Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research specializes in ecology, theories of consciousness and perception. Over the course of her career, she has analyzed complex human relationships with the environment through the lens of aesthetics, patterns of human waste, and the global energy economy. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and a forthcoming book titled Ecologicity, Vision and the Planetarity of Art. She is co-editor of Art's Realism in the Post-Truth Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Artworks for Jellyfish and Other Others (Noxious Sector Press, 2022) and Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). In her most recent research, Boetzkes focuses on environmental knowledge and aesthetics in the circumpolar North, the politics of Inuit sovereignty, and the Greenland Ice Sheet as a site of scientific, social, and perceptual importance. In 2019, she held an interdisciplinary, site-specific workshop in Ilulissat, Greenland, and curated a performance by the Greenlandic artist Jessie Kleemann on the Ice Sheet. This performance has since shown at numerous exhibitions and galleries including Inua at the inaugural exhibition of the Inuit Art Center in Winnipeg (2021); Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe (2021); Worst Case Scenario: Four Artists from Greenland - Pia Arke, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Elisabeth Heilmann Blind, Jessie Kleemann at the Lunds Konsthalle in Sweden (2021); Jessie Kleemann at the Portland Museum of Art (2022); Jessie Kleemann: Running Time* at the Danish National Gallery (2023); and the Nordic pavilion of COP28 in Dubai (2023).
Fran Chudnoff, also known as Franz (they/them), is a Tkaronto based millennial, with a BFA in performance, and paying rent as a multidisciplinary artist. They are a dance maker, video artist, photographer, and a true beginner when it comes to learning 3D modelling and digital illustration. Their work is in conversation with post internet aesthetics, gender deviance, and shaping a “social aura” through aspirational imagery. In 2020, Fran completed a 3-year Emerging Artist research residency at Dancemakers Centre for Creation with Driftnote where together they created the supported solo work – FACE RIDER. Their film ALL THINGS GROW is an official selection in the Regards Hybrides’ permanent Collection of Canadian screendance works. It is one of fifty-five short and long films produced between 1980 and 2020 that represent a wide range of cinechoreographic approaches. Fran is currently performing and touring in Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson’s MAKE BANANA CRY – a subversive runway featuring a parade of body politics prepared to trouble the Western gaze.
Beth Coleman researches experimental digital media, and specializes in race theory, game culture, and literary studies. She is currently working on two books and has previously published Hello, Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation, a critically acclaimed book examining the many modes of online identity and how users live on the continuum between the virtual and the real. She has also curated numerous art exhibits and media installations within North America and in Europe. Her current research investigates aspects of human narrative and digital data in the engagement of global cities, including aspects of locative media, mobile media, and smart cities.
Yehuda Duenyas (he/they) is a transdisciplinary artist creating at the intersections of Intimacy Coordination, Experiential Design, Performance, Film, and Sound. Weaving a rich tapestry of creativity across various mediums, they began their practice of Intimacy work for live arts in 2007 in New York City’s vibrant performance scene. They were a founding member of the NYC collaborative NTUSA, and their work has been experienced at venues such as PS122, NY; The Chocolate Factory, NY; The Kitchen, NY; The Public Theater, NY; ICA Boston; The Walker Art Center, Minnerapolis. Proudly representing the LGBTQIA+ community, Yehuda co-runs CINTIMA.CO, a SAG-AFTRA accredited training program specifically focused on BIPOC and queer individuals entering the field. Intimacy for Performance credits include Faye Driscoll’s Weathering (NY Live Arts; The Blackwood, Toronto), The Beautiful People (Rogue Machine, LA), and Tom Bradshaw’s Fulfillment (The Flea, NYC; ATC, Chicago). Intimacy for Film and TV credits include MONSTER: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (NETFLIX); Westworld S4 (HBO); The Afterparty S2 (APPLE TV); American Gigolo (Paramount+). Yehuda is also a Primetime Emmy award-winning experiential director with a focus on immersive new media, storytelling, and technology. They have created experiences for Spotify, Netflix, Google, HBO, Walt Disney Imagineering, and others.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems as “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.”
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
k.g. Guttman (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and teacher, a solo mother, and currently a 2023-24 Artist-in-Residence in the Intermedia area of Studio Arts (video, performance and electronic arts) at Concordia University, Montreal.
k.g. is a graduate of Leiden University's PhDArts program, the Netherlands, receiving funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their work on situated performance in the settler colonial context of Canada.
From the social location of a white settler of Jewish and Irish descent, she works on the complexities of the local, encompassing collaboration, visiting, and radical hospitality. Current research into bodily memory and somatic practices in pedagogy and practice have been informed by circumstances in childhood/ young adulthood of generalized anxiety/ depression and an environment that disavowed emotions.
k.g.’s recent exhibitions, performances and publications were held at TPW Gallery and Blackwood Gallery in Toronto, Verticale, VIVA! Art action, Dazibao Centre Art, and LaCentrale in Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang/ Montréal, Musée d’Art de Joliette, Klupko, Amsterdam, Galerie Khiasma and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Choreographic residencies and commissions include l’Agora de la Danse and Tangente, Montreal, the Canada Dance Festival, Dancemakers, Toronto, LeGroupe Dance Lab, Ottawa, the University of Sonora, Mexico, BudaKustencentrum, Kortijk and Pointe Ephémère, Paris.
Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton which played at MoMA NYC until January 30, 2022.
Aisha Sasha John is interested in choreographing performances that occasion real love. She’s passionate about the creative potential of surrender, and builds structures through her choreographic work that allow for experiences of entrancement. The expressive possibilities exclusive to Black being-together is her ongoing research interest. John’s duet DIANA ROSS DREAM (Danse-cité) premiered in fall 2022 and was developed during a 2019-2022 Dancemakers choreographic residency. Her first full-length solo work debuted as the aisha of oz at the Whitney Museum in 2017, and in 2018, iterations of the aisha of is were presented at MAI and Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival. From 2015-2017, John choreographed, performed and curated as a member of the collective WIVES, presenting ACTION MOVIE at La Chapelle (2017). With Julia Thomas, John choreographed and performed WE ARE HANGING OUT RIGHT NOW (Videofag and Buddies 2016). John’s video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and was commissioned by Art Metropole as Let’s understand what it means to be here (together), a public art residency in which John and collaborators made performances in Union Station’s west wing. A celebrated poet, John is the author of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize nominated collection, I have to live. (McClelland & Stewart 2017), THOU (Bookhug 2014), TO STAND AT A PRECIPICE ALONE AND REPEAT WHAT IS WHISPERED* (UDP 2021), and is currently at work on her fourth collection, total. Aisha was named the inaugural associate artist at Toronto Dance Theatre in 2023.
Lara Kramer is a performer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist of mixed Anishinaabe, Oji-Cree and settler heritage based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Her choreographic work, research and fieldwork over the last fourteen years have been grounded in intergenerational relations, intergenerational knowledge, and the impacts of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada. Her creations in the form of dance, performance and installation have been presented across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Martinique, Norway, the US and the UK. Her practice includes sound, video, and visual art. Lara’s work expands on her relational practice to express and represent embodied experiences like memory, loss, and reclamation. Her works challenge the Canadian narrative of the colonial project to reconcile and use storytelling as a form of resistance. She has received multiple awards, acknowledgments, and prizes for her work both as an emerging and established artist. Lara was appointed a Human Rights Advocate through the Holocaust Memorial Centre of Montreal in 2012, following the national tour of her work Fragments, a performance piece informed by her mother’s stories and lived experience as a survivor of the Indian Residential Schools of Canada.
In 2018 Lara was presented with the prestigious Ashley Fellowship with Trent University, as well as received the Jacqueline-Lemieux Prize for recognition of artistic excellence and distinguished career achievement in dance. She has collaborated closely with Peter James and sound artist Jassem Hindi on her work Windigo, 2018 exploring the destruction and deconstruction of sculpture/objects, body and land relations, and memory as the song. In 2019, the installation and performance piece This Time Will be Different, created with Emilie Monnet and co-produced by Festival TransAmeriques denounced the status quo of the Canadian government’s discourse regarding Indigenous relations and criticized the “national reconciliation industry“
Lara Kramer is a Center de Création O Vertigo – CCOV Associate Artist since 2021.
John Paul Ricco is Professor of Art History, Comparative Literature, and Visual Culture, and Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection, at the University of Toronto. Ricco works at the juncture of queer theory, contemporary art and literature, and continental philosophy—with a focus on sex, aesthetics, and ethics. He is currently developing a collection of essays, Queer Finitude: Intimacy, Anonymity, Solitude, that, along with his previous books, The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes (both University of Chicago Press), will complete his trilogy on "the intimacy of the outside."
Marina Roy is a Vancouver-based artist and writer, and associate professor in visual art at the University of British Columbia. Her artwork investigates the grotesque, at the intersection of language, image, and materiality, and her research interests include ecology, posthumanism, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics. Humour is explored through a corporeal register: humans’ underlying animality and mortality, as well as the absurdity of humanist moral positions vis-à-vis life on this planet. She has shown nationally and internationally. Roy was recipient of the VIVA award in 2010. In 2001 she published sign after the x (Arsenal/Artspeak), a book that revolves around the letter X and its multiple meanings. Her newest book Queuejumping (Information Office/Art Metropole, 2022), uses the letter Q as device to investigate such interwoven issues as the “invention” of language and art, the shifting nature of sovereignty, feminist utopias, ecological devastation, and animal extinction.
Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is author of Rag Cosmology (Bookhug, 2017) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2023), both winners of A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. A poet-researcher at Concordia University, her interests include embodied poetics, hydrofeminism, multisensory performance, queer & feminist ecologies, geopoetics, and relational poetics and practices. Performances include Zone of Exaggerated Dreaming, a solo work about the abyssal ocean, and collaborative works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. Erin grew up in Coast Salish territory, on Cortes Island.
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Andrew Tay was born in Windsor, Ontario where he attended the Walkerville Centre for the Creative Arts. Since finishing his B.F.A in contemporary dance at Concordia University, Andrew has presented his work at venues and festivals throughout Canada, New York and Europe. His work has appeared in films, installations and multimedia projects for companies such as Moment Factory, Bravo! and Gentilhomme. He has worked with well-known choreographer Doris Ulhich (Vienna) in the creation of More than Naked, which toured extensively throughout Europe.
In 2005 Andrew co-founded (with collaborator Sasha Kleinplatz) the company Wants&Needs Danse. Since then the company has produced the wildly popular dance events Piss in the Pool, Short&Sweet and Involved in Montreal. In June 2012, the duo choreographed the Cirque du Soleil show Les Frontieres de Pixels and were nominated for a Quebec Notables award in the Arts&Culture category.
Residencies have included the Foundation Jean-Pierre Perrault, the summer artist in residency program at studio 303, Usine C (Montreal), Montreal Danse Choreographic Atelier, The Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), the K3 centre for choreographic research (Hamburg), sign 6 (Brussels) and Skånes Konstförening (Malmo, Sweden).
Andrew was awarded the Dance WEB scholarship in May 2012 (Vienna, Impulstanz festival). In 2013 he was chosen to participate in the Rencontres internationales de jeunes créateurs (Montreal, Festival TransAmériques 2013) and 8 Days, an annual intergenerational meeting of dance artists from across Canada organized by the company Public Recordings. He has also participated in The Copycat Academy (as part of the Luminato Festival, Toronto) curated by Hannah Hurtzig (Berlin) for two editions, and created work with dancers at Toronto Dance Theatre through the company’s inaugural Emerging Voices Project in 2015. He has served as a board member of ELAN (the English Language Artists Network in Quebec) and the RQD – le Regroupement québécois de la danse.
In 2016, his work Fame Prayer / EATING was awarded the Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation from the Summerworks Performance Festival Toronto. Fame Prayer was subsequently presented at Fierce UK (Birmingham) 2017 Theatre La Chapelle (Montreal) 2018 and Diver Festival (Tel Aviv) 2019. Make Banana Cry (co-authored with Stephen Thompson) premiered at the M.A.I in 2017, and was later presented La Galerie de l’UQAM in the context of the exhibit Refus Contraire 2018 as well as the Nottdance Festival and Fierce UK in 2019. The work will continue to tour internationally for 2020.
Before relocating to Toronto in August 2020 to begin his leadership at TDT, Andrew was the Artistic Curator of the O Vertigo Centre for Creation in Montreal since January 2017, reimagining the company’s activities in its new mandate as a choreographic centre and artist incubator. He actively thinks about community, irreverence and resistance in both his performance and curatorial practices.