Alaa Abu Asad is an artist, researcher, and photographer. Language and plants are central themes through which he develops alternative trajectories where values of (re)presentation, translation, viewing, reading, and understanding can intersect. His work takes the form of writing, film, and interactive installations, in which he visually represents his research and explores the boundaries of languages.

Alize Zorlutuna is a queer interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator whose work explores relationships to land, culture and the more-than-human, while thinking through settler-colonialism, history, and solidarity. Having moved between Tkarón:to and Anatolia (present-day Turkey) both physically and culturally throughout their life has informed Alize’s practice—making them attentive to spaces of encounter. Alize enlists poetics and a sensitivity to materials in works that span video, installation, printed matter, performance and sculpture. The body and its sensorial capacities are central to their work. Alize has presented their work in galleries and artist-run centres across Turtle Island, including: Plug In ICA, InterAccess, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Mercer union Centre For Contemporary Art, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Art Gallery of Burlington, XPACE, Audain Art Museum, Access Gallery, as well as internationally at The New School: Parsons (NY), Mind Art core (Chicago) and Club Cultural Matienzo (Argentina). Alize has been a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University since 2015.

Born in Montreal in 1951, Anna Gronau later moved to Toronto, where she became a central figure in the city’s co-op filmmaking scene. Between 1980 and 1982 Gronau was Director/Programmer of the Funnel Experimental Film Theatre, and from 1983 to 1985 worked as video distribution manager at Art Metropole. She is also the founder of OFAVACS (Ontario Film and Video Against Censorship Society). Anna has written and lectured on feminism and the avant-garde.

Arina Chernova was born on the 16th of February 1995 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Today, she is a filmmaker living in Berlin. Growing up as an immigrant in Eastern Germany, she is particularly interested in the perspectives of outsiders. She began producing artistic works at the FilmArche Berlin and has continued her studies at the German Film and Television Academy (DFFB) since 2018.

Aryel René Jackson is a multi-disciplinary non-binary Black afro-creole artist. Their practice has considered land and landscape as sites of storytelling and personal representation with a material focus on the tools and aesthetics of agriculture, archeology, meteorology, and flight. Jackson lives and works in Texas, where they are an educator and curator.

Azadeh Elmizadeh is a visual artist currently based in Toronto. Her practice focuses on painting and collage, drawing inspiration from Sufi cosmologies and Persian miniature painting. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Visual Communication and Graphic Design from the University of Tehran (2010), a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ontario College of Art and Design in Drawing and Painting (2016), and a Master of Fine Art from the University of Guelph (2020). Azadeh has exhibited in solo and two-person exhibitions at the Tube Culture Hall in Milan, Italy (2023), the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Canada (2022), and the Franz Kaka in Toronto, Canada (2022). Notable group shows include Now I am a lake at Public Gallery in London, United Kingdom (2022), Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter at The Blackwood in Mississauga, Canada (2022), and Holding a line in your hand at Kamloops Art Gallery in Kamloops, Canada (2021). She was also awarded the Joseph Plaskett Award for Painting in 2020.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. 

Born stateless, of Palestinian heritage, artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical work.

Batoul Faour is an architectural researcher, writer, and filmmaker. Her work operates at the intersection of politics, spatial histories, and media, blending a journalistic, documentary approach with the empirical and the architectural. She holds a BArch from the American University of Beirut and an MArch from the University of Toronto.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist based in San Juan, Puerto Rico whose expanded moving image practice is entangled with Boalian theater, expanded cinema, and feminist practices. She tends to work with non-actors and improvisation. Her recent focus is on the sensorial unconscious of anti-colonial movements, everyday poetic thought, and feminist experiments. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Pivô in São Paulo and Argos in Brussels, the 34th São Paulo Biennial and Momenta Biennale in Montreal.

Chantal Rousseau is a queer settler artist from French Canadian and Ukrainian ancestry. Her work uses embodied experience and research to learn about specific ecosystems. She is curious about points of connection between humans and non-humans, species diversity, conservation initiatives, and exploring a personal relationship to the natural world. She is a painter, animator, and sound and installation artist.

Charles was born and raised in Toronto. He was a fashion model, hockey player and actor appearing on stage, film, and television, before making his directorial debut at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival with his short film When Morning Comes. He followed with the release of short films Short Hymn, Silent War (2002), Pop Song and Urda/Bone (2003), and a music video for K’naan’s Strugglin. Throughout his career, Charles was regarded as a leader in Black Canadian independent film, a title that will remain as part of his legacy. His 2008 feature, Nurse.Fighter.Boy, produced in residence at the CFC, premiered at TIFF and was nominated for 10 Genie Awards, sparking world renowned interest.

Charles continued to deliver on his promising talent with features

including The Skin We’re In, Unarmed Verses and crime-noir, Akilla’s Escape. Charles directed four episodes of the CBC/BET+ drama, The Porter, which follows railway workers and the creation of the world’s first Black union. The Porter received 12 awards at the 2023 Canadian Screen Awards, for Best Direction, Drama Series and Best Dramatic Series. The Porter is Canada’s largest Black-led television series, and demonstrates Charles’ commitments to nurturing Black talent and to the increased representation of Black creators. Charles served as a trailblazer for Black creators by championing stories through his roles as the co-founder of Black Screen Office. Charles Officer was Founder of the award-winning independent production company, Canesugar Filmworks.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her works are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, The Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is a professor at Cooper Union in New York City.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos "+300 films from 2012 the collective experiments from different documentary and cinematographic devices, digital and analog as well as interventions or appropriations from found footage that allows to demarcate the territory in which an image, being visual or sound, becomes a condition of possibility for a political art.”

Danielle Dean is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonize the mind and body. Dean has developed commissioned projects with the Wellcome Collection, London (2023) and Performa 21, New York (2021). She has held recent exhibitions with ICA San Diego (2023), The Contemporary Austin, Texas (2023), Midnight moment, Times Square Arts, New York (2023), Tate Britain, London (2022), and The Whitney Biennale, New York (2022). She holds an MFA from CalArts, and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Daphne Xu is a Chinese-Canadian artist and filmmaker exploring the politics and poetics of place.

Darcy Tara McDiarmid is a Han and Northern Tutchone artist from the Crow Clan. Darcy draws inspiration from nature, trying to capture the pristine beauty of our natural world. She believes in honouring her ancestors by devoting her art to heritage and culture as well as the reclamation of traditional practices. She is a painter, carver, and willow basket maker.

Diana Vidrascu (Romania) is a filmmaker based in Paris, France. Working with film, photography, and installation, Diana Vidrascu questions the narrative devices of cinema by challenging the limits of

the narrative discourse and codes of the film genres. She debuted as a director in 2017 and her films have screened in international festivals such as: Locarno Film Festival, Berlinale Forum Expanded, IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival, Experimenta, and the Chicago International Film Festival.

DISNOVATION.ORG is a research collective set up in paris in 2012, whose core members include maria roszkowska (pl/fr), nicolas maigret (fr), baruch gottlieb (ca/de), and jerome saint-clair (fr). they work at the interface between contemporary art, research and hacking, and compose tailor-made teams for each investigation together with academics, activists, engineers, and designers. more specifically their recent artistic provocations seek to empower post growth imaginaries and practices while challenging dominant techno-solutionist ideologies. Their research includes artworks, publications & curation.

Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Her practice considers gardens and disrupted landscapes as mutable sites of personal and collective memory — inscribed in dynamics of power, colonial histories and their legacies. Weaving lens-based mediums, installation, text and performance, she explores spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency, in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles and materiality. Tagny has a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism from University of Montreal. Recent exhibitions include Musée de Joliette, Momenta Biennale, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Centre Clark, Montreal; Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, and Franz Kaka, Toronto. She is the recipient of the Mfon grant (2018), the Plein Sud Bursary (2020) and has been shortlisted for the CAP Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018) and the OAAG Award (2020).

Felippe Mussel is a sound designer and filmmaker based in Rio de Janeiro. He has been responsible for the sound of over 40 Brazilian movies. In 2012, he directed the feature documentary A Place to Take Away. He is also a PhD candidate in Contemporary Art Studies at Universidade Federal Fluminense.

Felix Kalmenson is an artist and filmmaker. Kalmenson’s work variably narrates the liminal space of a researcher’s and artist’s encounter with landscape and archive.

Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist and researcher based in Vienna. His work engages with worldbuilding, meaning, aesthetics, and identity after/on the Internet. He is interested in post-colonial effects, technology, and history. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.

fORUM is Mercer Union's ongoing series of talks, lectures, interviews, screenings and performances.

Gabi Dao creates sculpture, installation, sound works and video. She co-publishes the weekly radio show Artspeak Radio Digest on 100.5FM and organizes exhibitions and events at the project space Duplex on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, also known as Vancouver. 

Gabi Dao (she/they) is an artist and organizer currently based between the unceded and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh Nations (colonially known as Vancouver, Canada) and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. They are interested in sensory entanglements and affirmations— the ways these can insist on counter-memory, multiple truths, other ways of knowing and blurred temporalities, against the capitalist linearity of cause-and-effect.

Hoda Afshar was born in Tehran, Iran and is now based in Melbourne, Australia. Through her art practice, Hoda explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making. Working across photography and moving-image, she considers the representation of gender, marginality, and displacement. Hoda’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally and published online and in print. Her work is part of numerous private and public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, University of Queensland Art Museum, Monash University Museum of Art , Art Gallery of Western Australia, and Monash Gallery of Art. Hoda is a member of Eleven, a new collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators, and writers whose aim is to disrupt the current politics of representation and hegemonic discourses.

Jamal Ademola is a Nigerian-American artist and filmmaker who creates across film, video, animation, painting, installation, and performance. His work delicately examines Black and African identity, memory, romanticism, poetics, and the concept of being. Jamal is currently in production with his first feature film They Came From the Clouds.. Recent exhibitions and screenings include showings at (BCA) Black Cultural Archives in London (2023), Alchemy Film & Arts Festival (2023)(2022), Kala Art Gallery (2022), The New School (2022), and Untitled (AWCA) White Space Creative Agency in Lagos, Nigeria (2021). He is represented by Where the Buffalo Roam for commercials, film, and television.

Jasmine Liaw is an emerging interdisciplinary artist in dance, performance, new media art, and experimental film. Her practice investigates methods of queering diasporic culture through dance-technology. Her work holds space for complexity, inspired by her own queerness, identity, and climate anxiety. She is an artistic associate of the Chimerik Collective in Vancouver.

Salloum observes the world and creates/collects images/texts to make meaning from. A grandson of Syrian immigrants (from what is now Lebanon), raised on Sylix land, now on the territories of the xʷməθkʷey̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh and səíl̓wətaʔł. Recognizing and acting on this is an everyday practice, but let’s face it, he could do a lot more.

Joyce Joumaa is a video artist based between Beirut and Montreal. After growing up in Lebanon, she pursued a BFA in Film Studies at Concordia University in Canada. Her work focuses on microhistories within Lebanon as a way to understand how past structures inform the present moment.

Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker. He attended the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and now lives in Berlin, Germany. His most recent work, Paradiso, XXXI, 108, premiered at Corti d’Autore in the Locarno Film Festival 2022. He just completed A Fidai Film and is preparing a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.

Lananh Chu is a Vietnamese writer and maker. She-they is calling for a ceasefire and unwaveringly supporting the Palestinian liberation.

Larissa Sansour was born in 1973 in East Jerusalem, Palestine. She uses science fiction to address social and political issues. She represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. In 2020, Larissa was the shared recipient of the prestigious Jarman Award. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos, and sculptures.

Maia Gattás Vargas is a visual artist, arts researcher, and professor. She holds a degree in Communication Sciences (UBA) and a PhD in Contemporary Latin American Art (UNLP). She works as a postdoctoral fellow at CONICET. In 2019, she was awarded a scholarship to attend the Di Tella University Film Program (2019). And in 2023, she participated in Talents Buenos Aires, BAFICI. She premiered her first feature documentary Viento del este (East wind) at Doc Buenos Aires Film Festival inAugust of 2023; the international premiere took place at Jihlava IDFF that October.

Maryam Tafakory, born in Shiraz, Iran, works with film and performance. Screenings of her work include MoMA, Locarno, IFFR and ICA, amongst others. Her works won awards such as the Best Experimental Short at 70th Melbourne International Film Festival, Gold Hugo Award at 58th Chicago International Festival, Tiger Short Award at 51st IFFR Rotterdam and Barbara Hammer Feminist Award at 60th AAFF.

Maya Jeffereis is an artist and filmmaker whose work seeks to expand overlooked histories and fill in archival gaps with counter narratives, personal histories, and speculative fictions. Jeffereis’ work has been presented in the United States and internationally, including

the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, The Noguchi Museum, among other institutions.

Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist whose embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity. Love lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College.

Miranda Javid (she/her) is an animator, curator, and art-educator. Her animations describe human bias and the relationship between individuals and their communities. These films have shown nationally and internationally at festivals like the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Eyeworks Film Festival, Slamdance, The Maryland Film Festival, and Animation Block Party.

Mohamad Malas was born in 1945 in Quneitra in the Golan Heights. He is a prominent Syrian filmmaker whose films garnered him international recognition. Malas is among the first auteur filmmakers in Syrian cinema. Malas worked as a schoolteacher between 1965 and 1968 before moving to Moscow to study filmmaking at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). Upon graduating, he worked in Syrian television and later produced multiple lauded feature films and documentaries.

Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production house, Idiom Films. He is also one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, which focuses on militant film practice. Since 2017, he is a resident researcher at The School of the Art (KASK) in Ghent, Belgium.

Muhammad Nour Elkairy is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist and film programmer from Jordan, currently based in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal). He holds a MFA in Studio Arts: Film Production at Concordia University. His work is particularly concerned with the legacies of colonial, political, and economic power. His work has been shown in several international film festivals and art galleries.

Nadine is an artist and instructor living in Mississauga, Ontario. Nadine works as a ceramics studio technician and teaches digital art. Nadine has over a decade of professional design experience in the GTA. Nadine studied Visual Arts at York University with a focus on sculpture and drawing.

Born and raised in Trinidad, Natalie Wood obtained her studio training at Ontario College of Art and Design and went on to complete an MA in Art Education from the University of Toronto in 2000. Her works have been presented nationally and internationally in several group exhibitions (Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art 2007), International Art Fairs (Artist Project Toronto 2010, Nuit Blanche 2007, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, 2006,), and film and video festivals (the New York Mix Film and Video Festival, Inside Out, Images, Pleasure Dome and Mpenzi Film and Video festival where she won the Audience Choice Award in 2006). She has had solo shows at ASpace Gallery windows, Zsa Zsa Gallery and following on residencies at the Spadina Museum House and at the Caribbean Contemporary Art Centre 7 in Trinidad. A recipient of numerous awards from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Council for the Arts, she received the 2006 New Pioneers Award for contribution to the Arts in Toronto and was nominated for the 2006 K. M Hunter Interdisciplinary Arts Award.

Natasha Woods is a filmmaker and educator currently based in Columbus, Ohio where she is in pursuit of her MFA. Committed to using filmmaking as a tool for inquiry, collective organizing, and worldmaking, she has organized a number of screenings and workshops at DIY and artist-forward spaces.

Nathan Clement is a Réunion-born, Paris-based filmmaker and musician. He studied cinema in Switzerland at HEAD-Genève and has produced three short films. He is also a musician and sound designer.

NIC Kay is a dancer, performer, conceptual choreographer, and all-around artist. Using creative movement, performing arts history, and performance art theory, they explore the themes of relationality and yearning in their work.

Nisha Duggal explores expressions of freedom in the everyday. She is interested in the transformative qualities of making and doing engineering situations that uncover deep-seated primitive impulses to connect. Nisha works internationally including installations at ArtNight and Watermans (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Ginza Art Lab (Tokyo), Baltic (Gateshead) and Oriel Mostyn (Llandudno) with screenings at Videobabel (Cusco, Peru), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrueck, Germany), Rekalde (Bilbao, Spain), Cornerhouse (Manchester) and Iniva (London). She has been awarded commissions by Site Gallery (Sheffield) and Contemporary Art Forum (Kitchener, Ontario) and was shortlisted for the Jerwood Moving Image Awards in 2008 and the Jerwood/Umbrella Moving Image Awards in 2013. Between 2018-22 Nisha was artist-in-residence for Walthamstow Wetlands, The National Trust at Powis Castle in Wales, Royal Overseas League and In Situ. She is currently working on Wanderings, a participatory commission for Bethlem Gallery and the NHS that will be presented as a series of permanent works for London’s new mental health facility, New Douglas Bennett House, in 2023.

Nour Bishouty is an interdisciplinary artist working across media including video, sculpture, works on paper, digital images, and writing. Her work engages with histories and narratives of place and poses questions around dissonance, opacity, legibility, and the generative possibilities of misunderstanding. Bishouty’s work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally including at Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto (2022); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2021); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2017); Casa Arabe, Madrid (2016); Access Gallery, Vancouver (2015); the Mosaic Rooms, London (2015); and the Beirut Art Centre, Beirut (2014). Her artist book 1—130: Selected works Ghassan Bishouty b. 1941 Safad, Palestine — d. 2004 Amman, Jordan, edited by Jacob Korczynsci, was co-published in 2020 by Art Metropole (Toronto) and Motto Books (Berlin). Upcoming exhibitions include La biennale de Québec (Feb 2024).

Nour Ouayda is a filmmaker and film programmer. Her films experiment with various forms of fiction writing in cinema. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Mira Adoumier and part of the editorial committee of the Montreal-based online film journal Hors Champ.

Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer, and educator. She is author of the book Sundry Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017), and the films Offing (2021), and When Things Occur (2017) among others. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art (2019).

Parastoo Anoushahpour is an artist originally from Tehran, now based in Toronto, who works predominantly with film, video, and installation. Her recent work has been shown at the Plugin ICA, Berlinale, MoMA, The Flaherty Film Seminar, Punto de Vista Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform, Viennale, NYFF, TIFF, Images Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Experimenta in Bangalore, and Media City. Since 2013, she has developed a shared practice with Ryan Ferko and Faraz Anoushahpour.

Peng Zuqiang works with film, video and installations. Exhibitions and screenings include Cell Project Space, E-Flux screening room, Kevin Space, UCCA Beijing, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 25FPS, IDFA, and Open City Doc Festival. He is a recipient of the Illy Present Future prize in 2022, and the Dialog Award at EMAF 2023. A resident artist at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (2022-24), he lives and works in Amsterdam.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker currently based on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker currently based on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, land, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework.

Rehab Nazzal is a Palestinian-born multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Toronto, Canada. Her work deals with the effects of settler colonial violence on peoples, on land, and on other non-human life in colonized territories. 

Rhayne Vermette is an artist and filmmaker born in Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, Manitoba. Her filmmaking practice has been described as opulent collages of fiction, animation, documentary, re-enactments, and divine interruption. She lives in Winnipeg.

Rouzbeh Akhbari is an artist working in video installation and film based between Toronto and Lisbon. His practice is research-driven and usually exists at the intersections of storytelling, political ecology, critical border studies, and human geography.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. 

Born in 1954, Niagara Falls, New York, Shelley Niro is a multi-disciplinary artist, and a member of the Six Nations Reserve, Turtle Clan, Bay of Quinte Mohawk. She has worked in a variety of media, including beadwork, painting, photography, and film. Her work challenges stereotypical images of Indigenous Peoples.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) b. Ferndale, Washington, is currently based in Vancouver, BC, and Milwaukee, WI. He studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centres around personal positions of Indigenous landscape, language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable.

Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Even) is an artist and filmmaker born in Yakutsk, the capital city of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located south of the Arctic Circle. Her practice centers on the importance of Indigenous visual language, particularly in the Arctic regions and gravitates towards critical self-historization.

Tacita Dean (British, b. 1965) was born in Canterbury, England. She attended the Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, England, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, Greece, and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She has produced works in various media, including sculpture, photography, and woodwork. Some of her unique and renowned creations, however, have involved the use of film as portrait. By projecting a series of frames, each blown up and lit to her own specifications, Dean makes the celluloid film itself the subject over and above the action in the film.

Tamara Jones is a writer and artist based in Tkaronto (Toronto) and Yelamu (San Francisco). Their research and site-specific video performance art practice uses experimental docu-fiction and sculpture to explore bureaucratic architecture and the politics of play and public space. This is a Crisis is their first public work.

Terra Long is a filmmaker whose work circles cultural, personal, and natural histories embedded within landscape. Her practice is collaborative, with a commitment to deep listening and material explorations of celluloid.

She is a member of the Independent Imaging Retreat Collective (The Film Farm) and F4A Collective, where she shares handmade filmmaking techniques. Her work has been shown in festivals including, Toronto International Film Festival,  Media City Film Festival, Images Festival, Ann Arbor, CPH: DOX, International Film Festival Rotterdam, EXiS, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival among others. Her work is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center. She studied at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University and received her MFA from York University.

She frequently collaborates as lead editor on documentary films, most recently, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project (Brewster, Stephenson, Sundance 2023) and regularly acts as an editing consultant, The Tuba Thieves (O’Daniel, Sundance 2023).

Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council as well as the British Columbia Arts Foundation. She was a 2016 recipient of the Ontario Arts Council’s Chalmers Fellowship.

She lives and works on the traditional territory of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Ulufer Çelik (b. 1992, Antalya/ Turkey) is an artist, who lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

She completed her studies in the MA Art Praxis program at the Dutch Art Institute in 2018. Her artistic practice explores the potentialities of narrative and myth-making, that is expressed through moving image, poetry, drawing, sound and performance. In her work, she constructs on multi-layered planes through a non-linear perception of time. She searches for queer, immigrant, feminist ways of making and thinking with the archeological, spiritual and spatial traces of memory. She is a member of Eat-House Collective, W1555 Artist Community and a resident at Putsebocht 3.

Her work has been exhibited in several shows at Growing Space, Corridor Project Space, Are Projects, Rib, State of Concept, Yellow Brick Gallery, Litost Gallery, Institute for Provocation, Belmacz Gallery and Wuerttembergischer Kunstverein.

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti (she/her) is the author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity's wrongs and the implications for social activism. She is also one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and the co-curator of Art-Life Rituals for Radical Tenderness with performance artist Dani d'Emilia. Vanessa is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Critical Multicultural Education. She is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Education of the University of Victoria.

Véronique Sunatori is a multidisciplinary visual artist living and working in Tkaronto, Canada. She works in sculpture and installation with a penchant for ceramic. Sunatori’s work has been presented in institutions across Canada, Japan and the US. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from York University (2018).

Wang Bing was born in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province. He studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, an industrial city where, years later, he would film Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. From there he moved on to the Beijing Film Academy, where he discovered the work of Antonioni, Bergman and Pasolini. Most recently, Wang Bing was awarded the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival for Mrs. Fang (2017), and in 2018, Dead Souls was selected for the Out of Competition segment of the Cannes Film Festival. In 2021, Le BAL in Paris mounted an exhibition entitled The Walking Eye during which the French Cinémathèque presented a retrospective of his films. The 2023 Cannes Film Festival will present two new films by Wang Bing: Man in Black as a Special Screening and Youth (Spring) in the Official Competition.

Since 2018 curators Toleen Touq and Liz Ikiriko have been working together as wave~form~projects. Currently based in Toronto, their practice embodies collaboration, relationality, and critical inquiry alongside communities of underrepresented artists, curators and arts workers. From 2021 to 2023, they facilitated Ways of Attuning, a study group which supported intimate and expansive curatorial practice with a group of participants across Turtle Island. Since then, they have presented workshops and programs with Critical Distance Centre for Curators, Gallery TPW, Images Festival, and re:assemblage collective.

Growing up in China, and having lived in Toronto by herself since she was 15, Xinli She is interested in telling the stories of stuck-in-between identities. She strives to capture the vulnerability and imperfection of human nature in her films. Her most recent documentary, Flourishing, was shown at TIFF Lightbox in 2022.

Yuka Murakami is a filmmaker and artist whose practice began in experimental sound. She has a BS in Cognitive Science from UCSD and an MFA in Film Direction from the California Institute of the Arts. Her awards include an Emmy in 2020 and the Allison Doerner Prize in 2021.

Yuula Benivolski is an artist and filmmaker in Toronto. Through auto-fiction and personal archive she explores the territories between memory and official history.

Most recently, her work has been shown at Microscope Gallery in NYC, Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, and Trinity Square Video media arts centre in Toronto.

Zaina Bseiso is a film director, producer, and curator working primarily in documentary and experimental cinema. Her work explores the relationship between the materialities of place and issues of memory, surveillance, corporeality, and nationalism. She received her Master’s degree in Film and video from the California Institute of the Arts. Bseiso is based in Los Angeles and was raised in Egypt by Palestinian parents. Her practice mainly traverses among Egypt, Palestine, Cuba, Mexico, and the US. She is co-founder of Bahía Colectiva, a community of filmmakers that collaborate in practice and curation.