Filippo Andreatta is an artist and curator. He has established the Office for a Human Theatre to create works that disrupt the hierarchy of sight and listening. He realises shows, performances, installations and unconventional formats in urban and non-urban contexts; he has read Frankenstein around a bonfire at the 79th parallel north in the Svalbard archipelago, staged an abandoned tower-bell via Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli, created Little Fun Palace a parasitic caravan that has travelled Europe and North America, curated the feminist futures festival for Centrale Fies and initiated the Nomadic School that moves between mountains, swamps and other rural areas contaminating performing arts with natural and social sciences. Filippo Andreatta develops his artistic research with the productive and organisational collaboration of Office for a Human Theatre (OHT), the research studio he founded in 2008. Together, they explore private and public spaces shaking the centre and margins of theatre and redefining the map of our positions in shared spaces. OHT works in the domain of theatre and beyond by collaborating with festivals, public administrations, contemporary art museums, theatres and underground realities.
Jessica Marion Barr (she/her) is an artist, educator, researcher, and single mother of Scottish, English, Dutch, and matrilineal Haudenosaunee ancestry. Her interdisciplinary practice incorporates artmaking and research-creation, investigating creative, collaborative, queer, embodied/somatic, and Indigenous-led approaches to environmental issues and social/ecological justice. Her work is vibrant and in constant motion, with projects including drawing and painting (including from handmade materials), collage, sculptural and found object assemblage pieces, ephemeral place-based and site-specific creations, soundscapes, zines, performances, poetry, and participatory works. Her arts-practice-based Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at Queen's University focused on ecological elegies. An Assistant Professor at Trent University, she teaches and supervises in the Cultural Studies Department (visual arts) and the Honours Bachelor of Arts and Science Program, and approaches her work with creativity, enthusiasm, and attentiveness to care and wellbeing. Jessica has exhibited artwork across Canada, and has attended trainings and artist residencies nationally and internationally.
Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies that are entwined within it. She looks to disaster as a series of intersecting processes including social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic … which are implicated not only in how disaster is caused but also in how it manifests, is responded to, and overcome. Through this research, Battle looks closer to both online models and plant systems for strategies to learn from, and for ways we might help to frame and strengthen such response. Much of this work extends from her 2020 PhD dissertation which looked closer to community responses to disaster: the ways in which they take shape, and especially to how artistic and online models might help to frame and strengthen such response. Battle’s practice prioritizes collaboration, experimentation, and failure; she has a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Toronto Metropolitan University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a PhD in Art & Visual Culture from the University of Western Ontario.
Sepideh Behrouzian is an interdisciplinary artist/researcher originally from Iran, who recently moved to Toronto. Her artistic practice explores the coloniality of the image, ocular-centric critique, and its active role in shaping the colonial frontier, extraction, and environmental issues. Behrouzian’s work critically engages with extractivist culture and ocular-centric governance, using research, writing, and creative production to reveal hidden gaps in totalizing governing regimes and open up spaces for alternative knowledge transmission, both human and non-human. Before moving to Toronto, Sepideh Behrouzian completed a one-year residency program at Jan Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. Sepideh holds an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute, an MA in Artistic Research, and a BA in Visual Arts from Tehran University of Art.
Joshua Bonnetta is a Canadian sound artist and filmmaker based in Munich, Germany. Working across installation, publication, and traditional film exhibition his artistic practice conceives of cinema as a sound forward medium historically situated in relation to both film history and a greater aggregate of sonic arts. A continuum throughout his career has been the creative exploration of environmental sound through cinematic frameworks, and re-imagining what could constitute site-specific sound in documentary film. His upcoming projects explore the environmental effects of anthropogenic noise through the world of scientific listening, from the inner geological sounds of mountains to the depths of the Pacific Ocean. His sound works are published by Shelter Press and Canti Magnetici and his films are distributed by The Cinema Guild and Arsenal Institute für Film und Video Kunst. He is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in the Creative Arts.
Andrew Denton’s research engages with climate and geological change through cinematic affective devices, video and photographic media. His practice challenges the ‘cinematic’ indexically (through aesthetic devices which distort and recalibrate viewers’ experience of time and space); harnessing affective approaches to cinematic making and thinking. These approaches manifest in works invested in the ecological (land, air, ocean), and the body (dance). The dance works are collaborative and experiment with technology and performance – specifically dance integrated with live cinema, motion capture and VR (360 cinema) technology. Alongside his practice-based research, he is committed to the development of postgraduate curricula, applying an approach to learning and teaching that seeks to enable meaningful research practices that are agile, responsive and collaborative. He has presented and published papers and chapters on creative-based pedagogical approaches, and project-based curriculum design, locally and internationally. Denton is the inaugural director of the School for the Arts at the University of Saskatchewan.
Tanya Doody is an artist and researcher and is Assistant Professor in Studio Art at Western University, situated on the banks of the Deshkan Ziibi and within the traditional lands of Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Chonnonton Nations. Her research explores objects, materials, and the senses together as a site of inquiry, with modes spanning performance art, object making, and land-based site-responsive practices rooted in sustainability. She is part of the Abundant Intelligences network of researchers dedicated to interdisciplinary intercultural research methodologies, engaging with AI through an Indigenous lens, and is studio lead, materials research with OTEKH.
Michaela Grill (AT/CA) studied in Vienna, Glasgow, and London (Goldsmith College) and has been producing film and video works, installations, and live visuals since 1999. Performances and screenings of her work have spanned 5 continents, including institutions such as MOMA NY, National Gallery of Art in Washington, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museo Reina Sofía and La Casa Encendida in Madrid, ICA in London, and many cinematheques. Her videos have been screened at over 200 festivals worldwide. Grill received the Outstanding Artist Award from the Austrian Ministry of Art & Culture in 2010 and is currently an Art-Science Fellow at the Woodwell Climate Research Centre, Collaborating to create new insights and inspire action.
Ufuk Ali Gueray is Assistant Professor of Painting at NSCAD University. Born in Germany to Turkish immigrant parents, he is based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. His work has been shown internationally and supported by residencies and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and other funding bodies.
Jessica Karuhanga is a first-generation Canadian artist of British-Ugandan heritage who addresses politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, sculpture, writing, drawing, and performance. Karuhanga’s work has been presented at venues including Warehouse9 (Copenhagen, DK), Sarajevski Otvoreni Centar (Sarajevo, BA), Mitchell Art Gallery (Edmonton), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Onsite Gallery (Toronto), Remai Modern (Saskatoon), Pallas Art Projects (Dublin, IE), WNDX Festival (Winnipeg), ROM (Toronto), and Goldsmiths University (London, UK). She holds a BFA (Western University) and an MFA (University of Victoria) and is an Assistant Professor at Western University.
Masha Kouznetsova’s work brings together analogue sound processes, performance, sculpture, and drawing/printmaking, with a focus on portable studio practices, salvaged materials, and site-responsive installations. Her practice and research are grounded in personal experiences of transience and the search for im/perceptible connections within/between geographic and cultural worlds she moves through. Born in Moscow, Russia, Masha received her BFA from Georgia State University in 2012 and from 2012-2021 has worked in cultural institutions and arts education in San Francisco, CA. She completed her MFA in 2023 at Western University in London, ON where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Visual Culture. Her works have been performed and exhibited in Berlin, Moscow, Atlanta, San Francisco, and London, ON.
Ella Dawn McGeough negotiates sticky sites of affection & infection, influence & inheritance, obligation & commitment, encounter & entanglement, inside & outside, you & me, they & we. Their doctoral research drew on the vast potential of beds, human and otherwise (York University, 2023). Alongside Liza Eurich and Colin Miner, they co-edit the publishing project Moire.ca. They recently relocated to Saskatoon (Treaty 6, homeland of the Métis), where they became area chair of Sculpture at the University of Saskatchewan’s School for the Arts.
Erica Mendritzki was born in Sarnia, Ontario, on the edge of Chemical Valley, in the ancestral land of the Chippewa, Odawa, and Potawatomi people. She now lives and makes art in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, and teaches painting and drawing at NSCAD University.
Sarah Messerschmidt is a writer who works across anthropology, art, and critical theory. Her current research examines nonfiction and artists’ films as ways of representing experience, particularly those that respond to legacies of colonialism. Looking at moving image practices as methods of reinvention and world-making, she is interested in the mediation of memory via footage, taking into consideration the politics of representation and relations of power in image making, while also considering film and video as insurgent media capable of establishing political and social solidarity. Her inquiries also consider the ways in which film can merge fiction with research, cultural analysis, and critique in order to draw out complex ideas about the relationships between visual culture, power and colonial violence. Messerschmidt regularly contributes essays and written texts to exhibition catalogues, journals, and magazines internationally, including Artforum, Art Monthly UK, Texte zur Kunst, and Third Text, among others.
Tékeniyáhsen Ohkwá:ri (Jackson 2bears) is a Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) artist, cultural theorist, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts Research and Technology at Western University. His research-creation practice explores Haudenosaunee cosmologies, land-based knowledge, and the creative use of digital technologies and AI to express and sustain Indigenous cultural practices. 2bears is Associate Professor of Art Studio and Indigenous Studies and Director of OTEKH, a network of labs at Western dedicated to Indigenous-led research-creation. He is also Co-Director of 2RO MEDIA and the Abundant Intelligences project, a global initiative reimagining AI through Indigenous epistemologies and community-centered design.
Cassie Packham is an Onyota'a:ka (Oneida) artist born and raised in Mi'kma'ki (Nova Scotia). Her work considers rearrangement, oscillation, transmission and reciprocity in manifestations of writing, video, sculpture, sound, installation, printed matter, drawing and performance. Enduring interests include the use of personal narrative to interrupt dominant modes of understanding, representations of media and its effects/affects, natural movement, and the body as resistance. In 2011 Cassie graduated from NSCAD with a BFA in Intermedia. In 2022, they were awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant and a Nova Scotia Arts Grant for Individuals for their on-going art explorations of the metaverse. Cassie is presently based in London, Ontario and is pursuing their Master of Fine Arts at Western University.
Parsons & Charlesworth, co-founded by Jessica Charlesworth and Tim Parsons, creates visually provocative objects, installations and digital media that invite viewers into meticulously crafted and designed alternate realities. Working with materials such as cast resins, woven willow, bent metal, inflatable PVC, molded fabrics and readymades they transform conventional materials into artifacts from imagined futures that feel both strange and familiar. Their studio operates as an artistic laboratory where speculative scenarios take physical form, challenging viewers to reconsider their relationship with technology and ecology. Through their richly detailed worlds, Parsons & Charlesworth examines the complex mythology of progress that underpins contemporary society. Each project begins with extensive research and dialogue with scientists, specialists and communities, resulting in works that blur the boundaries between art, design, and critical inquiry. Like archaeologists of possible futures, they excavate the moral dilemmas embedded in our technological aspirations. Rather than offering utopian solutions, their work creates spaces where uncomfortable questions can surface. By materialising abstract concepts into tangible experiences, they invite audiences to physically engage with alternate ways of living and being. Their practice ultimately serves as a mirror, reflecting our collective anxieties and desires about what lies ahead and how we might chart a more just and enlightened future ahead. Tim Parsons studied (MA) Design Products at the Royal College of Art and Jessica Charlesworth studied Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art. They both teach at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher and educator. His work is informed by studies of global modernisms, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Throughout the past decade, he has focused on a critical re-reading of the entanglements between colonialism and modernity. These concerns derive from lived experiences: Petros is an Eritrean emigrant who spent formative years in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Kenya before settling in central Canada. The overlapping cultures, voices, and tenets of this constellation produced a dispersed consciousness, global and transnational in stance and outlook. His works aim for an introspective and textured analysis of the historical factors that produced these migratory conditions. Petros installs photographs, moving images, sculptural objects, and sound work according to performative, painterly, or site responsive logics. Moving between the works echoes the extensive travel taken to produce them; while recurrent visual or formal devices quietly indicate the complex backdrops against which his projects are set. Petros completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, an MFA in Visual Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University; a BFA in Photography from Concordia University and a BA in History from the University of Saskatchewan. Petros is represented by Tiwani Contemporary in London, UK and Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal, Canada.
Danielle Petti is a mother and an artist whose work engages with material agency, geological time, sustainability, and care. Her practice challenges anthropocentric views and bridges scientific, domestic, and environmental narratives. Danielle has a BFA from Toronto Metropolitan University, and an MFA from Western University, where she is currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Visual Culture. She is cross-disciplinary, drawing from experience in photography, painting, sculpture, several crafts, and folk arts. Danielle aims to create responsibly by sourcing discarded material and by foraging for earth both globally and locally, on the traditional territories of Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Attawandaron.
Laura St. Pierre is Fransaskoise, and lives on Treaty 6 Territory. Her home incorporates a studio, native plant and food garden, and a refuge for insects, birds and wild creatures. She studied psychology at UBC and visual art at the U of A and Concordia University, where she completed an MFA. She has recently mounted solo exhibitions at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina and the Galerie d’art Louise et Ruben Cohen in Moncton, and is currently part of a traveling exhibition titled Storied Telling: Performativity and Narrative in Photography. Her work has recently been featured in BlackFlash Magazine and the Malahat Review. She works primarily in photo, video and installation, and her current research explores sustainable approaches to image making. She also teaches part time at the University of Saskatchewan and writes about art.
Arielle Walker (Taranaki, Ngāruahine, Ngāpuhi, Pākehā) is a Tāmaki Makaurau-based contemporary artist, writer, and maker. Her practice seeks pathways towards reciprocal belonging through the intersections and connections between land, language, and craft, weaving together tactile storytelling and ancestral narratives. Contexts that surround this include the intrinsic ties of language and land, migration across the swell and pull of the ocean, the interconnectedness of islands, pūrākau, textile traditions passed down through generations of tūpuna wāhine, tension, balance, and weight as material metaphors, roots and botanical belongings. In 2024, she completed a PhD —
Mending the Kupenga: Towards a Language of Reciprocity Between Ancestral Textile & Storytelling Practices — at AUT University, where she is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with RAU Textiles Research, Te Kura Toi a Hoahoa School of Art and Design.
Aurora Wolfe is a multimedia artist, researcher, and musician of Cree (Beardy’s and Okemasis Cree Nation) and Scottish descent. Her work centers on the relationships between Indigeneity and institutions, teasing out stories that have been overshadowed by the dominant colonial narrative. She holds an interest in exploring dynamic relationality and creating art that generates acts of kinship with the past, present, and future. Grounded within lived experience, her works dance between mediums, genres, and disciplines. Blending a tongue-in-cheek sensibility with historical reference, she unravels what it means to be displaced, and the simple yet complicated rituals of return. Alongside acts of truth-telling, aesthetics serve as both an entry point for viewers and a weapon against the fetishization of Indigenous pain. Through this lens, she firmly locates us in the here and now, and within our own complexities as living, feeling, and interactive beings.
Melanie Zurba is the Nominate Principal Investigator of the Worried Earth project and is an Associate Professor at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University. Her academic work focuses on social sciences and humanities related to community-engagement and wellbeing connected to the natural environment. She also maintains an emerging professional artistic practice in ceramic sculpture and installation.
