Solange Adum Abdala is a Peruvian-born photographer and visual artist (b.1980) currently based in Vancouver, where she is a candidate in the MFA program at the University of British Columbia. She holds a BA in visual project direction and photography from the Escuela Superior Tecnológica Centro de la Imagen. Influenced by her Lebanese-Palestinian heritage and experiences of migration, Adum Abdala’s practice engages with temporality, space, territory and landscape. Initially focused on lens-based views, Adum Abdala now repurposes previous works to comment on colonization, incorporating drawing, video, collage, AI and vision-extension devices to invite viewers to re/de/construct their perceptions of the world. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Peru, as well as in the US, Europe and Asia. She has been recognized by the Prix Pictet (2022), Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano, CPNA Contemporary Art Award (2020, 2024), American Illustration-American Photography (2019) and NextFoto Ibero-America (2014). In addition to her artistic practice, Adum Abdala teaches photography and in 2021, co-founded Galería Pública, a virtual gallery specializing in disseminating photographic production in Peru.

Barforoush is a journalism educator with a background in journalism and photography research. Her research interests include journalism education, representation of the “other” in news and photojournalism, foreign affairs and international reporting, journalism ethics, political communication, and the implications of new media technology in journalism and ethical reporting. Barforoush is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in journalism at UBC’s school of Journalism, Writing, and Media and an affiliated faculty with the bachelor of Media studies program.

Sabine Bitter (b. 1960) is a Vancouver-based artist, curator, educator and professor at Simon Fraser University. From 2009-13, Bitter was the coordinator of the Audain Visual Artist in Residence program and the curator of the Audain Gallery, SFU, realizing projects with Marjetica Potrč, Raqs Media Collective, Elke Krasny with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, Ricardo Basbaum, Claire Fontaine and Muntadas, among others. Since 1993, Bitter has collaborated with Vienna-based artist Helmut Weber on projects addressing cities, architecture and the politics of representation and space. Working mainly in photography and spatial installations, their research-oriented practice engages with specific moments and logics of global urban change in neighbourhoods, architecture and everyday life. Engaging architecture as a frame for spatial meaning, their ongoing research includes projects like “Educational Modernism” and “Housing the Social.” In 2004, Bitter, Weber and Jeff Derksen formed the research collective Urban Subjects.

Bourges is a Vancouver-based filmmaker originating from France. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Production at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Theatre and Film. His films navigate the intersection of documentary and fiction, with an emphasis on human relations within institutional systems. His practice is based on ongoing collaborations with his subjects, both actors and non-actors with lived experience within the systems depicted. Bourges’ work has been presented at numerous festivals and film spaces including the Berlinale, TIFF, Viennale, Centre Pompidou’s Cinéma du Réel, and the Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real.

Diack is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and the History of Photography at the University of Miami, where she specializes in conceptual art, critical theory, conflict studies, and civic engagement. She is the author of Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), co-author with Erina Duganne and Terri Weissman of Global Photography: A Critical History (London: Routledge, 2020), and co-editor of photographies (Fall 2017 no. 10.3) Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including, Visual Studies, History of Photography, Public, and RACAR, as well as in several edited volumes, such as Photography Performing Humor (Leuven University Press, 2019), L’art de Douglas Huebler (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018), Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2017), and The Public Life of Photographs (MIT Press and Ryerson Image Center, 2016). In 2016 Diack was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

Christine D’Onofrio is an artist who works in photography, video, digital media, interactive media, printmaking, sculpture, book work and installation.Her practice explores themes related to art history and the nature of artistic practice, current and historical feminisms, exploitation, virtue, humiliation, humour and desire. She is interested in the contradictions and ambiguities of liberty, especially under capitalism and her work frequently juxtaposes consumer culture and mass media with art historical references. Her recent work critically addresses feminist strategies and discourses pertaining to structures of exploitation, humiliation and power. D’Onofrio is involved with Art+Feminism in Vancouver, an international campaign to improve the coverage of women and female identifying artists on Wikipedia.

Olivia Michiko Gagnon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Film at UBC. She is currently completing her first monograph––On Closeness: Archives, Aesthetics, and Forms of Relation––which theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method that moves between the aesthetic and the social. Their writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Text & Performance Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, emisférica, Syndicate, C Magazine, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She has also written for the Vancouver Art Gallery (with Monika Kin Gagnon), the Belkin Gallery, Gallery 44, and the New Museum, and was formerly Managing Editor of HemiPress at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in New York City. They received their PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU.

Ayasha Guerin is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and professor of Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English Language and Literatures. Dr. Guerin is also faculty affiliate of the Centre for European Studies, the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, and a member of the Critical Image Forum research cluster at UBC.
Dr. Guerin received her PhD in 2020 from New York University’s American Studies program. Her first book project, Making Zone-A: Nature, Race and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores, explores Black social life and ecology in the city’s floodplain from the 17th-19th centuries. Tracing how colonial capitalism has cultivated a hierarchy of racial and species difference on urban landfill, it considers how activism on the waterfront has been shaped by diasporic relationships and interspecies entanglements. Her second project is focused on transnational Black feminism and arts activism in Berlin, Germany.

Jillian Lerner specializes in the history of photography, nineteenth-century visual culture, and critical pedagogy. An alumna of UBC (BA 1998), she went on to study art history at Columbia University, completing her PhD in 2006 under the direction of Jonathan Crary and Anne Higonnet. Dr. Lerner is the author of two books: Graphic Culture: Illustration and Artistic Enterprise in Paris, 1830–1848 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2018) and Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography (Routledge, 2021). Her essays on print and photography have been published in Grey Room, Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, The Art Bulletin, and Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024). A study on the phantasmagoria, historical retrieval, and the afterlives of social violence in revolutionary Paris is forthcoming in A Companion to French Art, 1780 to the Present (eds. Natalie Adamson and Richard Taws). Alongside her current research on reparative histories of photography, Dr. Lerner is pursuing a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project that explores approaches to social justice storytelling, place-based learning, and pedagogies of relational accountability enacted in undergraduate courses in art history and media studies.

Dr. April Liu has over twenty years of experience as a curator, researcher, and documentary filmmaker specializing in Chinese diasporic heritage. She co-curated the major permanent exhibits at the UBC Chung Lind Gallery (2024) with Faith Moosang, bringing new perspectives to Chinese Canadian history and the Klondike Gold Rush.  April has served as the Curator of Public Programs and Engagement at the UBC Museum of Anthropology and as an expert consultant for UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage section (Asia). Her media projects have been featured on CBC Gem, CBC Arts, CBC Radio Canada, Guangzhou Radio and TV, Chinese National Radio (CNR), and the Pasadena International Film Festival. She has published extensively on Asian arts and culture, including Divine Threads (2019), a major book-length study of Cantonese Opera.

McCormick is a historian of the visual and material culture of modern Japan. She writes about the politics of photography culture and optical technologies in Japan from the 1930s to the 1970s. Her recent research focuses on the first women to become professional photographers in Japan in the 1940s and 50s, marketing the camera as a symbol of Japanese modern design, and female student uses of the camera to document environmental degradation. McCormick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UBC.

Karice Mitchell (b. 1996, Toronto, Canada) is a photo-based installation artist whose practice uses found imagery and digital manipulation to engage with issues relating to the representation of the Black female body in pornography and popular culture. Her work seeks to re-contextualize pre-existing images to reimagine the possibilities for Black womanhood and sexuality detached from the white gaze and patriarchy. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and her MFA at the University of Waterloo in June 2021.

Faith Moosang is a multimedia artist, curator, writer, and researcher whose work explores the integration of multimedia imagery, digital interactivity, and archives. She co-curated the major permanent exhibits at the UBC Chung Lind Gallery (2024) alongside April Liu, bringing new perspectives to Chinese Canadian history and the Klondike Gold Rush. Faith has created interactive works for the Museum of Anthropology, Polygon Gallery, City of Richmond Public Art, and Cinevolution Media Arts Society, among others. Her curated exhibits, many featuring archival photographs and media, have been widely showcased across Canada and the United States. She received the Alcuin Society Award (1999) and the Canadian Museums Association Award for Best Canadian Research (2001) for her groundbreaking publication and travelling exhibit on photographer C.D. Hoy.

O’Brian is an art historian, writer, curator, and Professor Emeritus. He is the author or editor of twenty books and many articles, and is best known for his books on modern art, including Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, one of the New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” in 1986, and for his exhibitions on nuclear photography such as Camera Atomica, organized for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015. Camera Atomica was the first comprehensive exhibition on postwar nuclear photography. O’Brian taught in Art History at The University of British Columbia from 1987-2017, where he held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2008-11) and was an Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a recipient of the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University.

Jay Pahre is a queer and trans settler artist, writer, and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ peoples. His work engages trans and queer ecologies, interspecies collaboration, and place in the context of settler colonialism. He has attended residencies at the Western Front, Banff Centre and Isle Royale National Park. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada at traditional galleries and community spaces, and his writing has been published in academic journals and comic anthologies.

Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez (b. 1987 Mexico City) is an artist working in photography and film/video to examine the temporal ambiguity of our experience of images—still but in motion, historical yet continuously made present. He employs materials such as found photographs, magazine interviews and film/tv scripts to overlay the recent past against the present. Recent group exhibitions include the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, and Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York City. His work has been featured in Artforum, T Magazine, Musée Magazine and Hyperallergic. Rodriguez received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He lives and works in so-called “Vancouver”, where he is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University.

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.

Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker, artist and Fulbright scholar working in the realm of experimental documentary, and she is an Assistant Professor of film at Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Arts. Her projects emerge through processes that are relational, and have taken the form of films, sound composition/performance, visual art and writing. She is the director of SISTER MOTHER LOVER CHILD, ECHOLOCATION, AMAL’S GARDEN, and the feature-length film JADDOLAND, which was awarded five festival jury awards, including the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction” Award, and went on to broadcast for three seasons on US public television. Her work has shown in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including at Cinema du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Cairo International Film Festival, Images Festival, Black Star Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, DOXA, Kasseler Dokfest, and Alchemy Film & Video Arts Festival. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Djerassi Residency and her work has received support from the Sundance Institute, Arab Fund for Arts & Culture, Center for Asian American Media, Firelight Media, and Tribeca Film Institute.

Sameena Siddiqui is an Associate Curator of Adult Programs at Surrey Art Gallery. She is also a Ph.D. candidate and SRSF doctoral fellow at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Canada. Siddiqui has presented her research at several international conferences and residencies and published in photography journals. Her dissertation research won the MFAH Joan and Stanford Alexander Dissertation Award, US, 2021.

Erin Silver is an Associate Professor of Art History and Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Taking Place: Building Histories of Queer and Feminist Art in North America (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021), as well as co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016), and (with taisha paggett) the winter 2017 issue of C Magazine, “Force,” on intersectional feminisms and movement culture, and (with Elizabeth Cavaliere) a 2022 issue of Journal of Canadian Art History on collaboration as research and pedagogy. Silver’s writing has appeared in C Magazine, CAA Reviews, Canadian Art, Ciel Variable, Prefix Photo, Fuse Magazine, Momus, Performance Matters, Sculpture Journal, Visual Resources, and in the volume Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (ed. Martha Langford, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), as well as in various exhibition catalogues in the areas of Canadian photography and queer and feminist art. She is an editor of RACAR (Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review) and currently serves as President of the Universities Art Association of Canada.

Monika Szewczyk is a writer, editor, and educator, and Audain Chief Curator at the Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver. Her lifelong interest in art- and/as history-making has evolved in close collaboration with artists, poets, activists, and archivists whose methods vary, but who all tend to reimagine structures and reinvent traditions as they negotiate belonging to more than one place, people and culture. A native of Szczecin, Poland, Szewczyk moved at a formative age to the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations also known as Vancouver, Canada. After studying International Relations (BA) and Art History (MA) as well as theatre, film, and fine arts, she went on to lecture, advise and lead seminars at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Bergen Academy of Art and Design and the University of Chicago. Most recently (2019-2022), she served as director of de Appel in Amsterdam and evolved the curriculum of this foundation’s unique Curatorial Programme. Previously she was one of the curators for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2015-2017); Visual Arts Program Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (2012-2014); and Head of Publications at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (2008-2011), now Kunstinstituut Melly; Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2004-2007); and Program Coordinator of the Belkin Satellite (2001-2003), a downtown outpost of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, her alma mater. From 2022/2023, Szewczyk was the QuiS research fellow of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule and Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. Her writings and interviews as well as her editorial work can be found in numerous artists’ publications, readers, catalogues and in journals such as e-flux journal, Afterall, Mousse, OCULA and South as a State of Mind.

Thauberger is an artist and filmmaker and an Associate Professor of Visual Art at the University of British Columbia. Her artistic work involves collaborative research and is primarily concerned with the relationship between community narratives and geopolitical histories. Thauberger has produced and exhibited her work internationally including recent exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and the Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania.

Desiree Valadares is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Valadares’ research and teaching focuses on the cultural memory and infrastructural imaginaries of the Second World War in western Canada and the non-contiguous US. In her current book project, Valadares theorizes repair through Pacific redress movements which coalesce around the preservation and stewardship of Second World War confinement landscapes in Hawai’i, Alaska and British Columbia. She draws insights from archival research, and place-based research methods including architectural drawing and photography in addition to participant-engaged methods such as landscape archaeology, gardening, and salvage at former confinement sites. Broadly, Valadares’ research contributes to ongoing debates on infrastructural repair, war reparations, Asian North American-Indigenous relations, settler colonialism and land dispossession at former Second World War confinement sites in former US territories and in western Canada.

Valadares trained as an architectural historian (Berkeley), urban designer (McGill) and landscape architect (Guelph/Edinburgh) and worked in private practice, government, and non-profits in landscape architecture, master planning, heritage conservation (Canada) and historic preservation (U.S.). Currently, Valadares holds professional affiliations with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) and is a registered landscape architect with the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects (BCSLA).

Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation, b. 1977) is an artist and curator of mixed Secwépemc and settler ancestry. Willard’s research and creative processes are informed by land-based and community-engaged art practices, connections to culture and family, and intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Often focusing on Secwépemc aesthetics, language and land, Willard explores the shifts and tensions between ideas of the contemporary and the traditional. Willard centres art as an Indigenous resurgent act through her collaborative projects and her support of language revitalization efforts in Secwépemc communities. Willard’s personal curatorial projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land-based art and action led by Indigenous artists. Willard received an MFA from UBC Okanagan in 2018. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kamloops Art Gallery; Burnaby Art Gallery; and SFU Audain Gallery, Vancouver. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at FotoFocus Biennial; Cincinnati Arts Centre; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Germany; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; and Open Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre, Toronto. Willard has curated numerous exhibitions, including the traveling exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture that began at the Vancouver Art Gallery (co-curated with Kathleen Ritter); Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology (co-curated with Karen Duffek); and CUSTOM MADE at Kamloops Art Gallery. She was a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard was selected as one of five curators for a national scope exhibition in collaboration with Partners in Art and National Parks. She received the 2016 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, the 2020 Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award, and was named a 2022 Forge Project Fellow. Her work with BUSH gallery was recognized through the Ruth Foundation for the Arts Future Studies award (2022). Willard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies and Gallery Director at UBC Okanagan in Syilx territories (Kelowna, BC).