Team

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance Studies and Associate Dean, Research in York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. She is author of Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Ann Saddlemyer Prize) and Co-Editor of Performance Studies in Canada , with Marlis Schweitzer (Patrick O’Neill Award). Laura has led and collaborated on several research-creation projects that explore political performance, site-specificity, archives, and digital technologies. Mostly recently she has served as dramaturg on Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective (2021) and SpiderWebShow’s VR production, You Should Have Stayed Home (2022). Laura is Director and PI of Hemispheric Encounters.

Tracy Tidgwell works in the folds of process, connection, and the body. Tracy is co-editor of The Future is Fat, a collection of scholarly and artistic interventions that reimagine understandings of time to allow for new expressions of fat experience, creator of Anywhere Near Us, a collection of audio performances of queer texts, a member of Fat Rose, an art and activism incubator for fat liberation, and Producer and Project Manager for Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design at York University.

Alina Peña Iguarán is a member of the National System of Researchers, and is a research professor at the Department of Sociocultural Studies at ITESO, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara. She earned her Ph.D. at Boston University in the Department of Hispanic Studies. Her doctoral thesis focused on the relationship between writing, autobiography, and war in the context of the sociocultural construction of post-revolutionary Mexico and the representation of the figure of the intellectual. Her research interests include aesthetics and (bio)politics; memory and subjectivity in contexts of violence, borders and disappearance. Her current research project is entitled “Poéticas de las excedencias: discursos audiovisuales para habitar la frontera.”

Amparo Marroquín Parducci is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) of El Salvador since 1997. She has been visiting professor at universities in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia, among others. She is part of the coordinating team of the research group on Political Communication and Citizenship for CLACSO and a researcher at the International Center for Studies on Border Epistemologies and Political Economy of Culture in Chile. Consultant for international organizations such as GIZ, UNDP, Ford Foundation and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung among others. Her research has focused on examining the way in which identities, cultures, and narratives in the media have changed since migratory processes gained prominence, the conformation of memory and intangible heritage, and the ways in which different forms of violence are named, in particular, those that began in the 1990s.

Jess Dobkin has been a working artist, curator, community activist, mentor and teacher for more than 25 years, creating and producing intimate solo theatre performances, large-scale public happenings, socially engaged interventions and performance art workshops and talks. Her practice extends across black boxes and white cubes, art fairs and subway stations, international festivals, and single bathroom stalls. She operated an artist-run newsstand in a vacant subway station kiosk, a soup kitchen for artists, a breast milk tasting bar, and a performance festival hub for kids. Her film and video works are distributed by Vtape and traces of her performance work are held in performance art archives internationally. jessdobkin.com

Kim Sawchuk is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, where she holds a research chair in Mobile Media Studies. Trained in feminist cultural studies, since 2006 Dr. Sawchuk’s research has investigated aging, 'disability' and ICTs in the context of the transition to wireless, mobile, networked communications. She is committed to exploring research-creation to foment creative collaborations for social change. She is committed to working from a community-based perspective that includes looking at the structural and systemic barriers that perpetuate inequities and exclusion- and finding solutions from the ground up. Kim directs the ACT Lab at Concordia (Aging Communication and Technologies www.actproject.ca).

Marcial Godoy-Anativia is a sociocultural anthropologist and the Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. He is Editor of emisférica, the Institute's trilingual online journal. His publications include "Area Studies and the Decade after 9/11" (2016) with Seteney Shami; Religiones, matrimonio igualitario y aborto: Alianzas con y entre actores religiosos por los derechos sexuales y reproductivos en Argentina (2014) with Daniel Jones y Angélica Peña; Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era (2013) with Zeynep Gambetti; and Ciudades Translocales: Espacios, flujo, representación—Perspectivas desde las Américas (2005) with Rossana Reguillo. From 2000-2007, he worked in the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean and the Program on International Collaboration at the Social Science Research Council. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).

Paolo Vignolo is associate professor of the department of history at the National University of Colombia, Bogota. His fields of research and creation deal with public history, cultural heritage and memory studies with a focus on live arts, performance and geographic imaginaries. He holds a PhD in history at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) of Paris. In 2012-13 he has been visiting scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University and in 2023 he will be fellow at the Kate Hamburger Centre for Apocaliptic and Post-Apcoaliptic Studies (CAPAS) at the University of Heidelberg. He is a member of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics of the New York University and of the Transformative Memory Network of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Selena Couture is a settler scholar and an Associate Professor in Drama at the University of Alberta in Treaty 6 territory / Métis Region No.4. Her research deconstructs conceptions of settler colonial white possession while foregrounding the maintenance of Indigenous places through performance. Publications include: Against the Current and Into the Light (2020) and On this Patch of Grass (2018). She is part of the Kule scholar cohort focusing on Climate Resilience in the 21st Century. Her research responds to the crisis of global warming, aiming to create responsible relations with Indigenous people, lands and all other-than-human beings.

Sérgio P. Andrade, PhD, is an artist, professor and researcher in dance, performance and philosophy. Since 2012, he has been a Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in the Department of Bodily Art, teaching at the Undergraduate and Graduate Dance Programs. He coordinates the Laboratório de Crítica (the "LabCrítica") at UFRJ, in which he develops several collaborative research-creation activities, training, publication, curatorship and exchange in dance and performance. Some recent results of this work are the book "Performar Debates" (2017) and the two editions of the conference and performance showcase "Trans-In-Corporados", which took place at Rio Art Museum in 2017 and 2018.
www.labcritica.com.br | sergio.andrade@eefd.ufrj.br

Alex de las Heras is a relational artist and engaged scholar. He is a Ph.D Candidate in Social Sciences and Humanities at the National University of Colombia and holds a MA in Fine Arts and Experimental Design from the University of Art and Industrial Design of Linz, Austria. His fields of research and creation deal with Participatory Action Research, Future Studies and Politics, with a focus on living heritage, happening and performance, time perception and immersive future scenarios. In 2021 he was visiting researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, CSIC; since 2022 he is Research Assistant with Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Research-Creation Practices, a SSHRC Partnership Project, co-leading the research-creation project ‘PAN’: A series of etnofictive microhistories ranging from memory storytelling to the representation of present community conflicts, and the projection of community based speculative futures through gesture, images, thought and oral expression. www.alexdelasheras.es

Anna Agazzi Migotto is a Brazilian-Canadian environmental activist, photographer, film-maker, and aspiring biologist, inspired by life’s manifestations though light. She is proudly the new Special Events Assistant for Hemispheric Encounters. Anna has worked across research, environmental education and design, as a part of the Institute of Ecological Research (IPE) in Brazil. She also produces diverse independent art projects such as her new forthcoming short-film: “The flood from sky to ground”. The “scientist side of Anna" is currently researching the migratory patterns of juvenile Wood Thrushes as her final thesis at York University’s Faculty of Science, under the supervision of Dr. Bridget Stutchbury.

Arseli Dokumaci is Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Media Technologies and an assistant professor at Concordia University. She is also the director of the AIM (Access in the making) Lab. Arseli is an interdisciplinary scholar and creative practitioner. Her scholarly and creative work lies at the crossovers of disability studies, performance studies, media studies and medical anthropology. In her research and research-creation videos, Arseli explores how disabled people go about their everyday lives, and come up with micro, improvisational solutions that she theorizes as activist affordances. Arseli is particularly interested in exploring how disability can be a critical a method to rethink and practice media in new ways. Arseli is currently launching a four-year SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary team project, entitled "Mobilizing disability survival skills for the urgencies of the Anthropocene".

https://accessinthemaking.ca/

Beatriz Pizano (Actor/ Director/Playwright) is the founder and Artistic Director of Aluna Theatre, a company recognized for its unique approach to creation, its daring political work, and its experimentation with multi-language productions. She has received a number of prestigious awards including the John Hirsch Prize, the Chalmers Fellowship, the K.M. Hunter award and numerous Dora awards and nominations.  She is the first Latinx actress to win a Toronto Critics award and a Dora for her performance in Blood Wedding.  In 2019 she was named one of TD’s 10 Most Influential Hispanic Canadians.  She is passionate about nurturing the next generation of artists creating with a TransAmerican vision.

Carlota McAllister is an associate professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto, Canada. A political and historical anthropologist, she studies the formation of political and moral agency in situations of conflict or crisis in agrarian communities in Guatemala and Chile, using theoretical tools drawn from the anthropology of religion, actor-network theory, performance studies, feminist anthropology, and political ecology. With Diane Nelson, she co-edited War by Other Means: Aftermath in Postgenocide Guatemala (Duke UP, 2013), and her monograph The Good Road: Conscience and Consciousness in a Post-Revolutionary Mayan Village in Guatemala is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Daiana Bruzzone has a doctorate in Social Communication from Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. She is a teacher and researcher at the department of Journalism and Social Communication, director of the Specialization in Communication and Youth, and member of the Aníbal Ford Institute for Communication Studies. She is also a member of the CLACSO Working Group on Communication, Politics and Citizenship in Latin America and of the CLACSO Working Group on Youth and Childhood. She teaches at the Universidad del Este, Argentina, and in the PhD in Communication at the Universidad de la Frontera, Chile. One of her salient publications is the book Todos duros. Hijos del neoliberalismo: claves de las relaciones entre jóvenes, afectos y subjetividad corporal en los consumos de drogas (published
in 2020 by Editor Grupo Universitario, available through the publisher,
Editor Grupo Universitario .

Dan Pon manages the archives at grunt gallery where he works to preserve and activate material and non-material culture. He is interested in the practice of artists intervening in archives, liberatory community archives, and imaginative models at the intersection of visual arts and information science. He also works as a librarian at Langara College. His writing and work has been published by grunt gallery, VIVO Media Arts, Other Sights for Artists' Projects, UNIT/PITT Projects, and the BC Libraries Association. Dan holds an MLIS from the University of British Columbia.

https://archivesweek.ca/
https://grunt.ca/

Daniella Castillo Chen is a BFA Film Production undergraduate student at York University. In 2021, she moved from Panama to Toronto, Canada, to pursue a career as a filmmaker. Since a young age, she’s been passionate about storytelling and the different ways we can use art as a vehicle for change. So, starting with a career as a young novelist at 13 years old, she decided to learn and experiment with visual storytelling in her post-secondary studies. In the past two years, Daniella has been able to develop her skills in audiovisual production and learn from talented peers in her program. Now, she joins the team of Hemispheric Encounters as the Web and Digital coordinator, excited to be part of such a creative and diverse team of artists and scholars.

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the award-winning author of multiple books, among them: Theatre of Crisis (1991), Disappearing Acts (1997), The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Performance (2016), and ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (2020), and co-editor of Holy Terrors (2003), Stages of Conflict (2008) and Lecturas avanzadas de Performance (2011), among others. Taylor was the Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics from 1998 to 2020. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and several other major awards. In 2017, Taylor was President of the Modern Language Association. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science. In 2021 she was awarded the Edwin Booth Award for “outstanding contribution to the NYC theatre community, and to promote integration of professional and academic theatre.” She co-directs the Zip Code Memory Project.

Dot Tuer is a writer and cultural historian whose scholarly and creative work explores artistic practices of memorialization and visual storytelling in a hemispheric context. She also has a long-standing research interest in the history of Guaraní-Spanish transcultural practices in north-east Argentina and Paraguay. Tuer is the author of Mining the Media Archive (2005) and numerous museum catalogue, book anthology, and journal essays; her curatorial projects include Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2012-13). Since the 2000s, Tuer has divided her time between Corrientes, Argentina, and Toronto, Canada, where she is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at OCAD University.

https://www.embassyculturalhouse.ca/alberto-gomez-and-dot-tuer.html
https://ocad.academia.edu/DotTuer
https://www2.ocadu.ca/bio/dot-tuer

Fernando Codeço is an artist and a researcher. He investigates performance as a form of listening, production of oral knowledge, space for meeting and collective learning. Fernando is interested in the ecopolitics of arts in the context of climate emergency and forms of resistance to processes of extractivism and environmental degradation. He develops performative, transmedia and transdisciplinary research as co-founder of CasaDuna - Center for Art, Research and Memory and director of the theatre company Grupo Erosão. Fernando has a doctorate in Performing Arts from the UNIRIO (Brazil) in co-supervision with the UPJV (France). At UNIRO, he studied theatre, theory, visual arts, and contemporary dance. His thesis ‘Teatralidades da Erosão’ was nominated for the Capes 2022 award. His video, ‘Museu Ambulante’ won the Jean Rouch award for best medium-length film at the 2022 Pará International Ethnographic Festival. He has participated in several art festivals in Brazil and abroad.

Fernando develops works based on the socio-environmental phenomenon of marine erosion that has affected Atafona beach, located in the north of Rio de Janeiro State, for more than 70 years. From the popular idea that "the sea consumes the houses" and the territory of Atafona, he created the concept of "ecophagy" as an existential metaphor, a field of aesthetic experimentation, and a mode of cultural criticism in times of environmental collapse. For his postdoctoral project, Fernando will build on this research while studying other territories in Brazil and across the Americas facing similar situations of extreme destabilization, and develop a performative work in collaboration with Grupo Erosão weaving together a collage of fragments of the life stories of people whose territories were threatened by neo-extraction processes and/or resulting environmental changes. As a Postdoctoral Fellow, he will be hosted by the Postgraduate Program in Dance at UFRJ (Brazil) and supervised by Sérgio Andrade.

https://www.fernandocodeco.com/
https://www.casaduna.org/

Guilherme E. Meyer is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of English at New York University and a student-labor organizer in GSOC-UAW Local 2110. His main areas of interest are theater and poetry 1960s-present (U.S. and Brazil), Marxism, feminism, and utopianism, and his doctoral research focuses on modes of utopianism that have emerged in Brazil since the 1960s and their continued relevance to revolutionary praxis. He is a public humanities and arts graduate fellow with the Zip Code Memory Project and a Research Assistant with Hemispheric Encounters.

Jehan Roberson is a queer writer, artist, and memory worker who uses text as the basis for her interdisciplinary arts practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s work explores Black queer textual practices as sites of liberation, place making, and archival interventions. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Criticism, Recess Art, Public Books, Apogee, ZORA,Women & Performance, and, Autostraddle, among others. She is currently based in Ithaca, New York, where she is a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Photo © Jay Bendett Rose.

Dr. Jennifer Willet is a Canada Research Chair in Art, Science, and Ecology and an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor (Canada.) Willet is Director of INCUBATOR Lab an art/science research laboratory and studio in downtown Windsor. She is an internationally successful artist and curator in the emerging field of bioart. Her work resides at the intersection of art and science, and explores notions of representation, the body, ecologies, and interspecies interrelations in the biotechnological field.

www.incubatorartlab.com
https://visualartsnews.ca/2021/07/life-in-silos/
https://www.covidcreative.ca/

Jesusa Rodríguez (México 1955) is a theatre creator whose work is characterized by humor and political parody. She has written, directed, and acted in endless political farces and revues. She has also directed adaptations of Shakespeare and Yourcenar, as well as Mozart operas and pieces by Mexican authors such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Rodríguez has also performed, created theatrical installations, organized workshops with Indigenous groups and actions for the protection of native corn. She is currently a Senator of the Republic. Her greatest achievement: accumulating discredit.
https://jesusa.mx/

Jimena Ortúzar is a Postdoctoral Fellow with Hemispheric Encounters at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Her research explores labour and migration through the lens of performance and gender studies and her writing can be found in international journals as well as edited collections on art and activism, contemporary theatre, and Latinx performance. She is also a contributor to Gatherings, a project on archival and oral histories of performance.

Juan Carlos Saavedra, producer, stage director and actor, is the founder of Teatro Ciego MX, a company that promotes the labor inclusion of visually impaired people in the performing arts; General Director of Arte Ciego A.C., a non-profit association dedicated to the creation, research, promotion, development and dissemination of inclusive performing arts at national and international level; and Director of the Encuentro Otros Territorios, a space that promotes research, professionalization and dissemination of inclusive artistic proposals from different latitudes. He is currently working on the project "Methodology of training, creation and stage production based on blindness. Disarticulation of aesthetic constructs on the scene."

Dr. Julie Nagam is an Associate Professor in the department of Art History at the University of Winnipeg. She is the inaugural Artistic Director for 2020 and 2022 for Nuit Blanche Toronto, the largest public exhibition in North America. Dr. Nagam's SSHRC research includes digital makerspaces + incubators, mentorship, digital media + design, international collaborations and place-based knowledge. Dr. Nagam is currently the Principal Director of the multi-million dollar Partnership and Development Grant The Space Between Us: Co(lab)orations within Indigenous, Circumpolar and Pacific Places Through Digital Media and Design (2021–2028). She is a collective member of GLAM, which works on curatorial activism, Indigenous methodologies, public art, digital technologies, and engagement with place. As a scholar and artist she is interested in revealing the ontology of land, which contains memory, knowledge and living histories. Her artistic work has been exhibited internationally, including in Brazil, France, New Zealand, and England, which includes solo and group exhibitions. Nagam’s scholarship, curatorial and artistic practice has been featured nationally and internationally. She was the Concordia University and Massey University (NZ) Scholar in Residence for 2018/19, and will be the Terra Foundation Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney (AUS) for 2022-23. Dr. Nagam is the Director of Aabijijiwan New Media Lab and Co-Director of Kishaadigeh Collaborative Research Centre in Winnipeg, Canada.
www.julienagam.ca/
www.thespacebetweenus.ca
aabijijiwanmedialab.ca/
glamcollective.ca/

Juma Pariri seeks to listen and learn from plant secrets. They move in the friction between the arts of the body, undisciplined pedagogy, and the Indigenous struggle for environmental justice. They are part of the social movements Retomada Kariri and the Indigenous Cariri of Poço Dantas-Umari Association. Among others, they activate the platform AGITPORN! – POR NO a la desigualdad, for social decolonization!, to learn from indigenous ancestors about anti-monocultural sexualities, cuisines and crops, and the audiovisual springboard United against colonization: many eyes, only one heart for collective creation of other symbolic forms of self-representation of the people from first nations of Abya Yala. Juma was a Hemispheric Encounters Post-Doctoral Scholar-Artist in 2021-2022 and continues to collaborate with the project.

Kimberly Skye Richards is a settler scholar whose writing, teaching, activism, and artistic work engages performance as a vehicle for resisting extractivism and inspiring a just energy transition. She recently co-edited an issue of Canadian Theatre Review on “Extractivism and Performance” (April 2020). She has also published in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times, and An Ecotopian Lexicon: Loanwords to Live With. Kim is currently teaching in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia. She is a member of the Mission Circle of SCALE- Sectoral Climate Arts Leadership for the Emergency.

Lee Rodney is Associate Professor of Media Art and Cultures in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor. She has been involved in borderlands-related research since 2008 when she held a Fulbright fellowship to comparatively study relationships between contiguous urban regions along the U.S.-Mexico border and the Canada-U.S. border. Her publication, Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America’s Frontier Imagination examines the shifting relationship between borders and frontiers in North America as they have been represented and undermined through a variety of cultural practices (Routlege’s Advances in Visual Studies series, 2017). She has also organized community-based borderlands research through two SSHRC funded multi-year projects (2010-2013) The Border Bookmobile, and “Buoyant Cartographies: Alternative Mapping Practices on the Detroit River” (2018-2019).

http://frontierfiles.org/
http://www.buoyantcartographies.com/about

Lucas Liu is in their final year of the Specialized Honours Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at York University. Lucas also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Global Business and Digital Arts from the University of Waterloo, and their knowledge in web and app design inform their thesis work on how social media design impacts the well-being of emerging adults.

María Jose Contreras Lorenzini is a Chilean performance artist and scholar. She holds a Ph.D from Università di Bologna and is Associate Professor at the Theater School at Universidad Católica de Chile. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Using a wide range of formats, from massive public interventions to intimate actions of resistance, Contreras creatively explores the relation between the body and memory. Her work, presented throughout the Americas and Europe, include theatre productions, site-specific performances, durational performances, and urban interventions. She is one of 70 international artists featured in The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader (Routledge 2020). More info at www.mariajosecontreras.com

Marion Velasco is a transdisciplinary artist from working with the crossing of performance with video, photography, sound art, music and poetry. She holds a PhD in Visual Arts from Art Institute/UFRGS with a split-site doctoral program in Sound and Performance Art from Facultad de Bellas Artes of UPV/Valencia/ES (2019). Specialist in Performance (CNPq/UFRGS 1990) and graduated in Fine Arts (1989). She has participated in collective and individual exhibitions, nationally and internationally (Brazil, Spain, Germany, Canada, Argentina, Uruguay). She has videoperformance work in the MACRS collection and received the awards: Intercâmbio MINC/BR 2013 (Lisbon/PT); LABPOA 2020_Aldir Blanc Law/Visual Arts; Featured Artist Trajectory and Online Publication/Estúdio 88-documentation of videoperformances at the XIV Açorianos de Artes Plásticas, 2021. She edited, produced and presented FMradio and webradio programs and was responsible for the voice and lyrics of the indierock band Plastic Dream (1990-91), the electronic duo Adventure (1992-96), for creation and electronic bases of the IBG_Banda de Garotas Instantâneas (2017-21). Marion is based in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Mark Sussman is a theatre artist and scholar working on the animation of public space, material dramaturgies, and the integration of old and new technologies in live performance. A graduate of the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, he joined Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts in 2005. He is Professor in the Department of Theatre and advises graduate students in the PhD Humanities and Individualized interdisciplinary programs. In Summer, 2020, he was appointed Director of Concordia's Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. Sussman is a founder and Co-Artistic Director of Great Small Works , an award-winning theatre collective in New York City. Since 1995, Great Small Works has been producing new theatre on a variety of scales, from miniature toy theatre pieces using two-dimensional cutouts and live montage, to giant parades, community processions, and circuses. The company produces variety evenings, international festivals, and community-based projects. In Montreal, he founded Café Concret , an occasional cabaret of experimental puppetry and object-based performance. With the Café Concret collective, he organized Moving Parts: Articulated Bodies and Objects in Performance , a performance residency, interdisciplinary symposium, and book project exploring vocabularies shared across the fields of puppetry and dance. Sussman is a proud Co-Investigator of Hemispheric Encounters, and serves on the Artistic Committee of Casteliers and the Board of Directors of Montreal's Studio 303.

Natalie Álvarez is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies in the School of Performance and Associate Dean, Scholarly, Research, and Creative Activities in the Faculty of Communication and Design at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is author, co-editor, and editor of four award-winning books: Immersions in Cultural Difference: Tourism, War, Performance (U of Michigan Press, 2018), Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), Essays on Latina/o Canadian Theatre and Fronteras Vivientes: Eight Latina/o Canadian Plays (Playwrights Canada Press, 2013). Her most recent book, Theatre & War, is currently in press with Bloomsbury. Her work on immersive performance in the public sphere and contemporary activist performance in the Americas has been published widely in international journals and essay collections.

Nicole Cartier Barrera is a Toronto-based researcher, writer, and curator from Bogotá. Her interests revolve around contemporary visual culture in Latin America, in particular the relationship between art and socio-political movements, the overlapping of digital and in-person practices, and the construction of political agency in contexts of intimacy and the private sphere. Her practice explores experimental and collaborative editorial processes within a curatorial framework. Her most recent project, A Guide for the Afflicted and Defiant is an archive of gestures of resistance and exists as a publication, a website, and a travelling exhibition. She holds a double BA in Arts and Art History from Los Andes University, and a Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto.

Patricia is a PhD student in the Communications Department at Concordia University. She is investigating Brazilian women artists who engaged in art-making and artistic practices under censorship and conservative societal values during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985). Patricia employs the oral history methodology, integrating a feminist and decolonial perspective, to uncover women’s life experiences and their contributions to Brazil’s 1960s-1970s avant-garde art movement. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP), focusing on Teresinha Soares and Wanda Pimentel's artworks and examining how specific art exhibitions supported the circulation of women’s art in the 1960s-70s under Brazil’s dictatorship.

Peter Kulchyski is a Professor and former Department Head of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. His books include the award winning Tammarniit [Mistakes] with Frank Tester (American Society for Ethnohistory book of the year) and Like the Sound of a Drum (Manitoba non-fiction book of the year) as well as Kiumajut [Talking Back] also with Tester, The Red Indians; Aboriginal Rights are not Human Rights; and Report of an Inquiry into an Injustice. Kulchyski has engaged in research and social justice activism in a wide range of arctic and subarctic Indigenous communities. From 2013 to 2020 he was Co-Director of the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas.
https://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/departments/native_studies/people/kulchyski.html
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/enc14-5-minute-manifestos/item/2606-enc14-5min-kulchyski
https://sixgestures.hemi.press
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/personal-dimension-bush-life

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan ancestor artists. Morin began art school in 1997, completing his BFA at Emily Carr University in Vancouver in 2001 and his MFA in 2010 at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Initially trained in lithography, Morin’s artistic practice moves from printmaking to poetry to drum making to beadwork to button blanket making to installation to performance art. Throughout his exhibition and making history, Peter focuses on honouring the matriarchs of the Tahltan Nation. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.

Pilar Riaño-Alcalá is a professor at the Social Justice Institute. She is an anthropologist and interdisciplinary scholar. Her research interests are on historical memory and the lived experience of violence; the afterlives of political violence, the ethnography of living traces of memory and social repair; oralities and sound memory and social practice art. Pilar also has an interest in exploring the politics of knowledge and epistemic justice through the use of emplaced and creative research methodologies that draw on other knowledges and that centrally locate action and change in knowledge production. Pilar is the author of “Dwellers of Memory. Youth and Violence in Medellin, Colombia” and “Poniendo Tierra de por medio. Migracion forzada de colombianos en Colombia, Ecuador y Canadá and is currently working on the book manuscript, “In the Interstices of War and Peace: Memory and Social Repair in Colombia.” Her articles have appeared in Memory Studies, the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Anthropology Quarterly, Revista Colombiana de Antropología, Refugee Survey Quarterly, Estudios Politicos among others. She is currently working on three projects, Transformative Memory: An International Network (with Erin Baines, UBC); Exhumations and burial in Colombia (with the Committee of Victims of the Middle Atrato River) and Sacred Responsibilities to Water. Indigenous Knowledge Exchanges, Canada-Colombia (with Aimée Craft, University of Ottawa).

Roewan Crowe is an artist, writer, and professor. Through the use of performance, installation, video, text, and theory, Crowe creates intimate landscapes, making space for connection and stange encounters. Their practice engages in material explorations, questions of form, site-specificity, and collaborative processes. Work includes: digShift, an environmental reclamation project; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate poetic encounters; and the book Quivering Land, a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art. Crowe co-edited with Helen Vosters, the Hemi Press digital book, Return Atacama: Engaging Histories of Political Violence Through Performance and Durational Witnessing, documenting the return of artist Monica Martinez and the artist collective, CONSTELACIONES, to the Atacama Desert in Chile. Alongside co-pollinatrix Dallas Cant they recently launched the SWARM arc.hive www.swarm.greenhouseartlab.com , a sympoetic, more-than-human, artistic encounter with bees. Crowe’s paid gig: Associate Professor, WGS at the University of Winnipeg. Visit www.roewancrowe.com .

Shannon Cochrane is a Toronto based performance artist. Her performance work has been presented in festivals, theatres and at various events across Canada and the USA, and in over 20 countries across Europe, UK and Asia. She is also the Artistic Director of FADO Performance Art Centre (www.performanceart.ca/), a Toronto-based artist-run centre established in 1993 with the mission to support and present the work of contemporary performance artists from across Canada and around the world. As a platform, FADO exists nomadically, utilizing venues and sites that are appropriate to individual projects. Shannon is also a co-founding member of the Toronto Performance Art Collective. Established in 1997, TPAC is the producer of one of Canada’s oldest biennial performance art festivals, the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (www.7a-11d.ca ).

Shauna Janssen is Assistant Professor of Performance Creation in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, where she holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Performative Urbanism (2018-2023). Her teaching, research and creative practice are consonant with urban humanities, critical, interdisciplinary, and collaborative practices, and performative explorations with and within contested sites of the urban realm. Current research-creation projects include Feminist Performance Creation & the City (SSHRC PEG) and Situating Critical Performance Design in the City (SSHRC IDG).

www.performativeurbanism.com
www.shaunajanssen.ca

Smaro Kamboureli is the Avie Bennett Chair in Canadian Literature at the University of Toronto. Prior to this appointment, she was Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the University of Guelph, where she founded and directed TransCanada Institute. Her most recent publications include her articles “Literary Solidarities: ‘Should I be here?’,” her introduction to the University of Toronto Quarterly special issue that she co-edited with Tania Aguila-Way, and “Diaspora” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, as well as the bilingual English / Italian edition of her poetry book, in the second person, in seconda persona. She is the author of numerous books, including Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada, winner of the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Literary Criticism. Her collection of essays, co-edited with Larissa Lai, Land / Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures, is forthcoming. For a full list of her books and publications, visit www.smarokamboureli.ca

Sofía Acosta Varea (Quito,1988) is a visual artist. Her work encompasses an interdisciplinary practice that ranges from installation, through intervention of photographs, archives, cartographies, and testimonies, to graphics and murals. Her work is an aesthetic-political commitment that, on the one hand, questions established gender narratives and, on the other hand, seeks post-extractivist art approaches, putting contemporary notions of territory in debate. She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in different independent galleries, inside and outside Ecuador, curated (Ordinaria, Arte Actual FLACSO (2018) and worked as illustrator in multiple independent publications. Recently, together with Adrián Balseca, she created the project Mirador: Visiones sobre el extractivismo (Mirador: Visions on Extractivism, 2019), a book that investigates the different visual memories of peasant and Indigenous leaders who have been criminalized since the arrival of the Ecuador’s 6 mega-mining projects.
Links: www.lasuerte.art
IG @l_a_s_u_e_r_t_e

Sol Pérez Jiménez has a doctorate in Environmental Geography from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In the past decade she has worked as an activist, academic and independent consultant with national and international civil society organizations, on issues such as environmental and social impact of mining, environmental conflicts and alternatives to extractivism. Currently, since 2021, she is a researcher in the Land and Territory Program of Fundar Center for Analysis and Research.
AChttps://fundar.org.mx/

Sophia Zhou is a fourth year in her Honours Bachelor of Design program at York University. She is interested in web design and UX/UI. A curious individual looking for ways to connect with the local community and pick up new knowledge. She uses her experiences to create stronger and more meaningful designs.

Stephanie Sherman is a queer, bilingual, bicultural, interdisciplinary feminist educator, choreographer, dancer, poet, and activist who creates collaborations between artivists across the Américas. She has been faculty at Mills College, the University of Texas El Paso, la Academia de la Danza Mexicana, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (Mexico), la Universidad de las Américas Puebla (Mexico). She has been a guest teacher at the Centro Universitario de Teatro at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) (Mexico) and the Universidad Central del Ecuador. She is currently a Hemispheric Encounters Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University, where she is creating a transborder video-dance about accessibility with Deaf and disabled artists from Montreal and Mexico City. She will become faculty at California College in the Spring. She has a PhD in Performance Studies from UC Berkeley, an MFA in Dance from NYU, a BA in Hispanic Studies from Vassar College, and has received two Fulbright Awards (Mexico, Postdoctoral, 2018; Ecuador, 2006). During her Mexico Fulbright at the UNAM, she collaborated with Teatro Ciego, a blind theater company, on deconstructing gender through movement. www.stephanie-sherman.com

Stephen Lawson is a Montreal artist, activist, and educator that creates poetic transdisciplinary interventions within the fields of live art (music, theatre, cabaret), print, installation, and video. Since 2001, as one half of the collaborative art duo 2boys.tv, he has produced a wide repertoire of queer art works that have toured internationally. Stephen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theatre & Performance Studies at York University and his research is centred on radical drag praxis throughout the Hemispheric Americas. He is the Co-Managing Editor of the research site Cabaret Commons and a frequent part-time instructor at Concordia University. www.2boys.tv
https://cabaretcommons.org/
https://theatre-studies.gradstudies.yorku.ca/

Tamara Toledo is a Chilean-born Toronto-based curator, artist, writer, and PhD candidate at York University. Toledo is co-founder of the Allende Arts Festival and of Latin American Canadian Art Projects. For over a decade, she has curated numerous exhibitions offering spaces and opportunities to artists of the Latin American diaspora to present their work. She designed and curates the Latin American Speakers Series inviting internationally renowned contemporary artists and curators to Toronto to articulate and discuss issues of transcultural dynamics in contemporary art. Toledo has presented her work at various conferences in Montreal, New York, Vancouver, Chicago, Mexico City, and Toronto. Her writing has appeared in ARM Journal, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Art, and most recently in the Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal of the University of California. Toledo is presently the Director/Curator of Sur Gallery, the only space dedicated to contemporary Latin American art in Canada.

Tatiane Reis is always pursuing both theoretical knowledge and hands-on experience to fight for social justice, especially in the Global South. Her experience as a history teacher in Brazil was one of the possibilities that she has found to share knowledge and foster community-oriented actions. As an African Brazilian PhD Student in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University, she has been engaged to make racialized women’s intellectual and artistic contributions visible beyond academic settings. For her dissertation, she is investigating the impacts of mining activities on women’s paid and unpaid labour in Southern Africa. Since 2022, Tatiane has supported different Hemispheric Encounter activities, mainly with interpretations and translations.

Trevor Schwellnus is an Interdisciplinary artist and Scenographer who designs sets, lights, and video for performances with independent artists and companies. He was born on unceded Algonquin land. One of his chief obsessions is the intersection of design, dramaturgy, and cross-cultural art-making. He directed & designed Dividing Lines, What I learned from a decade of fear, Nohayquiensepa (No one knows) with Aluna Theatre.
He has designed with dozens of companies on over a hundred shows since 1999, including: The Theatre Centre, Cahoots, Modern Times Stage Company, Obsidian Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times, Theatre Passe Muraille, La Corporación Colombiana de Teatro, Ame Henderson, Dancemakers, and others.
He redesigned Toronto’s Dora Award statuette in 2019, has 6 Dora Awards (of 18 nominations), and was shortlisted for the 2015 Siminovich Award.

Véro Leduc is an artist, engaged scholar, and a professor in Communication Studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal, where she teaches in cultural action program as well as in the program Disability and Deafhood: Rights and Citizenship, which she co-founded. First Deaf university professor in Quebec, and Canada Research Chair in Cultural Citizenship of Deaf People and Cultural Equity Practices, her recent investigations focuses on Deaf and disability arts practices in Canada and Deaf music. In 2020, she received the Governor General's Medal of Canada for her commendable work in breaking down barriers to social exclusion and enhancing accessibility to university and culture for people who are deaf and hard of hearing.
Links:

- www.professeurs.uqam.ca/professeur/leduc.veronique
- Musiques au bout des doigts / Music at the fingertips: https://actproject.ca/act/musique-au-bout-des-doigts/
- Nos mains qui vibrent / Our vibrant hands: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8777738
- On vous fait signe / We're waving hands : https://www.signe.media/
- Chaire de recherche / Research chair: https://equite-culturelle.uqam.ca/

Warren Cariou is a writer, photographer and professor based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His work focuses on the environmental philosophies and oral traditions of Indigenous peoples in western Canada, especially in relation to his Métis heritage. He has published works of criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry and film, and his bitumen photographs have been exhibited and published widely. He has also edited numerous books of Indigenous literature and storytelling. He teaches in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media at the University of Manitoba.

For more information visit www.warrencariou.com

Zoë Heyn-Jones is a settler researcher-artist and cultural worker who grew up on Saugeen Ojibway land in Ontario, Canada and on Tz’utujil/Kaqchikel Maya land in Guatemala. Zoë holds a PhD in Visual Arts from York University and a graduate diploma in Latin American Studies from CERLAC (the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, York University). Zoë is currently a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the department of Visual Arts at Western University where she is developing an interdisciplinary arts-based project on food security, sovereignty and justice in Canada and Mexico. She lives and works in Tenochtitlán/Mexico City and Tkaranto/Toronto.

www.zoeheynjones.com