Filipina-Canadian filmmaker Stephanie Comilang is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design. Her documentary work investigates the way cultural and social factors shape our understanding of movement, capital, and work on a global scale: drawing on collaborative approaches and interviews, she creates narratives centred on the issues of present-day isolation, economic migration, and the role of the public arena in its urban and digital forms. Her filmography includes Children of the King, on child Elvis imitators; Flirting: Kyoto, on flirting rituals in that city; and more recently Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso, a science fiction documentary on the Filipina migrant workers who take over Hong Kong’s central business district every Sunday and turn it into a space for caregiving and sociability. Comilang lives and works between Toronto and Berlin.

Steven Eastwood is an award-winning artist-filmmaker whose work often involves participatory and co-creation methodologies. His recent films and moving image artworks include The Stimming Pool (2024); STIM CINEMA (2023); ISLAND (2018), THE INTERVAL AND THE INSTANT (2017); BURIED LAND (2010); The Hiss of the Blow (2009). Steven is Professor of Film Practice at Queen Mary University of London.

In 2018, The Blackwood presented Steven Eastwood’s THE INTERVAL AND THE INSTANT in the 5-part exhibition series Take Care, curated by Letters & Handshakes (Greig de Peuter & Christine Shaw). Steven’s participation in Take Care included “The Interval and the Instant: Inscribing Death and Dying,” a conversation with Dr. Naheed Dosani, Dr. Jenny Lau, and Dr. Kim Wedger as part of the the 3-day event Running with Concepts: The Empathic Edition.

Jeneen Frei Njootli has been working and living on unceded Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Skwxwu7mesh territories (Vancouver) for the last ten years. Jeneen Frei Njootli is a Vuntut Gwitchin artist who has performed and exhibited their work internationally, from galleries to rooftops, casinos, runways, and the bush. They work across numerous media and modes, including performance, sound, installation, fashion, and with community, and are a co-creator of the ReMatriate Collective. Frei Njootli has completed multiple residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and has collaborated with James Luna, Dana Claxton, Olivia Whetung, Tsēmā Igharas, Krista Belle Stewart, Lindsay Lachance, Angela Code, Tania Willard, Gabrielle l’Hirondelle Hill, Chandra Melting Tallow, and her brother Stanley Grafton Njootli. Frei Njootli has been awarded the Contemporary Art Society Vancouver Artist Prize and the William and Meredith Saunderson Prize, and was a Sobey Art Prize finalist in 2018.

Sheena Hoszko lives and works in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal), in Kanien’kehá:ka territory. A sculptor, anti-prison organizer, and Polish settler, Sheena Hoszko explores the connections between physical control of the body and mental health. Her work is based on long-term research into the power dynamics of geographical, architectural and psychological sites, and is informed by her own family’s experience of migration and incarceration. Drawing on measurement and surveying practices and transcription of oral information and stories, she interprets and recreates experiential spaces for the viewer, using materials such as light, stained glass, fabric, concrete and metal in conjunction with textual gleanings. Recently she has been focusing on the cartography of sites related to the spatial control of the body—borders, boundary lines, fences—and on possible ways of recontextualizing them as a political tool in a gallery situation.

Kwentong Bayan Collective is a collective of two Toronto-based artists, Althea Balmes and Jo SiMalaya Alcampo. Their work explores critical and intersectional approaches to community-based art, labour, and education. They are currently developing a comic book, Kwentong Bayan: Labour of Love, in close collaboration with caregivers, advocates, and community allies about the real life stories of Filipinx migrant care-givers working in Canada under the Care-giver Program (formerly known as the Live-in Caregiver Program).

Hazel Meyer lives and works between Los Angeles and Toronto. Hazel Meyer is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sport, sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of sports and recreation. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians, feminists, gender outlaws, leather-dykes—into the performative spaces of athletics. She often works collaboratively with her partner, media historian Cait McKinney. Together they explore their shared attachments to queer histories and accessibility politics through research, writing, video, and archival interventions.

Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist who uses art, education, and activism to forge creative survival. Based in London and working beyond, they primarily use their nonconforming body to bridge the gap between dis/connected bodies, theory and practice, text and the body, and aesthetics and the political substance. They work in performance, sculpture, soundscapes, and moving image, utilising everyday objects and life experiences to build new narratives of gender, race, and culture. They are an organizer with Collective Creativity arts collective. Recent performance and exhibition venues include ICA and Showroom (London), Nottingham Contemporary, and nGbK and xart splitta (Berlin).

Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory is a performer of uaajeerneq, a contemporary Greenlandic mask dance, and a recognized storyteller, poet, and actor. She is Inuk of Greenlandic origin, living in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Laakkuluk is a founding member and Programme Manager at Qaggiavuut, a non-profit society advocating for and supporting Nunavut performing artists.

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).