Melanie O’Brian is Associate Director/Curator at the Belkin, and has been the gallery’s Acting Director/Curator 2022 to the present. Prior to joining the Belkin, O’Brian was Director/Curator of Simon Fraser University Art Galleries, including Audain, Teck and SFU Gallery, from 2012 to 2020. She was formerly Curator/Head of Programs at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Director/Curator at Artspeak in Vancouver and Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. O’Brian has taught at UBC, Emily Carr University and Simon Fraser University, and received her MA in Art History from the University of Chicago. She has organized exhibitions locally and internationally, edited numerous publications and written extensively for catalogues and magazines.

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.

Camille Georgeson-Usher is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at UBC. She is a Coast Salish / Sahtu Dene / Scottish scholar, curator, and writer from Galiano Island, BC. Through her research, Usher is interested in the many ways in which peoples move together through space, how public art becomes a site for gathering, and intimacies with the everyday from an Indigenous perspective. She uses her practice as a long-distance runner as a methodology for embodied theory and an alternative form of sensing place. She is an award-winning writer whose work merges theory with poetry and at times, science-fiction; she has been published widely across academic books, magazines, arts journals, and exhibition texts. In addition to her academic work, she serves as Co-Chair of the Toronto Biennial of Art, is a Board Member of the Galiano Island Literary Festival, and sits on several advisories and committees across academia and the arts sector.

Tatiana Mellema has a longstanding practice working in public art, academic research and curating and is the Curator of Outdoor Art at the Belkin. She holds an MA in Art History from Concordia and a PhD in Art History from the University of British Columbia. Since 2018, Mellema has worked as a public art planner with the City of Vancouver. Prior to this role, she worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Banff Centre, the National Gallery and at the Belkin as Curator of Academic Programs (2021/22). Through her work at the City of Vancouver, Mellema has realized major public art commissions, including Weekend Chime (2021) by Brady Cranfield, A Constellation of Remediation (2021) by T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Anne Riley and Saltwater City Vancouver (2020) by Paul Wong. Her recent curatorial projects include Traces and Intervals (2022) at the Cinematheque, Spill Radio (2019) at the Belkin and Notes on the Nude (2016) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Mellema has contributions forthcoming in edited volumes published by b_books (2024) and Routledge (2025), and her writing has been published in Canadian Art, cmagazine, Border Crossings and Black Flash. She is currently developing a book on the practices of North American artists in the 1970s and the engagement of socially reproductive labour.

Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw artist and writer of Stó:lō descent, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. His current work focuses on the return of Indigenous songs to communities who were prohibited by law to sing them as part of the Indian Act from 1882‒1951. Robinson is the author of Hungry Listening (2020). His other publications include the edited volumes Music and Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples of North America (2018), Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2016), and Opera Indigene (2011).

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.

Susan Rowley is Associate Professor in the UBC Department of Anthropology and is Director and curator at the Museum of Anthropology. Rowley holds a PhD in archaeology from Cambridge University. She first travelled north in 1974 as a field assistant on an archaeological excavation in northern Baffin Island and was captivated by the people and the land. Rowley has worked with Inuit elders on historical research and with Inuit youth on archaeology projects. She is currently working with First Nations communities in British Columbia. Since 2005 she has been the Museum of Anthropology’s member on the Steering Group of the Reciprocal Research Network (www.rrncommunity.org). In 2015 she was a member of the curatorial team for c̓əsnaʔəm, the city before the city and co-curated the exhibition at MOA.

Sadia Shirazi is Assistant Professor | Canada Research Chair in History of South Asian Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture in the UBC Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. A scholar, writer and curator, their multi-disciplinary research focuses on trans-regional histories of modern and contemporary art and architecture across South Asia, the Indian Ocean, and its diasporas. Shirazi was previously Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. She has also held positions as a Visiting Scholar and an American Council of Learned Societies, Postdoctoral Fellow in Transnational Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins University. From 2018 to 2021, they were Instructor of Curatorial Studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and has taught at Cooper Union, The New School and National College of the Arts. They have practiced architecture in America, Bahrain and Egypt. Shirazi received their PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from Cornell University and a MArch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shirazi has contributed essays to numerous catalogues, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed journals, including Panorama, The Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Movement Research Performance Journal. Their art criticism has appeared in e-flux, Frieze, Bidoun, C Magazine, Artforum, and The Funambulist. Shirazi has exhibited work at Arika, the 16th Venice Architecture Biennial and the Devi Art Foundation. They are currently working on an audio documentary and counter-archive of The 02020 Project for Performance Space New York. As an independent curator, they have organized exhibitions and programs at venues including The Kitchen, Queens Museum, EFA Project Space, and Khoj International Artists’ Association.  

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.

Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation, b. 1977) is an artist and curator of mixed Secwépemc and settler ancestry and beginning January 2026, the Belkin’s Director/Curator. 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).