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  • Saranaz Barforoush

    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.

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  • Antoine Bourges

    Faculty Researcher

    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.

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  • Christine D’Onofrio

    Faculty Researcher

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of liberty, especially under capitalism and her work frequently juxtaposes consumer culture and mass media with art historical references.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

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  • Tobias Ewé

    Graduate Researcher

    Ewé is a theorist and experimental art historian. He is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on inhuman psychoacoustics in the Department of Art History at UBC. His research focuses on the epistemology of listening in modernity, and its symptoms in the sonic arts at the nexus between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Holger Schulze, ed (2019), Handbook of Sound Art, London: Bloomsbury, and the Danish translation of Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminism: A Politics of Alienation. Tobias has exhibited/performed diagrams and sonic fictions in Germany, Canada, Denmark, Italy, and online.

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  • Denise Ferreira da Silva

    Faculty Researcher

    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 TextTheory, Culture & SocietySocial 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 ArtTexte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux. 

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  • Olivia Michiko Gagnon

    Faculty Researcher

    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/JournalCanadian Theatre ReviewemisfeìricaSyndicate, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She received her PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU.

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  • Ayasha Guerin

    Faculty Researcher

    Guerin is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and curator who lives between Berlin and Vancouver. She is an Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Studies at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English.Guerin  received her PhD from NYU’s American Studies department where her dissertation, Making Zone-A: Nature, Race and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores, explored Black social life and ecology in the city’s floodplain from the 17th-19th centuries. Tracing how colonial capitalism cultivated a hierarchy of  racial difference on urban landfill, the project considers how activism on the  waterfront has  been shaped by diasporic relationships and interspecies entanglements. Guerin is invested in art practices that are also forms of activism and believes a responsibility of the research profession is to make knowledge accessible through public actions and exhibitions. Another ongoing research and workshop project has evolved from study in the Audre Lorde and May Ayim Archives at the Freie Universität, Berlin, which hold important records of the Black Feminist poets’ transnational activism and grassroots coalitions, addressing racism in the late 1980s – early 1990s.

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  • Sarv Iraji

    Graduate Researcher

    Sarv Iraji was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives and works on the unceded territory of the  xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Iraji holds a BA in Film Studies (2020) and is currently an MFA candidate in Visual Art at the University of British Columbia. Working in the expanded field of image, their works touch on the experiences of immigration, individual and social representation of the “self,” and the influence of politics and law on identity. Iraji has expanded their research on symbolism, mysticism in Persian cultural heritage, and its representation in the collective sense.

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  • Kelly McCormick

    Faculty Researcher

    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.

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  • Daniela P. Montelongo

    Graduate Researcher

    Montelongo holds degrees from the Institut de Sciences Politiques de Paris (BA), from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (MA) and is pursuing her PhD at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. Daniela is interested in the complex relationship between the simultaneously evolving practices of photo-documentary, photojournalism and landscape photography, particularly in relation to the global circulation of images of apartheid South Africa. Her research explores the landscape photography of South African photographers David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe, as being disruptive of canonical uses of the genre. Daniela is also interested in providing a critical response to the construction of “African photography” as a category, by focusing on the historically specific conditions of the photographic image in the context of apartheid, while expanding her analysis of the genre of landscape beyond the medium of photography.

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  • John O'Brian

    Faculty Researcher

    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.

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  • Shelly Rosenblum

    Faculty Researcher

    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.

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  • Erin Silver

    Faculty Researcher

    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)

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  • Althea Thauberger

    Principal Investigator & Faculty Researcher

    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.

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  • Tania Willard

    Faculty Researcher

    Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation) works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production. Often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Indigenous and other cultures. Willard is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, and has worked as a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard’s curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, a national touring exhibition first presented at Vancouver Art Gallery in 2011, Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology co-curated by Karen Duffek in 2016 and CUSTOM MADE at Kamloops Art Gallery. She has also been selected as one of five national curators for a national scope exhibition in collaboration with Partners in Art and National Parks. Willard’s personal curatorial projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land based art and action led by Indigenous artists. Willard’s current research constructs a land rights aesthetic through intuitive archival acts and land-based practices, focusing on Secwepemc aesthetics/language/land and interrelated Indigenous art practices. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, in 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice.

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  • Daniel Young

    Graduate Researcher

    Young is currently interested in the intersections between social science and the visual arts. His collaborative practice with Christian Giroux spanned public art, cinema installations, sculpture, exhibitions, and artist books. Their ‘Berlin 2013/1983’, was awarded the runner-up for the best architecture book in Germany in 2018 by the Deutsches Architekturmuseum Frankfurt, and their public artwork ‘Three Points Where Two Lines Meet’ has been referred to in the Toronto Star as the most hated in Toronto. Young’s master’s thesis (in the department of Geography) has the working title of ‘Vancouver’s Political Economy of Construction’.

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  • Ophelia Yingqiu Zhao

    Project Coordinator & Graduate Researcher

    Ophelia Yingqiu Zhao is a Vancouver-based artist and curator, and MA candidate in the Critical and Curatorial Studies Program at UBC. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from UBC. Her interdisciplinary practice spans photography, performance and writing; her artistic language concerns itself with the physicality and materiality of immaterial art. Her first book, One-and-Twenty (2020) is an ongoing text-image project written by each of Zhao’s artistic alter egos. Zhao has curated exhibitions and shown artworks at galleries and artist-run spaces in Vancouver.

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