume imagery of sexualized and battered women. Alexis’s collages mostly center around rape culture and the language that upholds it, especially thinking about how small pieces fit together to create a cultural acceptance towards violence against women and queer people. She often uses found text from newspapers, books, and historical documents to compose these collages. 

Originally from San Francisco, Alexis is now living in Chicago, where she will be graduating from Northwestern University with a BA in Psychology and Art Theory and Practice in June 2020. She plans to continue her art practices in printmaking and collage while also exploring bookmaking, where she feels she will be able to reconnect with more sculptural art while still incorporating found images and text in her works.

Amy Hughes is a New York City-based British Artist who identifies as an intersectional- feminist and activist; actively working to advance the status of female-identifying artists and promoting equality for all. She currently works out of her studio in Brooklyn, NY where she currently resides. 

Part social commentary, part autobiographical, thematically Amy Hughes’ work deals with the female body, typically her own. She manipulates and renders the flesh in oil paint; a medium and subject matter steeped in the male tradition; exploring the ways in which women’s bodies have been depicted in art history & contemporary visual culture and the societal pressures exerted upon them. 

Born in Leicestershire, UK in 1992, Amy Hughes spent her years growing up between Cheshire, UK and Moscow, Russia. In 2013 she received a degree in BA Hons Fine Art from Liverpool Hope University, UK. At her undergraduate Thesis show, she was awarded the 'purchase prize' by the Liverpool Women's Hospital, where a painting remains on display in their private collection. In 2016, Hughes graduated from a two-year full-time MFA program at the New York Academy of Art. During her studies, she was awarded an Academy Merit Scholarship and the prestigious HRH The Prince of Wales Scholarship (MFA 2016). Since graduating, Hughes has continued to exhibit her work in both solo and group shows, and working as an instructor of painting at the New York Academy of Art where she also oversees special programming. Notably, she exhibited her work in an exhibition titled “Duality of Feminine and Feminist Exhibition” at Gallery 66, Cold Spring, NY which was curated by Karen Gutfreund; most known for curating ground-breaking feminist exhibitions and working with the likes of the Guerrilla Girls. Hughes has also notably sold work at Sotheby's Auction House, NY and has exhibited in the International Biennale Portrait Competition at Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art. She has been featured in several prominent publications, including W Magazine, Southwest Art, Aesthetica Magazine, Cheshire Life, The Liverpool Echo, and more. 

Alongside exhibiting her work, Hughes oversees the “Forensic Sculpture Workshop” at The New York Academy of Art, the nation’s first-ever art class to use actual skulls from cold cases as a base to sculpt the faces of unknown crime victims in clay in order to aid in identification. In recent years, the workshop has expanded its scope to include border migrant cases whose skeletal remains have been discovered in the desert at the US/Mexico border. Hughes currently volunteers as a podcast host and bulletin editor for the International Women Artists Salon. She is an active member/volunteer for the multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural organization of women making art in the world today, with its aim “to bring art by women to the forefront of the art world and local communities through exhibitions, events, salon style gatherings, and radio.”

Website Instagram

I am a Toronto-based artist who is passionate about drawing, painting, installation and ceramics. I have studied with artists Ed Pien, Brian Smith, and Elly Smallwood. I have shown my work through multiple fairs and shows in Toronto and abroad and in 2016, I was awarded the Emerging Toronto Artist Character Award. 

I am passionate about using art as a way to connect with other people and create community. 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. 

I identify as queer, a settler and a first-generation immigrant, having arrived from Romania 16 years ago. 

Through art I hope to create a sense of community through shared experiences. My work focuses on the experience of being a woman in society today. It focuses on showing the full story of our lives through visual storytelling. There are many sides to each of us, some which are rarely seen, but all of which are integral to understanding the narrative of our lives. By overlapping multiple images of the same person, I create abstracted composite figures that tell a more complete story of the subject. 

In the past year, I have been exploring how women have been represented through art history and in current media. While unpacking and unlearning the internalized lessons of the male gaze, I have been exploring alternative narratives to famous artworks viewers may be familiar with. My series, WTF Art History, captures the women’s determined reactions to push against the voyeuristic gaze. It challenges old conventions of representations and empowers women to reclaim their images and call out the sexism and violence inherent in art history. The piece WTF Giambologna references the Rape of the Sabine Women by Giambologna, which was made in Florence, where it continues to inspire artists centuries later. In taking down the rape culture that the statue reinforces with its passive depiction, I imagined a desperate, fighting woman who is not afraid to fight dirty in order to protect herself. 

I hope those explorations will resonate with others, and will help create a new discourse on the representations of women in art.

Anj Fermor is an emerging artist and writer residing in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), on Treaty 7 Territory. They have provided art work and writing for venues and publications in Calgary, Toronto, and New York. In 2018 they were a resident with the New York University Summer Studio Program and was a finalist for the 20th Annual RBC Painting Competition. In the summer of 2019 they participated in the Calgary Allied Arts Foundation Residency at cSPACE King Edward and the inaugural Momus Emerging Critics Residency, in Montreal. 

At the beginning of July 2019 the new online art publication Studio was launched, for which Fermor is the founding publisher and writer. 

Using time and material-intensive processes, Fermor's visual work uses language and imagery to reflect their interest in the intentional abstraction of communication and identity. Much of Fermor’s artwork and texts are the result of time spent alone: each offer a small gesture to the experience of solitude or alienation, each a documentation of identity-making. Currently, Fermor is using oil portraiture to depict the historic isolation of queer persons; those who are searching, those who are othered, and those who have had to choose isolation in order to be themselves. 

Website

Caroline Phillips is a visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia, who identifies as a woman artist. Her practice combines participatory and collaborative projects that build feminist community, with practice-based research, curating and a studio practice of sculpture and photography. She is the author of the time-based online project #imawomanartist. 

Her work has been exhibited in over 50 solo and group exhibitions internationally at venues including; NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NYC), George Paton Gallery (Melbourne), First Draft (Sydney), Cité International des Arts (Paris), Slade School of Art Research Centre (London) and Great Hall OCADU (Toronto). She held her first New York solo show (by invitation) at NARS presents @ Anese Projects (NYC) in 2017. Phillips has been awarded a number of grants including NAVA Australian Artists’ Grant, City of Melbourne Arts Project Grant, Victorian Women’s Trust Sponsorship Grant and a Creative Victoria VicArts Grant. Her residencies include the Art Gallery of New South Wales Moya Dyring Studio Residency, Cité International des Arts, Paris (2012), Australian Tapestry Workshop, Artist in Residence (2014), NARS Foundation International Residency, NYC (2017), and the inaugural FAC International Feminist Artist residency, Toronto (2015). 

Phillips is the current Secretary of the Women’s Art Register, and writes about women artists and feminist art, including an essay in the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2020 publication She Persists, Protest and Gender in the NGV Collection (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). She has also curated a number of feminist exhibitions including The f Word – Contemporary Feminist Art in Australia (2014), and co-curated The Technopia Tours Feminist Art Bus (2014), f generation; feminism, art, progressions (2015) and AS IF: Echoes of the Women’s Art Register (2015). She has a PhD from the Victorian College of the Arts/University of Melbourne (2017), for the practice-led research project Materialising Feminism: object and interval that examined the minimalist object as a feminist, relational device. 

In the studio Phillips’ materially charged practice uses minimal forms, handmade processes of making, and the intensity of repetition to explore contemporary feminist aesthetics. Her use of recycled and industrial materials, combined with intensely crafted processes, expands minimalism into the realm of embodied corporeality. Most recently her practice has shifted to incorporate photography and time-based elements, that reconfigure relationships of power, sexual politics and embodied experience. Through modes of connection and inter-relation in both her methodology and outcomes, Phillips (re)imagines an ethical feminist future.

Cassandra Paige is a Filmmaker and Artist currently based out of Alberta, Canada. She graduated from the Red Deer College Motion Picture Arts Program in 2015 and was awarded the Alberta star of the Future Grant for her year. Although she studied acting, she went on to write and direct and in 2015 ’Mending with Gold’, her first film, was awarded “Best Experimental film” at the Edmonton Short Film Festival as well as nominated for a screen writing award at the Mirror Mountain Film Festival in Ottawa. Since then, Cassandra has won three Telus Storyhive Grants to fund her passions. They funded two short films including the film “Ugly Girl” which now has over 70,000 views on Youtube, and a music video for local metal band Haaze. Her work in Experimental films have been the focus as of lately, including a spontaneously recored phone call as the inspiration for her latest. Acting remains one of her passions and she continues to audition and act as much as she can. Music is another passion and she has most recently begun learning to play the Bass Guitar. Cassandra hopes to continue to make films and art that mean as much to others as her favourite films mean to her. She identifies as an intersectional feminist cis woman.

Website

Dan Hamilton is a visual artist, poet, and data enthusiast who identifies as a queer, white-Hispanic, first generation college graduate. They have also recently learned to accept and connect with their BFRB / OCD and are excited for how this will inform their creative practices. 

Since 2014, Dan has worked with several non-profit arts organizations as a means of community-building. Alongside the Creators Collective and its director, Nasrene Haj, Dan founded The Alliance of Brooklyn Creatives - to support partnership between artists and collectives, granting each greater exposure, opportunity for dialogue, and general support. This year, Dan has volunteered some 400 hours to the archives at Austin, Texas' Women and Their Work Gallery, helping to organize and curate documents and footage for their forthcoming permanent exhibition commemorating the gallery's past 40 years of empowering women- identifying artists. 

Dan holds a BA from Vassar College in Studio Art and Geography and has exhibited in several group shows across the US, including Black Box in Portland and Motion Media Arts Center in Austin. At the Hey Lady: Sylvia Rivera showcase, profits from Dan's piece and those of other contributors were donated to the Sylvia River Law Project, a legal aid organization that serves low-income or people of color who are transgender and/or gender non-conforming. Their art and writing has appeared online and in print in New York's Emerging Writers Anthology, Naked Garden, and Passaic / Völuspá. Their capstone research paper Sexwork in Cyberspace won departmental distinction in 2015 and was published by Raw Paw three years later. Most recently, Dan will be supporting their local creative community by participating in open studios, impromptu public park exhibitions, and backyard poetry readings.

Website Instagram

Deborah Eddy is an emerging mature age contemporary feminist artist and researcher who works in the field of sculpture and performance. She lives and works in Brisbane, Australia.

Her area of research is the invisibility of older women, ageism and historical feminist activist art. Her artwork responds to women’s historical and current unresolved issues, for example: the inequality of women, ageist treatment of older women, violence against women and also our fragile environment. Her work is influenced by 1970s feminist artists and the current feminist craftivists – craft + activism.

Eddy’s creative process utilises the feminine crafts of knitting, weaving, sewing and embroidery to make objects and also costumes in which she performs. Her materials are drawn from the building and safety industry. She favours a hi vis palette as a tool to give a hypervisibility to the issues she is responding to. 

She achieved a Bachelor of Arts 1st class Honours at a mature age in 2017 and is now completing a Doctor of Visual Arts. She attended the Feminist Art Collective Residency in Toronto in 2018. She was a speaker at the Lilith Feminisms/Femininities Symposium in 2019 and will be speaking at the Activisms @ the Margins conference in 2020. In 2019 she will be attending a month-long residency at House Conspiracy in Brisbane. Her work has been collected privately and by the Moreton Council Regional Gallery. Eddy has exhibited solo, in group exhibitions and in regional gallery exhibitions.  

While Eddy acknowledges that as a white heterosexual woman, she cannot speak of other’s issues and traumas, she respects and supports women of colour, transgender women and those who identify as women. Her pronouns are she/her. If she was to label her feminism she would be a Liberal Feminist with a touch of Marxism.

Website

Diana Zipeto’s folded paper paintings explore issues of gender, patriarchy, and democracy, specifically the ways in which people’s lived experiences of oppression and fragmentation is kept hidden and unrecognized in society. She studied illustration at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design where she was drawn to the power of painting and its ability to not only express ideas and emotions, but to provide space to think through cultural and political issues. In 2017, Diana received a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to produce the exhibit, Women Looking at Women, showcasing women painters working with the female figure in their work. In 2018, she was awarded a second gallery venue to showcase the exhibit. She has exhibited in both group and solo exhibitions, including the Ceres Gallery in New York, the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans, and numerous Massachusetts galleries and museums. Her paintings are in private collections and public spaces in the United States. Diana lives in Lowell, MA, and works in Lowell’s energizing artist community at Western Avenue Studios. 

As a Caucasian American, bisexual, feminist woman raised in a Democratic household and state, I identify politically as a liberal Democrat. I am interested in understanding and incorporating progressive ideas and listening to points of view that push the limits of my chosen party. I choose Democrat because it attempts to include all people and believes that any people who are oppressed means we are all living in an unhealthy society. Despite its many flaws, the party works to lift people up. It seeks to work through the issues that exist in living in a diverse culture rather than trying to ignore them. It turns around to face the reality of our history and our present rather than trying to contort it into something it can never be and never was.

Website Instagram

An abiding interest in color animates the figurative work of Elizabeth Chapin, whose most recent series, Deconstructing Nostalgia, explores the spaces between how culture tells us to be seen, how one wants to be seen, and where one’s truest self lies. It is a universal discrepancy, but one that, in the American South, where Chapin grew up, lies atop a relentless and narrowly defined yet cleverly downplayed ideal of success and beauty. A culture of propriety and hospitality (which can distract from systems of racism and patriarchy) is powerful today and has a way of dripping out an anesthetic of confusingly pleasurable status quo in exchange for capitulation. Chapin finds this overlay to be insidious and dangerous because it is moneyed and presents as socially acceptable, subverting violence with gentility. In many ways this is a large contributor to the foundation of our present political climate, given that 75% of white women in the American South voted for Roy Moore despite child molestation charges and for Cynde Hyde Smith after she made “public hanging” jokes. Chapin, having experienced rape and assault in college, watched the Kavanaugh hearing with rage and despair, only to find the women in her family believed and felt protective of Kavanaugh over Christine Blassey Ford. Chapin is exploring the ways in which women confuse social systems as their safety instead of their cage. She relishes the irony of using historically feminine sensibilities (ruffles, fringe, lace, doll-like sculptural paintings) as the very means for this exploration. 

Chapin feels that social media has crashed into the space of portraiture, democratizing it while creating a new tension between connectedness and anxiety. Women bear this pressure of image anxiety disproportionately both in reality and virtually. The selfie/nudes culture responds to this pressure. Chapin values a woman’s complex journey of finding her authentic voice that is free of either shame or duress, and one that perpetuates all women’s right to be utterly themselves. 

Chapin studied painting and art history at Parsons in Paris the summer of 1991 and in Florence at SACI College of Art and Design during the summer of 1992. She received her BFA at the University of Virginia in 1993 then moved to New York City and built a career as a portrait artist. In 1999, Chapin moved to Austin, TX, where she lives and works. 

In 2018 Chapin co-founded Midterms Matter in partnership with NYC’s Downtown for Democracy to activate the young vote in Texas, which hovers around 8%. Midterms Matter live-painted a mural at ACL Music Festival (attended by 450,000 people-- mostly in their 20s) where they could register young voters. Also, they created a backstage replication of Angela Davis’ living room where they encouraged musicians to speak about voting onstage. Many artists passionately spoke onstage, and Midterms Matter registered more than 800 new voters at the festival. The young vote in Texas surged in 2018

Website

Evelyn Roitner is an artist and illustrator who identifies as feminist and queer. Originally from Aurora, ON now based in St. John’s, NL. In 2016 she graduated from OCAD University with a Bachelor of Design in Illustration. 

Through traditional and digital mediums, she explores themes of identity, storytelling, place and personal mythologies. 

In university, she took a domestic ceramics course that subsequently took over her life for the remainder of the year – in a good way. In her approach to clay, she is most interested in combining illustration and sequential art with functional ceramics.

Instagram

Having loved the arts since childhood, Hemangi began her career as an Artist Educator in Dubai where she worked as a facilitator with a studio called The Jam Jar. There she designed and facilitated school visit workshops for all ages. Her teaching practice is grounded in an authentic studio approach with a breadth for freedom to create. 

Her own artistic practice was spurred when she became a mother in a new country and art became her therapy. She was inspired by her Indian heritage and Indian folk art to make cultural mandalas and zentangles with a variety of inks.  This brought her to delve deep into exploring these global patterns and prints from all over the world. Hemangi says she has found her purpose by focusing on teaching children how to express their own artistic voice while exploring her own. 

As an Educator and Coordinator with Blank Canvases Hemangi is able to bring her artistic passion to the children of Toronto from all grade levels. She does this by teaching them about local artists and their art making process while giving them an experience to create in an inspired experiential and supportive environment. She also designs lessons grounded in pedagogical approach using a process oriented student centered teaching practice. 

She brings her vast experience in the Corporate world and Clinical Practice into her work as an Art Educator and Coordinator . Her medical practice, which was predominantly treating children, became a catalyst in the transition towards becoming an empathetic Art Educator, enabling a deeper understanding in child psychology and behaviour patterns among children.

Hemangi is currently pursuing Fine Arts Foundation as well as Cartooning and Illustration Certification at George Brown College of Continuing Education. 

Her most recent artwork is a series of Pen and Ink Cultural Abstracts inspired by the wide variety of textile patterns and weaves of India and how it connects with fabrics around the world, as well as the intersection of fabrics and femininity in the Indian Culture. Her work is also influenced by her upbringing in a progressive but conservative Indian family and constantly questioning gender roles defined by the society she grew up in.

Website

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. Politically identifyig as an Intersectional Feminist they seek to make space for inclusive dialogue that critiques social injustice and the displacement of marginalized identities. 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, and the AGO’s First Thursdays.

Jordana Franklin is a writer, curator, and investigator based in Toronto, Canada. She holds a master’s degree in Art History from the University of Western Ontario. Her graduate work examined the impact of power structures on the private sphere through the works of feminist artists who recreated private experiences in public spaces.

Jordana has worked for art galleries on land and sea and curated exhibitions in Canada, Hungary, and Italy. Inspired by collaboration, she has been a member of the Feminist Art Collective, the London Writer’s Society, and an international curatorial collective known as 7x8. She has contributed articles to academic publications, art blogs, and arts and culture websites. She also co-founded a blog that examines critical curatorial practices.

As a fiction writer, she recently completed creative writing courses through the Toronto District School Board and Ryerson University. Her current writing practice is inspired by autofiction, transforming personal experiences into fictional narratives. She is working on her first novel, which uses interlocking narratives to explore how patriarchal systems can invade our fictional outlets.

In her curatorial practice, Jordana has strived to create a platform for artists to share their stories. With the creation of her novel, she is excited to also be sharing her own

My name is Laura Paolini (she/her pronouns), and I am an artist from Toronto living in Ottawa. My artwork is primarily conceptual and manifests through installations, videos, and performances. I have exhibited at art-based fundraisers and fairs, and in gallery settings. I identify politically as a feminist and a woman, and I hold myself accountable to all women and feminist histories. I strive to make space for queer and marginalized folk. 

My practice stands between historical interrogation, personal experience, and trajectory(ies) of contemporary art. I am interested in the complex overlaps and fleshy folds, where the “political” person and “personal” person meet, merge, and overlay. My work concerns itself with performative actions and methodologies that construct our engagement with objects. This exploration is humorous and probing, has feminist tendencies, and seeks to organize and condense a vast array of passions and emotions. The next steps I am taking in my artistic practice investigate how we manifest history through habits and patterns, and interrogates the structures uphold that as status quo. 

I graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2007 with a BFA with Distinction from the Sculpture/Installation Department in the Faculty of Art. I have worked for habitually for many artist-run centres, including Vtape from 2000-2012, respectively. Currently, I am pursuing an MFA in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa. My writing and critical thoughts on art and art-making have appeared in arts-based publications such as Les Fleurs du Mal, Fuse, Musicworks, and <H>ART International.

Website

Maria-Hélèna is an accomplished actress, singer-songwriter and multidisciplinary artist. Originally from Montreal the area, Maria-Hélèna completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Concordia University, and their Master's in Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa, where her research focused on feminist political theatre. She has presented and curated her work as part of solo and group shows, working with galleries and other spaces, to show her visual art; and also performed in several theatre productions and musicals, as well as performed her own original music. 

Passionate about the power of music, song and vocal work, Maria-Hélèna released their first independent album of original songs, entitled “Stories the land will tell”. These works of inspired songwriting are a subtle but powerful call to honouring the land, and intended to inspire listeners to take action on environmental and social justice issues and allyship. 

In 2018, Maria-Hélèna wrote, directed and produced her first play for the 2018 Ottawa Fringe Festival, entitled "Ultraviolet Life". The play spoke to issues of identity and chronic illness, as she experienced them as a survivor of abuse and a person living with multiple chronic health issues and disabilities. 

Fascinated by theatre and social movements, they have been part of forum theatre and delivered workshops on theatre of the oppressed, working with people from a variety of backgrounds, with a strong emphasis on social justice and intersectional feminism throughout her work and practice. 

Maria-Hélèna is a non-binary queer femme and their pronouns are she, they, her and them.

Graduated of National School of Photography in Arles after studies in Fine Arts and Philosophy, Mélanie Pottier wonders codes through each individual is constructed as a gendered body. 

Diverting symbols, gender iconography, her photography play with reality as parodies of a copy. Her works has been shown in various exhibitions in France and abroad. I politically self-identify as dyke or lesbian in a way of warning with the invisibility of lesbians and defend a queerness in lgbtqi+ front of normativity of bodies, etc.

Nadine Valcin is a bilingual Canadian filmmaker of Haitian descent whose documentary and dramatic work deals with questions of race, language and identity. Her productions have been widely broadcast on television in Canada and the United States as well as film festivals around the world.

She has directed four documentary projects for the National Film Board of Canada, including the critically-acclaimed Black, Bold and Beautiful (1999) and Une école sans frontières (A School without Borders, 2008). Most recently, her short experimental film Heartbreak was one of 20 finalists among over1700 submissions to the inaugural TIFFxInstagram Shorts Fest in 2016. She has written and directed three short narrative films and is developing the virtual reality experience Ghosts of Remembrance about the forgotten history of slavery in Canada with funding from Ontario Creates and the experimental stream of the Canada Media Fund.

Nadine has been awarded numerous grants and prizes including two prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowships and a Drama Prize from the National Screen Institute for the short film In Between. She holds a professional degree in architecture from McGill University and is an alumna of Doc Lab, Women in the Director’s Chair, and the National Screen Institute. She was an artist-inresidence at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University for the 2015-16 academic year and the recipient of the 2016 WIFT-T/DGC Ontario Director Mentorship. She is currently an MFA candidate in Digital Futures at OCADU as well as artist-in-residence for Archive/Counter Archive at Library and Archives Canada.

Negin Shamshiri is a Toronto-based painter. She uses archival material and spatial references to examine the interplay among history, identity, and gender. Tehran-born to Iranian parents, her artistic study is inspired by her personal immigrant experience and the experiences of women in her life. She highlights complexities and contradictions in being an immigrant woman – precarious hopeful beginnings, unplanned narratives, and the search for agency and relevance.

Using acrylics and mixed media, her work is currently focused on the creation of a series of paintings based on personal and family photos taken in Iran and Toronto. Her depictions of amused and carefree Iranian women contrast with the personal, social and political realities of life in Iran and marginalized immigrant life in the West. Negin uses symbolic and physical references in her work to signify concrete and misleading markers of identity and home.

In addition to this work, Negin also uses watercolours to paint encompassing and vibrant images of real and imagined floral arrangements.

Negin has her HBA and MPP from the University of Toronto. Since 2011, she has worked as a policy professional, largely within a local government setting.

Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, installation, textiles and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space. Susan is co-founder of Ogimaa Mikana, an artist collective working to reclaim and rename the roads and landmarks of Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemowin and is a member of the Indigenous Routes artist collective which works to provide free new media training for Indigenous youth. Her writing has been published in Shameless Magazine, the Globe & Mail, and on the Decolonization: Indigeneity, Society, and Education blog and she is the recipient of a 2014 IDERD award for her anti-racism work at the University of Toronto. Susan received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography and a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from the University of Manitoba, a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Windsor in Integrated Media, and is a PhD student in Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). In August 2019, Susan joined OCAD University as Delaney Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture and as Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies.