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.

Kari Cwynar is a doctoral candidate in Art History at Concordia University and independent curator and editor based between Toronto and Montreal. Her research asks whether tracing lineages of performance and ephemeral practice in Canada can serve to denaturalize the colonial attachment of public art to monuments. She was the inaugural curator of Evergreen’s public art program in Toronto’s Don River Valley (2015-2020), co-director of the occasional project space and publishing house Kunstverein Toronto since 2014, and Editor and Editorial Director of C Magazine (2016-2019). She has written on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, Inuit Art Quarterly, Frieze and C Magazine; held curatorial research positions at the National Gallery of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario; and participated in curatorial and writing residencies at Fogo Island Arts, the Banff Centre, Griffin Art Projects and SOMA Mexico.

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.

Tanya Lukin Linklater is an Alutiiq multidisciplinary artist and performer whose work, performances, videos and installations have been exhibited in Canada and abroad. Her work centres Indigenous knowledge production in and through orality, conversation and embodied practices, including dance. While reckoning with histories that affect Indigenous peoples’ lives, lands and ideas, she investigates insistence. She considers That which sustains us a conceptual and affective line within her work, alongside histories and structural violences that Indigenous peoples continue to respond to. In 2017, as a member of Wood Land School, she participated in Under the Mango Tree – Sites of Learning, a gathering for documenta14 in Athens and Kassel. In 2018, Lukin Linklater presented a commissioned performance for Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Lukin Linklater was the inaugural recipient of the Wanda Koop Research Fund administered by Canadian Art. She will present currrent and new works, including a performance, for the BMW Tate Live Exhibition 2020 in London. She originates from the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in Alaska and is based in Northern Ontario.

Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning is a Queen’s National Scholar in Anishinaabe Language, Knowledge and Culture (ALKC), Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. A member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation and an interdisciplinary artist and scholar, she received a PhD from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University (2018), and holds graduate degrees in critical theory (MA, Western, 2005), and in contemporary art (MFA, Simon Fraser, 1997). She points to her early childhood grounding in her mother’s  cultural lessons as her primary philosophical influence and source of creativity. Manning has wide-ranging interests in Anishinaabe ontology, critical theory, phenomenology, and art, investigating questions of Indigenous imaging practices, mnidoo inter-relationality, epistemological sovereignty, and the debilitating impact of settler colonial logics.

David Metzer is a historian of twentieth and twenty-first century music. His work covers a variety of genres, including popular music, classical, and jazz. He nimbly jumps from Barry Manilow’s power ballads to songs by Aaron Copland. His research explores cultural issues of race, sexuality, gender, and emotional expression. A new project looks at how musicians have confronted the toll of incarceration in American society and how musical works have shaped understandings of incarceration.

He is the author of The Ballad in American Popular Music: From Elvis to Beyoncé, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music.  The Ballad in American Popular Music: From Elvis to Beyoncé is the first history of the ballad in recent popular music and discusses why these songs have become emotional touchstones in our lives and American society. David has published articles in a wide range of music and interdisciplinary journals, including Journal of the American Musicological Society, Popular Music, Modernism/modernity, and Black Music Research Journal.

Lisa Myers (Beausoleil First Nation, born in Oakville, ON, Canada; lives in Port Severn and Toronto, ON, Canada) is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Myers has a Master of Fine Arts in Criticism and Curatorial practice from OCAD University. Her recent work includes printmaking, stop-motion animation, and performance involving food. She is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, Toronto. Myers is a member of Beausoleil First Nation.

Michael Nardone is a poet and editor based in Montréal. His works include Aural Poetics (2023), the Documents on Expanded Poetics books series (2018– ), the critical journal Amodern (2013– ), The Ritualites (2018), Sonic Materialities (2016), and Transaction Record (2014). An active collaborator across artistic practices to produce experimental editions and language works, Nardone’s recent and ongoing collaborations occur with Dana Michel, Dylan Robinson, Ryan Clarke, and Tanya Lukin Linklater. His forthcoming works include a monograph on contemporary poetics, a book of dialogues, and a translation of Abigail Lang’s La conversation transatlantique.

Lisa C. Ravensbergen is an established multi-disciplinary creator and writer, and also works across Turtle Island as a Jessie-nominated actor and dramaturge, director and dancer. A tawny mix of Ojibwe/ Swampy Cree and English/ Irish, Ravensbergen resides on unceded Coast Salish territory in Vancouver, BC. She supplements her eclectic theatre practice with the delights of motherhood and the challenges of self-produced works. Ravensbergen is an Associate Artist with Full Circle and Playwright-in-Residence with Delinquent Theatre. She holds undergraduate degrees from TWU and SFU and is currently in the final year of her MA in Cultural Studies at Queens.

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 is the author of Hungry Listening (2020). His other 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).

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.

Rita Wong is a poet and associate professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Wong investigates the relationships between contemporary poetics, social justice, ecology and decolonization. For some time now, she has been researching the poetics of water. A recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop Emerging Writer Award, Wong is the author of monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), forage (Nightwood, 2007, short-listed for the 2008 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry, winner of Canada Reads Poetry 2011), sybil unrest (Line Books, 2008, with Larissa Lai), and undercurrent (Nightwood, 2015). Wong co-authored with Fred Wah the map-length poem beholden: a poem as long as the river (Talonbooks, 2018). In 2017 she co-edited with Dorothy Christian Downstream: Reimagining Water, a collection of work on the theme of water for the Environmental Humanities series with WLU Press.