• Melody Courage

    Performer

    Vancouver-based Métis soprano Melody Courage, of Dene, Cree and Chipewyan descent, gained national attention as The Native Girl in the 2017 world premiere of Marie Clements’ and Brian Current’s opera Missing, co-produced by City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria. Missing gives voice, in English and Gitxsan, to the story of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women. Courage received her degree and diploma in Opera Performance from the Vancouver Academy of Music after music studies at the University of British Columbia, followed by guest appearances in Vivaldi’s Gloria with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and The Messiah with the Prince George Symphony Orchestra.

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  • Tania Willard

    Artist

    Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation) works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production. Often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Willard has worked as a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard’s curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, a national touring exhibition first presented at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011, Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology co-curated by Karen Duffek in 2016 and CUSTOM MADE at Kamloops Art Gallery. She has also been selected as one of five national curators for a national scope exhibition in collaboration with Partners in Art and National Parks. Willard’s personal curatorial projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land based art and action led by Indigenous artists. Willard’s current research constructs a land rights aesthetic through intuitive archival acts and land-based practices, focusing on Secwepemc aesthetics/language/land and interrelated Indigenous art practices.

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