Alison Ariss is a PhD student in AHVA at UBC. She earned her art history MA at UBC, and holds a BA Honours in anthropology from Waterloo. As a settler-scholar, Ariss finds her research is an (un)learning experience that centers Salish weaving practices, and is guided by Indigenous feminist approaches and critiques of institutions. Prior to her return to graduate studies in 2015, Ariss worked in research development, including pre-award administration and management roles at the University of Winnipeg and McMaster, to consultative roles for research partnerships with Western and UBC. She has experience with funders such as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Networks of Centres of Excellence, and was engaged with knowledge mobilization projects. Ariss has volunteered with public interest research organizations, community groups and museums as a volunteer board member, program developer and curatorial assistant.

Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based visual artist, curator, writer and editor. Brown is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, and is an ongoing member of the Other Sights Producer team. She was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004, an artist-run centre focusing on the relationship between visual art and writing. Between 2015 and 2022, she was Acting Director/Curator at the Belkin, curating exhibition series such as Beginning With the Seventies that explored the relationship between art, archives and activism. Brown has exhibited her work internationally since 1984, and has taught at Simon Fraser University and Emily Carr University of Art and Design where she received an honorary doctorate of letters in 2015. Awards include the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts Award (1996) and the Canada Council Paris Studio Award (2000). Her work is in the collections of the Belkin, SFU Galleries, the National Gallery of Canada, the BC Arts Council, the Surrey Art Gallery and the Canada Council Art Bank.

T. Patrick Carrabré has been active as a composer, administrator, educator, radio host and conductor. For well over a decade, he worked closely with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, including six seasons as composer-in-residence and co-curator of the orchestra’s New Music Festival. Also active in the media, Carrabré served two seasons as the weekend host of CBC Radio 2’s contemporary music show The Signal.

Carrabré’s best known compositions include Inuit Games, for throat singers (katajjak) and orchestra, Sonata No. 1, The Penitent, for violin and piano, From the Dark Reaches, and A Hammer For Your Thoughts…. Together these works have earned two Juno nominations, a recommendation at the International Rostrum of Composers (2003), a Western Canadian Music Award (Best Classical Composition) and two other WCMA nominations.

Carrabré’s primary focus as an artist-researcher is in the area of research-creation, and he has been involved with community-engaged research. Construction of identity is a long-term theme, manifesting in his compositions, concert and radio programming, and administrative activities. The creation of shared musical spaces with indigenous and non-western musicians has also been a significant theme of his work and since the dawn of the Truth and Reconciliation era. This has led to a number of works confronting issues of decolonization, frequently using deconstructionist techniques. Carrabré’s other interests have included the exploration of his Métis heritage, use of interactive electronics, and editorial work.

Barbara Cole is the Curator of Outdoor Art at the Belkin. Cole oversees the University’s Outdoor Art collection, commissioning new projects in public space and stewarding the existing artworks sited across the Vancouver campus. For over three decades, she has been actively involved in the field of public art working as an artist, curator, educator and consultant. In 2005 she founded Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting temporary projects in public space and continues today as part of the production team. Cole is also the principal of Cole Projects, a public art consulting firm that promotes experimental approaches to public art planning and commissioning. She has led workshops, lectured widely and published articles on the subject of art in public space. Cole taught at Emily Carr University from 1984 to 1999 and worked as a consultant to the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program from 1999 to 2004. In 2011, Cole received the Mayor’s Award for her contributions to the advancement of public art in Vancouver and in 2013, was a curatorial resident at ZK/U Center for Art + Urbanistics in Berlin, Germany.

Candice Hopkins is a curator and writer of Tlingit descent originally from Whitehorse, Yukon. She is Senior Curator of the Toronto Biennial of Art and co-curator of the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada. She was a part of the curatorial team for documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany and a co-curator of the major exhibitions Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, and the 2014 SITElines biennial, Unsettled Landscapes in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing is published widely and her recent essays and presentations include “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind and Sounding the Margins: A Choir of Minor Voices at Small Projects, Tromsø, Norway. She has lectures internationally including at the Witte de With, Tate Modern, Dak’Art Biennale, Artists Space, Tate Britain and the University of British Columbia. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art and the 2016 the Prix pour un essai critique sur l’art contemporain by the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco. She is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation.

Sasha Kow is a Malaysian composer currently based on the unceded, territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil- Waututh peoples. She obtained a BMus in Composition from the University of Oregon, and is now in the 2nd year of her graduate degree in Composition at the University of British Columbia. Her music has been performed at the Concerts at First series, Oregon Bach Festival, Oregon Composers Forum, and the Music Today Festival. Her most recent work was premiered at the West Coast Student Composers’ Symposium by UBC’s Contemporary Players. Her art strives to understand where and how her background and upbringing fit into the world of Western contemporary art music. Through her involvement with the Score Cluster Research, she seeks to diversify her approach to writing music and hearing sound.

David Metzer is a historian of twentieth and twenty-first century music. His work covers a variety of genres, including popular music, classical, and jazz. He nimbly jumps from Barry Manilow’s power ballads to songs by Aaron Copland. His research explores cultural issues of race, sexuality, gender, and emotional expression. A new project looks at how musicians have confronted the toll of incarceration in American society and how musical works have shaped understandings of incarceration.

He is the author of The Ballad in American Popular Music: From Elvis to Beyoncé, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music.  The Ballad in American Popular Music: From Elvis to Beyoncé is the first history of the ballad in recent popular music and discusses why these songs have become emotional touchstones in our lives and American society. David has published articles in a wide range of music and interdisciplinary journals, including Journal of the American Musicological Society, Popular Music, Modernism/modernity, and Black Music Research Journal.

Jay Pahre (American, b. 1991) is a queer and trans settler artist, writer, and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Weaving between drawing, sculpture and writing, his work queries trans and queer nonhuman ecologies at points of intersection with the human. Originally from the midwestern US, Pahre has turned his work back toward the shifting ecologies of the Great Lakes and Great Plains regions. He received his BFA in painting and BA in East Asian studies in 2014, and his MA in East Asian studies from the University of Illinois in 2017. He went on to complete his MFA in visual art at the University of British Columbia in 2020. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada. He was selected for the Transgender Studies Chair Fellowship at the University of Victoria (2020), as well as the Helen Belkin Memorial Scholarship (2020) and Fred Herzog Award in Visual Art (2019) at the University of British Columbia.

Marcus Prasad is an art historian residing on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He has earned his MA (2020) and BA Honours (2018) in Art History and Theory from the University of British Columbia, with a research focus on spatial theory, temporality, and queer theory as they relate to American contemporary horror film and postwar art. His work has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and he has been the recipient of the Patsy and David Heffel Award in Art History, the Ian Wallace Award in Art History, and the University of Toronto Master Essay Prize. Prasad is Editorial Director at SAD Magazine, an arts and culture print publication seeking to feature emerging artists and writers, and has served as Secretary on the Board of Directors at Richmond Art Gallery (2015-2020) and Access Gallery (2019-present). His work has appeared in Wreck, Cinephile, and CineAction, and his research presented at McGill University, The University of Victoria, Ontario College of Art and Design, and Carleton University.

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.