Weiyi Chang is a writer and curator based in Toronto. Currently the 2023-24 Writer-in-Residence at Gallery 44, Chang’s research centres around the nexus between the cultural, social, economic, and political forces that sanction ecological violence, including climate change and biodiversity loss. Her writing has been widely published and she has curated projects in Canada, Germany, and the United States. Chang was a 2019-20 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She holds a MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies from the University of British Columbia.

Soft Turns is the collaborative effort of Wojciech Olejnik and Sarah Jane Gorlitz. Alongside simple mechanisms —pulleys, mirrors, paper, lenses — and crucially, their own bodies, they use stop-motion animation’s capacity to stretch and collapse time, to attempt to get as close as possible to the rhythms of their subjects. The results are slow-paced, immersive, intimate video-centred installations. Recent research interests include: controlled artificial environments such as greenhouses and data centres, plant-human interactions and the physics of information. Feature articles about their work have been published in Canadian Art and Esse, and their writing will be included in the upcoming edition of Public Journal. Their work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, most recently at the Plumb (Toronto, 2021) 8eleven (Images Festival, 2018) and The Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2018). They have been privileged to undertake residencies abroad and in Canada, including a pivotal three years at the School of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph (2016-19). They are current artists-in-residence at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (2023-2024), where they host a bi-monthly reading group called Thinking through the milieu: decentralizing thinking while spending time with plants. Gorlitz is a settler of English and Mennonite descent and Olejnik immigrated from Poland as an adolescent. They live with their two young daughters in the Lakeshore Village Artist Co-op, on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples, in what is commonly referred to as Toronto.

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.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at UBC. She is a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish scholar, curator, and writer from Galiano Island, BC. Through her research, Usher is interested in the many ways in which peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday from an Indigenous perspective. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a methodology for embodied theory and an alternative form of sensing place. She is an award-winning writer whose work merges theory with poetry and at times, science-fiction; she has been published widely across academic books, magazines, arts journals, and exhibition texts. In addition to her academic work, she serves as Co-Chair of the Toronto Biennial of Art, is a Board Member of the Galiano Island Literary Festival, and sits on several advisories and committees across academia and the arts sector.