Curator, writer, and artist Emelie Chhangur is the newly appointed Director and Curator of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. This appointment follows a significant curatorial career at the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU). At AGYU, she led the reorientation of the gallery to become a civic, community-facing, ethical space driven by social process and intersectional collaboration. She founded the gallery’s residency program and received 25 awards from Galeries Ontario/Ontario Galleries for her contributions in writing, publishing, exhibition-making, public and education programming. Over the past twenty years, Chhangur has emerged as a leading voice for experimental curatorial practice in Canada and is celebrated nationally and internationally for her process-based, participatory curatorial practice, the commissioning of complex works across all media, and the creation of long-term collaborative projects performatively staged within and outside the gallery context. Chhangur has published numerous books on contemporary art and regularly contributes articles to art journals, peer review essays to anthologies, and presents her research at conferences internationally.

Distinguishing herself as a cultural worker dedicated to questioning the social and civic role of the public institutions of art, Chhangur has developed a curatorially-engaged approach to working across cultural, aesthetic, and social differences through a practice she calls “in-reach”—a concept that has since transformed engaged institutional practice in the arts across Canada. In 2019, she won Ontario Galleries’ inaugural BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) Changemaker Award and was a finalist for the Margo Bindhardt and Rita Davies Cultural Leadership Award. In 2020, she won the prestigious Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence. She holds a Master of Visual Studies from the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, at the University of Toronto.

Francisco-Fernando Granados’ multidisciplinary critical practice spans performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Vancouver Art Gallery, Darling Foundry (Montreal), Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts (Helsinki). Awards and honours include the Governor General’s Silver Medal for academic achievement upon graduating from Emily Carr University in 2010, and being named as one of Canada's 30 Under 30 by BLOUIN ARTINFO in 2014. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012 and is a member of the 7a*11d International Performance Festival Collective.

Multi-disciplinary artist Golboo Amani is best known for their performance and social practice works that rely on familiar social engagements as a point of entry. Amani’s work often responds to the conditions of knowledge production and systemic epistemic violence. By expanding sites of pedagogy to include the streets, backyards, homes, and public transit, Amani aims to produce skill-sharing experiences that speak to collective agency and egalitarian epistemology. Amani’s work has been shown nationally and internationally in venues including; Toronto Biennial, Creative Time Summit, AGO, Articule, XPACE Artist-Run Centre, Encuentro: Hemispheric Institute, Summerworks Festival, Rhubarb Festival, TRANSMUTED International Festival of Performance Art, 221A Artist-Run Centre, LIVE Biennial of Performance Art. Amani is a member of the Toronto Performance Art Collective co-curating the 7a11d International Festival of Performance Art and 7aMD8 as well as the co-curator of PUSH.PULL: QTBIPOC Cabaret & Performance Art.

Born in Kenya of Indian descent, Brendan Fernandes immigrated to Canada in 1989. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art and earned his MFA from Western University and his BFA from York University. He has exhibited widely including exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Art and Design New York, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the National Gallery of Canada, MASS MoCA, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Guangzhou Triennial. Fernandes has participated in numerous residency programs including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Work Space and Swing Space. He was an Ontario representative for the Sobey Art Award. Fernandes is based between Toronto and New York.

Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist, writer, educator, and editor at Fillip. Participating in exhibitions internationally, she has shown at institutions such as Artspeak, Border Gallery, Darling Foundry, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Tate Modern, Dorsky Gallery, and the Power Plant. Her artwork has been published in books such as Nonsite, Secret Publicity, and The F Word. She is also co-editor of the publications Institutions by Artists: Volume 1, 100% Vancouver, and the forthcoming Tradition versus Modernity. She currently teaches in the Curatorial Practice and Masters programs at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Emily Carr University of Arts + Design.

kristinaleepodesva.com

Chun Hua Catherine Dong is a Chinese-born artist working with performance art, photography, and video. She has performed and exhibited her works in multiple international performance art festivals and venues, such as Quebec City Biennial, Canadian Museum of Immigration, The Aine Art Museum, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Kaunas Biennial, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival in Chicago, 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, Place des Arts in Montreal, Dublin Live Art Festival, and more. She received a BFA from Emily Carr University Art & Design, an MFA from Concordia University, and was the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Award for contemporary avant-garde art (New York) in 2014.

Aryen Hoekstra is an artist and writer. Recent solo exhibitions in Toronto have been hosted by YYZ Artist’s Outlet, 8eleven, and Mercer Union, and other recent exhibition venues include Scotiabank Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography (Toronto), Forest City Gallery (London), and Modern Fuel (Kingston). He has contributed writing to YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Susan Hobbs, COOPER COLE, and Daniel Faria Gallery, and his art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Border Crossings, and Magenta Magazine. Hoekstra is the founder and director of the independent project space Franz Kaka in Toronto, Ontario.

Manolo Lugo is a Mexican-born artist and educator working in performance, video, photography, and installation. His work speaks to the conditions of migrancy, precarity, and queerness in advanced capitalist societies. He has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in venues including Unpack Gallery (Toronto), University of Toronto’s Art Centre, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), LIVE Biennial of Performance Art (Vancouver), and Visualeyez Performance Art Festival (Edmonton). He received a BFA from Emily Carr University and recently completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. He works as a Digital Media Technician at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.

Jude Norris (aka Tatakwan) is a multi-disciplinary Métis (Cree/Anishnawbe/Russian/Scottish Gypsy) artist of Plains Cree cultural affiliation. Norris’ work focuses on relationships—to self, others, animal world, earth, culture, community, territory, technology, spirit world, time/timelessness, and the “Great Mystery” —and the placement of those relationships in contemporary situations. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally and can be found in the collections of major museums across Turtle Island. She is a recipient of the Chalmer’s Arts Fellowship Award.

Kika Nicolela is a Brazilian artist and independent curator whose work includes video, installation,
and photography. She has participated in over 100 solo and collective exhibitions internationally, in institutions including the Museum of Image and Sound (São Paulo), MASP (São Paulo), Museum of Modern Art (Buenos Aires), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), LOOP Gallery (Seoul), GL Strand (Copenhagen) and Parc de La Vilette (Paris). In 2010, she had a retrospective of her videos at the Museum of Modern Art in Salvador, Brazil.

Johnson Ngo is a Toronto-based artist who works in performance and sculpture. Ngo's research explores connections and disjunctions between his gaysian identity and Western queer culture. He recently participated in LEITMOTIF for Nuit Blanche, a commission for the Bernie Miller Lightbox at the Blackwood Gallery, and the Bloor Alternative Art Fair for the BIG on Bloor Festival. Ngo also plays a facilitative role at various art institutions in Toronto, such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, TAIS, and Reel Asian Film Festival, and serves as the current chair of Trinity Square Video's Board of Directors.