Vanessa Andreotti is the Interim Director of the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, a professor in the Department of Educational Studies, a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, a research fellow at the University of Oulu, where she was chair of global education from 2010 to 2013, and a research fellow at the Centre for Global Citizenship Education at the University of Alberta. Andreotti’s research examines historical and systemic patterns of reproduction of inequalities and how these limit or enable possibilities for collective existence and global change. Her publications in this field include analyses of political economies of knowledge production, discussions of the ethics of international development, and critical comparisons of ideals of globalism and internationalization in education and in global activism, with an emphasis on representations of and relationships with marginalized communities.

Kayah George “Halth-Leah” (she/they) proudly carries the teachings of her Tulalip and Tsleil-Waututh Nations and has been on the frontlines fighting against the Trans Mountain pipeline for more than half of her life. She is a young Indigenous environmental leader, activist and filmmaker. George has spoken globally about climate justice and shared the teachings of her nations to honour and care for the earth. She has worked with environmental organizations, including Indigenous Climate Action (an Indigenous-led organization guided by a diverse group of Indigenous knowledge keepers, water protectors and land defenders), to build capacity for an Indigenous-led divestment movement. George is currently working on a short film that shares the intrinsic connection the Tsleil-Waututh people have to the “Burrard” Inlet.

Ayasha Guerin is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and professor of Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English Language and Literatures. Dr. Guerin is also faculty affiliate of the Centre for European Studies, the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, and a member of the Critical Image Forum research cluster at UBC.
Dr. Guerin received her PhD in 2020 from New York University’s American Studies program. Her first book project, Making Zone-A: Nature, Race and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores, explores Black social life and ecology in the city’s floodplain from the 17th-19th centuries. Tracing how colonial capitalism has cultivated a hierarchy of racial and species difference on urban landfill, it considers how activism on the waterfront has been shaped by diasporic relationships and interspecies entanglements. Her second project is focused on transnational Black feminism and arts activism in Berlin, Germany.

Charlene K. Lau is an art historian, critic and Curator of Public Art at Evergreen Brick Works. She has held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Parsons School of Design, The New School; and Performa Biennial. Charlene has also held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design, OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, Western University and York University. Her writing has been published in Art in America, Artforum, TheAtlantic.com, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, Canadian Art, frieze, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, Fashion Theory and Journal of Curatorial Studies, among others.

Gudrun Lock works with performance, sculpture, video, painting, and collaborative, socially engaged art practices. In 2019 and 2020 she received grants from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and in 2021 and 2022 from their Institute for Advanced Study to engage human and other-than-human partners in a long-term project focused on revitalizing the buffers of active rail land.

Lock knows that trees, rocks, and rivers are part of a living metabolism whose transformative powers endure even amidst ongoing extraction, colonialisms, and unsatiated consumption. Born in California, and raised in Montreal, she has lived in Minneapolis for 24 years. Her work has been installed in galleries in the US and Canada, foreclosed homes, empty storefronts, the Atlantic Ocean, and a hole in her backyard.

Michael Nardone is a postdoctoral fellow at the Université de Montréal, where he researches poetics, performance, and inscriptive practices. Co-editor of the book series Documents on Expanded Poetics (Anteism Books) and the critical journal Amodern, he is author of two books of poetry – The Ritualites (2018) and Transaction Record (2014) – and editor of Aural Poetics (2023) and Sonic Materialities (2016). His writings, dialogues, and editorial works are collected at http://soundobject.net.

Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw artist and writer of Stó:lō descent, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. His current work focuses on the return of Indigenous songs to communities who were prohibited by law to sing them as part of the Indian Act from 1882‒1951. Robinson’s previous publications include the edited volumes Music and Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples of North America (2018); Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2016) and Opera Indigene (2011). His monograph, Hungry Listening, is forthcoming in early 2020 with Minnesota University Press.

Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the Belkin. Inaugurating this position at the Belkin, Rosenblum’s role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completing two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

One of the founders of the Photographers Gallery, Sandra Semchuk, asks herself the question: what leads towards deeper recognitions across generations, cultures and species? Photographer and scholar Semchuk is a second generation Ukrainian Canadian. In 2018, Sandra received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She has focused her often collaborative photographic and video works on relationships between herself, her family, and her community. She collaborated with her late husband James Nicholas, Rock Cree writer and orator, on photographic, text and video works to disrupt myths that have shaped settler relations to First Nations. Ithin-eh-wuk – We Place Ourselves at the Centre: James Nicholas and Sandra Semchuk, is a traveling collaborative exhibition produced by the Mackenzie Art Gallery. She is the author of The Stories Were Not Told, Canada’s First World War Internment Camps, the University of Alberta Press.