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.

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.

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of liberty, especially under capitalism and her work frequently juxtaposes consumer culture and mass media with art historical references.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.

An academic and practicing artist, Dr. Ferreira da Silva is a Professor and Director of the Social Justice Institute-GRSJ, at the University of British Columbia.  She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), A Dívida Impagavel (Oficina da Imaginaçāo Política and Living Commons, 2019), Unpayable Debt (Stenberg/MIT Press, 2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Her several articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, Social Identities, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event, The Black Scholar, to name a few. Her artistic works includes the films Serpent Rain (2016) and 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and published in art venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux. 

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.

Gagnon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Film at UBC. She is currently working on her first monograph, which theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method of doing history through art & performance and beyond archival stricture. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Canadian Theatre Review, emisfeìrica, Syndicate, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She received her PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU.

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.

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 resent research focusses 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 a Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UBC.

Daniela P. Montelongo holds a BA in Political Science from the Institut de Sciences Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), an MA in Art History from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her doctoral research continues with the work undertaken for her Masters thesis: “Symbolic Big Houses: a Performative Indigenization of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the Royal British Columbia Museum”. She is interested in contemporary and historical indigenous Northwest Coast Art, and more specifically, the politics around the entanglement of embodied enactments of culture and material culture. Her interest in performance is informed by postcolonial theory and institutional critique, as well as a contemporary indigenous politics and critique of colonialism.

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.

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.

Silver is an Assistant Professor of Art History at UBC, with a specialization in Canadian Contemporary Practices. Her research interests include activism and photographic re-enactment, social media, and queer and feminist visual art and performance. Silver has published widely in periodicals and exhibition catalogues, and has curated exhibitions the FOFA Gallery (Concordia University, Montreal), the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (Toronto), and the Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto Scarborough)

Morgan Sears-Williams is an interdisciplinary artist and cultivator based in Toronto and Vancouver. Her practice reflects themes of feminist queer histories, collective memory and exploring the materiality of moving images by using organic film developers. Investigating the use of analog film both as a form of projected image and as a sculptural material, her current research focuses on how lived experiences inform queer aesthetics and articulations of memory and gender.

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.

Thauberger is an artist and filmmaker and an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at the University of British Columbia. Her artistic work is primarily concerned with experimental and community/collaborative practices in social documentary. Her research interests include site based art and activism, and artists’ use of archival materials. Thauberger has produced and exhibited her work internationally including recent exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver and the inaugural Karachi Biennale.

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).