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 multi-disciplinary artist who 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.

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 completed his PhD in art history at Harvard under the supervision of TJ Clark and in 1987 joined the University of British Columbia, where he is Professor of Art History and a Faculty Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. He publishes on modern art history and criticism, and is the author, co-author, or editor of eighteen books and more than sixty articles. His current research is on nuclear photography in North America and Japan. He has organized four exhibitions on the subject, two of which, Strangelove’s Weegee (2013) and Camera Atomica (2015), were accompanied by catalogues. A related book, Atomic Postcards: Radioactive Messages from the Cold War, co-authored with Jeremy Borsos, was published in 2011.

His other books include: Beyond Wilderness (2007), edited with Peter White; Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse (1999); Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power, and the State (1996), co-edited with Bruce Barber and Serge Guilbaut; The Flat Side of the Landscape (1989); Degas to Matisse (1988); and David Milne and the Modern Tradition of Painting (1983). He is also the editor of the four-volume edition of Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (1986 and 1993). The volumes were named to The New York Times list of “best” books of the year, and have received hundreds of scholarly citations.

He has lectured in North America as well as in Europe, Israel, Mexico, Australia, South Africa, India, Palestine, China, and Japan. He was the Shastri Visiting Professor in India in 1997 and Visiting Research Professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan in 2007. From 2008 to 2011, he was the Brenda and David McLean Chair of Canadian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Approximately half his research and teaching is related to Canadian art and culture. Beyond his academic responsibilities, he has been involved with the Harvard University Art Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Presentation House Gallery, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.

In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2011, he received the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University and an honorary doctorate from Trinity College at the University of Toronto. In 2016, he was inducted into the University of Toronto Sports Hall of Fame.

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 of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the 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). (2018)