Teresa Montoya (Diné) is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago where she holds a position in Native American and Indigenous Studies. She earned a PhD in Anthropology from New York University where she also completed a filmmaking certificate in Culture and Media.  She earned a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Spanish from the University of San Diego and an M.A. in Museum Anthropology from the University of Denver. Her current manuscript project, Permeable: Diné Politics of Extraction and Exposure, approaches territorial dispossession and environmental toxicity as pervasive features of contemporary Indigenous life. Based on over 15 months of ethnographic research on the Navajo Nation, her research engages local modes of relating, both in its political and kinship imaginings, to understand the entanglements of checkerboard allotment, tribal jurisdiction, and regulatory failure among Diné communities of present-day northern Arizona and New Mexico. Themes of environmental contamination and settler colonialism interrogated in her writing are central to her ongoing media work in the mediums of photography and filmmaking. A curated selection of images from her current photographic projects are shared in this website. Her academic, political, and personal commitments are centered in Diné Bikéyah, the home that she carries with her and the home to which she always returns.

Marianne Nicolson (Kwakwaka’wakw, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations, b. 1969) is an artist and activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw Nations who are part of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala speaking peoples) of the Northwest Coast. She is trained in both traditional Kwakwaka’wakw forms and culture and contemporary gallery and museum-based practice. Her practice is multi-disciplinary, encompassing photography, painting, carving, video, installation, monumental public art, writing and speaking. She works as a Kwakwaka’wakw cultural researcher and historian, as well as an advocate for Indigenous land rights. She holds a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design (1996), an MFA (2000), MA in Linguistics and Anthropology (2005) and PhD in Linguistics and Anthropology with a focus on space as expressed in the Kwak’wala language (2013) all from the University of Victoria. Solo exhibitions include the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (2008); Artspeak, Vancouver (2006); Esquimalt Municipal Hall (2004); Thunder Bay Art Gallery (2002); National Indian Art Centre, Hull (2001); Campbell River Public Art Gallery (2000) and Or Gallery, Vancouver (1992). Group exhibitions include the 17^th Biennale of Sydney (2020); the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver (2020); the Vancouver Art Gallery (2019-20); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2018-19) and the National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2017-19), among others. Major monumental public artworks are situated in her home territory of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation, Vancouver International Airport, the Canadian Embassy in Amman, Jordan and the Canadian Embassy in Paris, France.

Following Nicolson’s Hexsa’am: To Be Here Always, a 2019 project with the Belkin that functioned as research, material, media, testimony and ceremony to challenge the western concept that the power of art as limited to the symbolic, This Is An Emergency Broadcast (2023) is another moment to amplify Indigenous tradition.

Tania Willard, of the Secwepemc 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 MADEat Kamloops Art Gallery. She has also been selected as one of 5 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.

cheyanne turions is a curator, cultural worker and writer concerned with art’s capacity to provoke otherwise possibilities. Currently, turions is the Curator at SFU Galleries and on the Board of Directors at 221A.

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.