Sheryl Conkelton is the Senior Curator at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, and has been as associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Among her publications are monographs on Annette Messager, Catherine Wagner, Aaron Siskind and Frederick Sommer, as well as an upcoming volume on Uta Barth.

Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994) was a painter, sculptor, teacher, poet, musician, filmmaker and photographer. When Kiyooka arrived in Vancouver in 1959 he was already one of Canada’s most respected abstract painters. His modernist stance at the time inspired a generation of Vancouver painters to reach beyond regionalism. In the sixties and seventies Kiyooka began to write and publish poetry and produce photographic works. The best known of these, StoneDGloves (1969-1970), is both a poetic and photographic project. As Kiyooka eventually rejected the Greenbergian modernist aesthetic that informed his paintings he increasingly took up performance, photography, film and music. He saw the position of the artist as being in opposition to the institutions of art. Born in Moose Jaw, SK, Kiyooka grew up in Calgary during the pre-World War II years. He studied at the Alberta College of Art in the 1940s under Jock MacDonald and Illingworth Kerr.  In 1955 he won a scholarship to the Institutio Allende in Mexico, where he studied under James Pinto.  During the summers between 1956 and 1960, Kiyooka attended the Artists’ workshops at Emma Lake, Saskatchewan, where he worked under two American leading abstract artists: Will Barnet and Barnett Newman.  In the early 1960s, Kiyooka moved to Vancouver and soon became a leader in the emergent artistic community there.  In the next two decades, he embarked on a remarkable career as an artist, and traveled across Canada to Calgary, Regina, Halifax and made many trips to Japan. He became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1965; represented Canada at the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil, where he was awarded a silver medal. In 1967 his work was exhibited at Expo in Montreal and in every major centennial show across Canada.

Roy Miki is a writer, poet, teacher, and editor, whose publications include Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement (Co-authored with Cassandra Kobayashi) and Random Access File (Red Deer College Press). He edited Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka (Talonbooks), which received the 1997 poetry award from the Association for Asian American Studies, and is currently writing a book on his participation in the Japanese Canadian redress movement of the 1980s. A collection of essays, Broken Entries: Race Subjectivity Writing, has recently been published by Mercury Press.

John O’Brian is an art historian, writer and curator. Until 2017, he taught at the University of British Columbia. His publications on nuclear photography include Strangelove’s Weegee, Camera Atomica, Through Post-Atomic Eyes, The Bomb in the Wilderness, and Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War. He has organized five exhibitions on nuclear photography, in Copenhagen, London, Toronto, and Vancouver, and is a recipient of the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University.

Scott Toguri McFarlane is a writer and editor living in Montreal. He is the co-founder of the Pomelo Project, a production house for the arts which organized City at the End of Time: Hong Kong 1997, a series of art exhibitions, poetry readings, public talks and publications engaging with Hong Kong culture. He was one of the organizers for “Writing thru Race,’‘ a national conference for First Nations writers and writers of colour. He is completing his PhD in the English Department at Simon Fraser University.

Henry Tsang is a visual artist and independent curator based in Vancouver. His artwork has been exhibited across Canada and abroad, and is concerned with cultural identity and intercultural communication, exploring the interaction between different cultures resulting from contact, influence, negotiation, and contestation. Tsang’s curatorial projects include Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity and Chinese-Canadian Artists in Vancouver, at the Chinese Cultural Centre in Vancouver in 1991; Racy Sexy, an intercultural multidisciplinary project presenting 33 artists in 9 community and cultural centres around Greater Vancouver in 1993; and City at the End of Time: Hong Kong 1997, a series of art exhibitions, poetry readings and public lectures, in 1997.

Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).