Re’al Christian is a writer, editor and art historian based in Queens, NY. She is the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, a nonprofit research centre based at The New School, where she manages editorial projects including anthologies, artist books, exhibition booklets, communications, and the digital series Post/doc. As an independent writer, her criticism, essays and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine and ART PAPERS, where she is a contributing editor. She has written texts for catalogues and anthologies including Howardena Pindell: Numbers/Pathways/Grids (Garth Greenan and Dieu Donné), On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016–2021 (Gregory R. Miller & Co.), Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument), and And ever an edge (Studio Museum in Harlem), among others. Her curatorial projects include The Black Index (2020–22) and Life as Activity: David Lamelas (2021), which she worked on as a graduate curatorial fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries, as well as The earth leaked red ochre (2022) at Miriam Gallery, for which she edited an accompanying catalogue; Steven Anthony Johnson II: Getting Blood from Stone at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (2022); and Repetition means a/void at Parent Company (2023). She received her MA in Art History from Hunter College and holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History and Media, Culture and Communication from New York University.

Claudia Fernandez is a Mexican sculptor whose practice is collaborative by nature. She thrives on discovering the self through finding spiritual connections between materials, sounds and stories. Her research is mainly focused on mythology, surreal mathematics, comedy and geographical mysticism. Her most recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Ranger Station Art Gallery, Harrison, BC, It’s Not All The Work (2023) and a group show at ECU Michael O’Brian Exhibition Commons, Leaning Out of Windows: In/visible Forces (2022). As a multi-instrumentalist, Fernandez has performed for the launch of the music program at Alouette Correctional Facility in Maple Ridge, BC, The Punk Museum in LA, HKW Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin and Nrmal Fest in Mexico City. Fernandez is a grant recipient from The Goethe-Institut for her work with the musical ensemble Mondmaschine, and holds a BFA from Emily Carr University, sculpture studies from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway, and advanced music production degrees from The London Music School in the UK and the Nimbus School of Recording Arts in Canada.

Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary artist working in performance and media arts. She was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Canadian mid-career artist (2018), a Lucas Artists Fellowship in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design, Montalvo Arts Center (2019-2020), and the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Award (2023). Hupfield is a Guest Curator for the Artists of Color Council, Movement Research at Judson Church, Winter 2020, and an inaugural resident of the Surf Point Foundation Residency 2020. Her solo Nine Years Towards The Sun at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, (2019) focuses on exhibiting performance as living culture and follows her first major institutional solo exhibition in Canada, The One Who Keeps on Giving, a production of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto. Her work has shown at the Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, represented Canada at SITE Santa Fe (2016) and traveled nationally with Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-14); with recent performances at the National Gallery of Canada. Hupfield is an off-rez citizen of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Anishinaabe Nation, and the Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto.

Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist and curator. Throughout his artistic practice, Morin investigates the impact zones that occur when Indigenous practices collide with Western-settler colonialism. Morin’s artworks are shaped, and reshaped, by Tahltan epistemological production and often takes the form of performance interventions. In addition to his exhibition history, Morin has curated exhibition for the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery and Burnaby Art Gallery. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievements by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin’s practice has spanned twenty years so far, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Singapore, New Zealand, and Greenland, as well as across Canada and the United States. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.

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.

Patrick Nickleson is a settler music historian from southwestern Ontario. He is currently Assistant Professor of musicology at the University of Alberta, where his research explores music’s role in dispossession, and unfounded claims of propriety on historical, experimental, and popular sound recordings. His graduate training and the majority of his publications to date have been centered around musical minimalism, with a particular focus on its authorial disputes, scrutiny by musicologists, and its ambiguous standing as an art music. Notable works in this domain include his monograph titled “The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute” (University of Michigan Press, 2023) and articles published in Twentieth Century Music and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. These articles challenge minimalism’s status as an art music through the presentation of published transcriptions and analyses of bootleg tapes. Additionally, Nickleson is actively engaged in the scholarly contributions of Jacques Rancière. He serves as the co-editor of “Rancière and Music” and has translated Rancière’s essays, including “Afterword: A Distant Sound” (featured in “Rancière and Music”) and “Autonomy and Historicism: the False Alternative” (published in Perspectives of New Music).

Skeena Reece (Tsimshian/Gitksan/Cree, b. 1974) is an artist based on the West Coast of British Columbia. Her installation and performance work has garnered national and international attention, most notably for Raven: On the Colonial Fleet (2010) presented at the 2010 Sydney Biennale as part of the group exhibition Beat Nation. Her multi-disciplinary practice includes performance art, spoken word, humour, “sacred clowning,” writing, singing, songwriting, video and visual art. She studied media arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and was the recipient of the British Columbia Award for Excellence in the Arts (2012), the VIVA Award (2014) and the Hnatyshyn Award (2017). For Savage (2010), Reece won a Genie Award for Best Acting in a Short Film and the film won a Golden Sheaf Award for Best Multicultural Film, ReelWorld Outstanding Canadian Short Film, Leo Awards for Best Actress and Best Editing. Solo exhibitions include Surrounded at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (2019); Touch Me at the Comox Valley Art Gallery, Courtenay, BC (2018); Moss at Oboro Gallery, Montréal (2017) and The Sacred Clown & Other Strangers at Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Winnipeg (2015). Group Exhibitions include Red on Red: Indigeneity, Labour, Value at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (2022); Women & Masks: An Arts-Based Research Conference at Boston University (2021-22), Interior Infinite at the Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2021); Àbadakone at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018-2019) and Sweetgrass and Honey at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2018), among others.

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.

Charlene Vickers is an Anishinaabe artist based in Vancouver working in painting, drawing, sculpture, assemblage and performance. Vickers’s works manifest ancestral connections, cultural reclamations and her territorial presence as Anishinaabe Kwe while responding formally to the Coast Salish land she has resided upon for the past thirty years. She holds undergraduate degrees from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Studio) and Simon Fraser University (BA, Critical Studies), as well an MFA from the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Recent exhibitions include Indian Theatre (CCS BARD Hessel Museum, 2023), Reverberations: Contemporary Art and Modern Classics (Seattle Art Museum, 2023), Good Foot Forward (Art Toronto, 2023), Big Blue Smudge (USask, 2022), Ancestral Gesture (CAG, 2021), Rain Shadow (Nanaimo Art Gallery, 2021) and Where Do We Go From Here? (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2020).