Jamelie Hassan is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator and lecturer, for whom art and activism are deeply intertwined. Her experience living as a Canadian citizen with a Lebanese immigrant background and leading a career that has involved extensive international travel contextualizes the sensitivity to cultural displacement, political conflict and social activism in her work. Her art is both personal and political, addressing worldwide concerns about cultural interactions, the subjection of women, colonialism, racism and political conflict. Using traditional and contemporary cultural artifacts, she works in a visual language of cultural cross-references. Hassan studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome; the Académie libanaise des beaux-arts, Beirut; University of Windsor; and University of Mustansiriya, Baghdad. Hassan has exhibited in Canada and internationally including at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver; Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina; Art Gallery of York University, Toronto; Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo; Windsor Art Gallery; and Museum London. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; University of Baghdad; and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Hassan was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual Arts (2001) and the Canada Council’s Arts International Artist Residency in Paris. Hassan lives and works in London, ON.

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).