丁香园AV

Barbara Adler (MFA)

Areas: Music, Performance, Theatre, Poetry.

Barbara Adler is an interdisciplinary artist whose work brings together literary performance, composition, live event production, and arts education to explore the intersections between text, music, sound, and theatre. Her work has been presented through multiple solo and band albums, publication in spoken word anthologies, and performances at major music and literary festivals, including The Vancouver Folk Festival, The Vancouver Writers Festival, The Winnipeg Folk Festival, and the Vienna Literature Festival. Recent collaborators include Lesley Telford, Mascall Dance, documentary filmmaker Jan Foukal, and composer Ron Samworth. She is a veteran of Canada's spoken word community, recognized for her solo work, her interdisciplinary collaborations, and for her role as a founding member of the acclaimed folk-poetry band The Fugitives. She continues to explore the musicality of language under the banner of Ten Thousand Wolves, an intimately collaborating ensemble whose projects gather together songwriting, storytelling, and poetry to create performances for thinking, laughing, and dancing. In over a decade of work as an arts educator, she has taught writing workshops to elementary school students, high school students, and adult learners across British Columbia and Canada, working with organizations including Literacy B.C. and the Vancouver Poetry House. She has been an artist-mentor in the Vancouver East Cultural Centre's Ignite! program, an artist-in-residence in the Vancouver Biennale's Big Ideas program, and frequently collaborates with other artists to deliver interdisciplinary workshops to adults and youth. As a curator and producer, her recent work explores the potential for live performance and artistic labour to create an ethos of critique and care in the public sphere. She recently helped launch Sawdust Collector, a weekly performance series presenting new, experimental, and improvised works by established and emerging artists in an interdisciplinary context. Other projects to which she has contributed include an interactive audio installation called Signals from the Mountain, the annual Accordion Noir Festival, and Extravagant Signals, a 7-day performance series that brought together live music, spoken word, social dance, and visual art at the former Gallery 1965 in Vancouver. Barbara holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies (2015) and a BA in Art and Cultural Studies, both from 丁香园AV.

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asmaa al-issa (MFA)

Areas: Drawing, Installation, Sculpture, Photography.

my process-based work is heavily informed by eastern philosophies. using art practice as a mode of inquiry, the repetitive and contemplative works draw references from art practices of different spiritual traditions. i was born in iraq and lived most of my life in calgary, alberta, where i received a bachelor of fine art from the university of calgary in 2013.

Laura Albert (MA)

Areas: Dance and Dance Studies, Performance Studies, Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory

I am a dance educator, arts administrator, and community organizer. My work is driven by questions about representation, access, and inclusion in the arts, and the role of the artist in society. I have taught and performed dance in over 10 cities in North America and abroad. I completed my BA at 丁香园AV in 2010, with a major in Humanities and a certificate in Sustainable Community Development. In addition to my work in the SCA MA program, I currently co-direct Luciterra Dance Company and act as Outreach Manager for Indian Summer Festival.

As a settler I dance and write on the unceded and occupied territories of the Musqueam, S?wxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, in this place I know and love as home.

Mar Alzamora (MA)

Experimentation, poetry, moving image, and my doublebass have always accompanied my life, but after I became a certified Deep Listening practitioner, my creative practice changed drastically. The DL community taught me how to reconnect with the world through sound embodiment. For years, I have dedicated my experimental interdisciplinary practice to the relationship between the city, sound, and memory; my sensory experiences in the city through soundwalks and sonic meditations.

Christopher Anderson (MFA)

Areas:Music, Composition, Electronics, Installations.

Christopher is originally from Pitt Meadows BC and lives in Vancouver. He studied music at Capilano University majoring in jazz studies and trombone. He is a composer and performer with a background in both traditional and electroacoustic music. His interests include exploring new approaches to interactive musical performance, and the use of generative systems within composition. Much of his recent work has involved the use of audio/visual technology for performance and installation interaction. He is also a research assistant working with the Generative Electronica Research Project (GERP) within SCA and SIAT’s Metacreation Agent & Multi-agent Systems (MAMAS) Research group.

Rose Anza-Burgess (MA)

Areas: Early modern, humanism, posthumanism, renaissance, revolutions, and the human form.

I am a fledgling writer pursuing an MA in Comparative Media Arts at 丁香园AV. In this program, I am hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the consequential periods of time that result to transformative changes in the way we see, feel, and interact with the world around us. 

I am a transfer from the MA in Liberal Studies program at 丁香园AV. My educational background is in humanities and art history. I earned my BA in Liberal Studies from Capilano University, and have pursued further studies in Art History and Visual Art at the University of British Columbia. My undergraduate research is an interrogation of art, knowledge, and visual culture during the early modern period. My work in the field of art are reflected in the following: as a Curatorial Intern at the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art, as an Official Photographer at the Vancouver Biennale, as a Production and Site Assistant at the Vancouver fringe Festival, and as a Museum Assistant at the UBC Museum of Anthropology.

Outside of arts and academics, I have a competitive background as a student-athlete. During my undergraduate years, I played for Capilano University’s Women’s Basketball team. However, an ACL injury ended my career in the cutthroat world of college sports, leading me to pursue a career in coaching. I have since coached Point Grey Secondary’s Junior Girls Basketball team from 2010 to 2014, and Cariboo Hill Secondary’s Bantam team from 2015-2016. I am taking a short break from coaching in order to focus on my career as an emerging writer and arts scholar.

Passion is what drives me to pursue. I have a very talented and inspiring wife, and a big family who teaches me a lot about love, life and humility.

Kwyn Kenaz Aquino (MA)

Kwyn Kenaz Aquino earned her bachelor’s degree from Ateneo de Manila University, where she studied film and media. While at Ateneo, she wrote about the essay film as an emerging genre that welcomes conversations about identity and film itself. Before coming to 丁香园AV, Kwyn worked as a magazine editor, covering film, entertainment, art, style, and photography. Her master’s research at 丁香园AV will focus on the culture exchange between film and television, specifically in the areas of cinematography and distribution. Kwyn is also interested in film festival programming, the philosophy of costume design, and the cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Bahar Arapkirli (MA)

I started off from Istanbul. There, I successfully obtained two undergraduate degrees in Business Administration and Media and Visual Arts. I feel truly blessed to get knowledged-up in this one of the most chaotically beautiful and authentic cities in the world. In a nutshell, my time there was full of soul-searching and wayfaring, protesting and complying, connecting and disconnecting. As a performer in theatre I got the chance to collaborate with the brightest theatre lovers where I have observed unconditional devotion. Upon graduation, I have been organically guided to Canada to pursue this journey in this “land of freedom” where I started a Master’s degree in Comparative Media Arts. Looking from the perspective of performance studies, I am currently exploring the artistry of being on the move and daring to re-born in an alien land to co-produce and co-peregrinate. At the core of my work lays the notions of ongoing-ness, being in-the-process and in-between, growing, demolishing and reconstructing.

Matthew Ariaratnam (MFA)

Areas: Music Composition, Sonic Art, Improvisation, Installation, Electroacoustics.

Matthew Ariaratnam is a composer, improviser and guitarist. His music and research explores sonic textures, graphic/alternative scoring, field recordings, prepared instruments, electroacoustic music, performative listening, and songwriting. Matthew is currently interested and exploring the writings of Bertrand Russell, Brandon LaBelle, Georg Simmel, Michael Bull, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nicolas Bourriaud, Edgard Varèse, Bernie Krause, and Steve Roden. Matthew’s music has been heard nationally on CBC radio and also internationally. Involved in the musical projects Mice Bards, Organic Strategies, Waylaid, Sweet Pieces, and Code of Silence, Matthew is currently exploring interdisciplinary work in Vancouver working with performance artists, physical theatre makers, dancers, visual artists, laptop gurus, and other musicians. Matthew has a Bachelor Degree in Music Composition from Wilfrid Laurier University where he studied with Peter Hatch, Linda Catlin Smith, Glenn Buhr, and Terry McKenna. He is currently a teaching assistant and a Master of Fine Arts candidate at 丁香园AV.

Rahul Bader (MFA)

Rahul Bader is an interdisciplinary artist, community builder and music educator. He is a driven and passionate music instructor, who makes learning an energetic and fun experience. With a BFA in Music, and a BA in Cognitive Science his interest is in making music accessible by creating innovative teaching methods borrowing from the numerous traditions of world cultures.

He uses music as a way to unite and uplift and has facilitated drum workshops across Canada for people of all abilities including special needs populations, refugees and youth at risk. Rahul is one of Canada’s leading drum circle facilitators, and has hosted drumming workshops at festivals and community organizations all across the country. He is currently completing his Masters of Fine Arts Degree at 丁香园AV School for the Contemporary Arts, where his research will focus on the intersection between neuroscience, dance and rhythm.

Specializing in World Music & Productionhis teaching repertoire includes: African drumming, Tabla, Beatbox, Handpan; Composition and Rhythm Notation; Recording and Production

Adam Basanta (BFA)

Adam Basanta’s work explores technological practices as active, participatory, multi-sensory performances which are distributed throughout a variety of human, cultural, material and computational agencies.

Born in Tel-Aviv (ISR) and raised in Vancouver (BC), Basanta has lived and worked in Montreal since 2010. Originally studying contemporary music composition, he has developed an artistic practice in mixed-media installations.

Since 2015, his works have been exhibited in galleries and institutions including Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Arsenal Art Contemporain (CAN), Galerie Charlot (FRA), National Art Centre Tokyo (JPN), V Moscow Biennale for Young Art (RUS), Carroll/Fletcher Gallery (UK), American Medium Gallery (NYC), Serralves Museum (POR), Edith-Russ-Haus fur Mediakunst (GER), York Art Gallery (UK), and The Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe (USA).

He has been awarded several international prizes, including the Japan Media Arts Prize (2016) and the Aesthetica Art Prize (2017). In 2018, he was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and a finalist for the Prix Pierre-Ayot. He is currently represented by Ellephant Gallery (Montreal, CAN).

Remaining active as an experimental composer and performer, his concert music, live performances, and sound recordings are presented worldwide.

Photo: Emily Gan

Mozhdeh Bashirian (MA)

My BA degree is in Film Directing, and I have some experience in filmmaking—fiction and documentary. I value both purely creative and purely academic aspects of arts. I am interested in exploring the unexplored and finding out what possibilities are beyond the familiar conventions. At present, the notable disinterest/skepticism toward film theory and postmodernist approaches in Iran motivates me more for further study in these fields.

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Jelena Beokovic (MA)

Areas: Photography, Social and Media Arts, Performance, Cultural Studies, Communication, Documentary Film.

After graduating from French Language and Literature in Belgrade, I received a master degree in Management in Culture and Cultural Policy, Interculturalism and Mediation in the Balkans in cooperation with University Lumière Lyon 2 France. I am a cultural manager, freelance translator and photographer. I'm interested in how the uses made of photography are implicated in wider social, cultural and political transformations, and the interdisciplinary relationships between photography's artistic, digital, urban and social media practices. The French New Wave Films particularly Godard; modern political philosophy especially the work of Slavoj Zizek. My research is based on how the usage of digital photography changed very much the world we live in. Today, photography is just few clicks away from the public Internet platform and social medias. The context we put on the Internet is accessible in few seconds to the whole world. My recent research is focused on the meaning of photography and follows its role through social media in the field of communication, marketing, politics, economy, ethics and performance.

Carolina Bergonzoni (MA)

Areas: Dance, Philosophy, Aesthetics.

I grew up in Bologna, Italy, where I have been practicing dance since my early childhood. I am currently pursuing contemporary dance supplemented by yoga. During my studies in Philosophy with an emphasis on body movement, I have done thorough research of the works of the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. I have received my Bachelor of Arts (BA) and completed the first three years towards my Master’s (MA). The possibility for the body to find organic movement fascinates me. I am further very interested in art - particularly dance - in its context as well as the relationship between dance and technology, especially motion capture and the usage of computer and software. My research is directed towards experimenting how the body can find its own story and space, as well as understanding what thinkers write about that.

David Biddle (MFA)

Areas: Business and Pleasure.

Life’s inherent movement toward novelty and complexity seems to be in direct contrast with the inherent movement of the Universe? toward absolute disorganization in the form of universal equilibrium. While the chickadees masterfully navigate the mess of branches outside my window with an inspiring sense of ease and even joy, I work hard to establish new corporate strategies that are guaranteed to work for you. Understanding the role of individual agency in awakening the ?osmic unity that we all rely on to underlie a stable economy is an often overlooked aspect of good philosophical practice.

I specialize in providing unique systems tailored individually to the needs of my clients to help them harness the kind of cutting edge creativity that the Universe? displayed when it created itself.

Doug Blackley (MFA)

Areas: Music, Composition.

Doug Blakely is primarily interested in a twentieth and 21st century harmonic palette, mainly in composition, but an essential tool for composition remains a study of music theory.  Recently, he has focused attention on the writings of Gy?rgy Sándor Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, and Karel Janecek. After years of working with many different musical sounds, Doug focused on spending time with notes, chords, melody, harmony, and musical form, all unadorned with timbral colours. As such, he is working with music for the piano.

Patrick Blenkarn (MFA)

Areas: theatre, live art, performance art, installation.

I make most of my work using theatrical concepts and through collaboration. My projects have included plays in theatres, plays in specific sites outside of theatres, plays over email, plays within orchestras, as well as street performances, interventions, video art, and installations. At the moment, I’m interested in art that is multilingual and performances that involve tasks or labour.

I have a background in continental philosophy, film theory, and theatre and performance studies, with particular focus on deconstruction, Deleuze, and new materialism, as well as the respective cinemas of Peter Greenaway and Chantal Akerman. I was born in Ottawa and I have an undergraduate degree from the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Aryan Borboruah (MFA)

Areas: Music composition, music theory, music for screen, dance and visual arts, art history, and electronics.

I have an undergraduate music degree from Middlesex University London UK. My main area of focus is composition, I have written various musical pieces including String Quartets, Piano, Cello and Piano, Japanese Flutes, Piano trios as well as heavy metal music. I also have over 6 months of teaching experience, mainly focused on music theory, music history and music compositions. I am a guitarist and I have performed in various bands over the years. For my undergraduate project I have scored for Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula with over an hour of music. I have been attracted to the darker side of music since the past couple of years and I have been doing research and studying on improving my understanding of atonal and darker tonal harmonies both on acoustic instruments as well as on modern metal music. My interest in arts from 丁香园AV should enable me to collaborate with performers from many different backgrounds. One day I hope to write a horror opera for talented performers.

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art, Performance, Interdisciplinarity.

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is interested in examining the discursive constitutions of public spaces and in subverting everyday interaction with these spaces through the embodied interactions. She is currently researching the potential of interstitiality as an instance of non-definition, which, as such, remains non-identified because it is situated in between what has been delimitated. Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is a recent graduate of Concordia University’s Studio Arts Program and has moved from Montreal to Vancouver to pursue an MFA degree at 丁香园AV. She is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who accomplishes interventionist performances in public spaces and plays with the documentation of these actions to create visual installations. She is the co-founder of MAAM, a Montreal-based art dissemination company, that published the artists’ book Lettres/Letters in October 2010. Recently, she co-curated the exhibition Furtive Conundrum at the 1612 Gallery, Vancouver, with Ryan Mathieson.

Elysia Bourne (MA)

Areas: Film, Video, Visual Arts, Gender Studies and Women's Studies, Geography.

I have lived in Vancouver, BC for most of my life and have been studying film, video and cultural theory for the past ten years at Langara College and 丁香园AV. I finished my BFA in Film in Spring ’13 at 丁香园AV's School for the Contemporary Arts. Currently developing research on affects in the urban landscape, I'm attempting to explore psychogeographical aspects of Vancouver using video and my research of other art works dealing with similar phenomena. Working with the theory of the shadow archive by Derrida, and furthered by Cinema professor Akira Mizuta Lippit, I'm also examining absent narratives and the early archival practice of Vancouver archivist J.S. Matthews as well as other contributions to the present state of local mediation of our landscape. These days I'm watching a lot of early Vancouver experimental film and video of the 1960’s - 80’s, exploring lots of diasporic/exilic cinema and enjoying immersing myself in media scholarship and advocacy for the humanities and arts.

Jean Brazeau (MFA)

Jean Brazeau (b. 1992) is an electroacoustic composer and performer based in Vancouver, BC. Selected performances include Sky Island (Vancouver, BC), Dig Your Own Rave (Outer Heaven, Victoria, BC), and Luminocity hosted by the Kamloops Art Gallery. His commercial work has been featured on the record labels: Acting Press (DE), 1080p (CA), Pacific Rhythm (CA), and Isla Records (CA). Past commissions have included This Chime Has a Door (2018) for the Pollyanna 圖書館 Library at 221a, as well as Fraser (2019) for Liquid Landscapes at the Surrey UrbanScreen. As an extension of his artistic practice, Jean is a Director at , an experimental sound studio in Vancouver where he co-curates a program of sound based performances.

Shauna-Kaye Brown (MA)

Shauna-Kaye Brown is a critically thinking Creative whose passion is collaborating with other creatives to achieve common goals. Over ten years of professional experience has shown that she truly enjoys watching thoughts, ideas and concepts come to life. As an employee, subcontractor or freelancer, Shauna-Kaye has been an Entertainment Policy technocrat, Entertainment Administrator and Music Business Executive. Her vocational pursuits have also seen her planning and producing micro, medium and large music events as well as the production of medium and large-scale music festivals in Jamaica. Shauna-Kaye holds a BA in Entertainment and Cultural Enterprise Management with a Minor in Music from the University of the West Indies, Mona. This is accompanied by a wide spectrum of creative experience.  Shauna-Kaye is most interested in exploring Gig Economies, Entertainment Policy (in particular a data driven approach to Entertainment Policy), Creative Cities, as well as continued work in the Entertainment sector. She is also motivated to participate in general Entertainment related research.

Rebecca Bruton (MFA)

Areas: Electroacoustic Composition, Music Performance, Visual Arts, Writing.

Rebecca Bruton is a violinist, vocalist and composer from Treaty 7 Territory (Calgary, AB).  She works primarily within the realm of Free or Wyrd folk, combining a strongly traditionalist approach to folksong with noise, psychedelic and free-improv sensibilities.  One grandmother threw her fists down into dry ground; the other carried salt.

Minahil Bukhari (MFA)

Areas: Installation / Painting / Sculpture.

Minahil Bukhari is a visual artist working in mixed media and installation art. She graduated from the BFA program at ACAD, Calgary in 2016 and was awarded a distinction. Her topic of research is based on her personal experiences of displacement and diaspora. She is interested in the subtlety and sensitivity of the inner unrest caused due to displacement, while recognizing the complexity of that space. There is conflict and duality that is hard to comprehend within the parameters of language and she attempts to convey that through her art pieces.

Torien Cafferata (MFA)

Torien Cafferata (he/they) is an immersive theatre producer, director, playwright, dramaturge, actor, and educator based in Treaty 6 territory, Saskatoon, Canada. He holds a BFA in Drama from the University of Saskatchewan, which has shaped his practice to consistently centre the relationship between performer and audience -- or technology and user. As co-Artistic Director of he plays at the intersections between performance, interactive digital design, immersive scenography, sound design, found spaces, and lo-fi augmented reality. He thrives on collaborating across disciplines and inviting audiences to become players and storytellers, as seen most broadly in , It's Not A Box Theatre's one-on-one immersive documentary podplay and Situationist psychogeographical experiment. Overhear is an on-going international project, having been produced at both Toronto's SummerWorks and Prague Quadrennial, and received the SATAward for Innovation. His latest work has drifted further into digital immersive game design, such as in the home interactive mobile game series and the first-person lo-fi livestream RPG, . Reflected in these are his recent research muses which lurk in the realm of anti-capitalist hauntology; from Vaporwave to Hopepunk to Fisherian "Weird and Eerie" liminality and lost futures. As an active community member Torien has served as Board Chair of , as President and Dramaturgical Chair of the (2018-2019), and as Head Dramaturge of the Sask Writers Workshop, a free workshop collective for young or emerging writers. He has written Fringe plays and sketch comedy since 2013 and his short plays have twice been selected for the Hardly Arts .

To stay up to date on Torien's digital immersive work, see

To stay up to date on Torien's Internet Dumpster Marxist Shitposting, see

Hannah Campbell (MFA)

Hannah Campbell is a photographer who focuses on themes of shared experience, collective memories and storytelling. Hannah is based in Vancouver/unceded Coast Salish Territories and holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is currently completing an MFA at 丁香园AV. She has received multiple awards for her work, including a Canon Photography Award. Hannah has been chosen to attend international artist in residencies including the Arctic Circle Residency. Hannah uses art as a medium to share stories and create collective experiences between strangers. Her recent work is an exploration of how imagery, storytelling and memories are connected. Through social engagement with the public, she seeks to create a narrative of untold stories of the everyday.

Yves Candau (MFA)

Areas: Dance improvisation, Embodied cognition, Sound.

I have been dancing for the past 17 years, coming to movement from a background in science ?- MSc in Applied Mathematics and MSc in Cognitive Sciences. Dance became a way to pursue a form of embodied research, exploring my nature as a living moving being and my place within the world. This exploration has been invaluably nourished by a number of past and present practices: Aikido, Contact Improvisation, and most importantly Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine and the Alexander technique. My work focuses on solo improvisation and is grounded in an investigation of pedestrian and functional patterns; the incorporation of somatic techniques as generative and creative tools; and seeing movements as emergent forms - determined by and emerging from underlying structures of mind and body. These forms are not isolated but connected in rich webs of possibilities. The challenge of improvisation then is to navigate these webs in real time - the forms constantly appearing, shifting and dissolving. While dance and improvisation have been my main practices, I have gradually been drawn to other media in pursuit of similar fascinations: emergent forms, both in natural and artificial systems; the interplay between complexity and simplexity; and the dynamics of transformation through practice.

Alexandra Caprara (MFA)

Alexandra Caprara is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work focuses on lighting and video design, devised processes, installation, poetry, and physical theatre. Born in Toronto, she holds a degree from York University in Theatre and Creative Writing, and has produced and performed her work internationally. Her research interests include examining the ways emergent technologies can become a harmonious part of a creation process, and how the digital can embrace the organic in both form and content.

Pedro Chamale (BFA)

Areas: Theatre.

Pedro Chamale received his BFA in theatre performance from 丁香园AV. Since then, Pedro has performed in such projects as: The Walking Projects: Vancouver, Crawling, Weeping, Betting (Battery Opera), Matador vs Minotaur (Ensemble Fou), From Whence He Came (rice & beans theatre), Are We There Yet? (Neworld Theatre), The Show Must Go On and Poetics: a ballet brute (Push Festival). As co-artistic director of rice & beans theatre, Pedro has directed Mobils In Mobili and The Libation Bearers for the company. Most recently, with fellow rice & beans artistic director Derek Chan, he co-directed the gods detest you and Canvas, a live tattooing theatre performance for Hive: New Bees 3. Pedro is interested in performance, directing, writing and hopes to facilitate, create and collaborate with anyone who is interested. Pedro would like the theatre he creates to push audience’s perspectives, values and ideas of theatre while telling interesting, evocative and funny stories. Since the company's inception Pedro has produced of all of the company's projects and has worked behind the scenes with local theatre companies such as Leaky Heaven, Boca del Lupo, and The Only Animal.

Justine A. Chambers (MFA)

Justine A. Chambers is a choreographer, dancer and teacher living and working on the traditional, ancestral and  unceded Coast Salish territories of the S?wx?wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her work has been hosted by theatres and galleries locally, nationally and internationally. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Cindy Chan (MA)

Areas: Arts and Cultural Management, Cultural Studies, Film, Graphic Design, and Visual Arts.

Cindy Chan, is a graphic designer, brand marketing, and programming coordinator. She is pursuing her Masters of Contemporary Arts from 丁香园AV. Before 丁香园AV, Cindy earned a diploma of Arts and Cultural Management from MacEwan University and Bachelor of Graphic Design (Honours) from Middlesex University. Cindy did practicums in Alberta, at Visual Arts Alberta – CARFAC and Art Gallery of Alberta, and in British Columbia, at Or Gallery. In these positions, she worked with the gallery curatorial and administrative staff to support exhibitions and programming as well as day-to-day gallery operations. Prior to this, Cindy worked as a graphic designer and a brand marketing executive in Hong Kong for nearly three years at a financial company and a private company respectively where she designed more than thirty covers and layouts for Annual Report, Interim Report, and brochures. During Cindy’s current graduate academic career at 丁香园AV, her research will focus on how Objiwe spiritual belief in dreams resonate to a Thai film. She is particularly interested in how philosophy approaches relate to film, dream, environment, and culture.

Roxanne Charles (MFA)

Areas: Visual art.

Roxanne Charles is a mixed media artist of Strait Salish and European decent. She is an active and proud member of Semiahmoo First Nation in Surrey, BC where she promotes art, language, and culture.

Roxanne recently completed a double major from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, receiving a BA in general studies with a minor in anthropology and a BFA with a minor in art history. Roxanne also holds a certificate in northwest coast jewelry design from The Native Education College.

Her work often explores a variety of themes such as spirituality, environment, identity, hybridity, and various forms of violence. Roxanne likes to work with a wide range of media and really enjoys combining both traditional and contemporary practices. Roxanne is a historian, artist, and contemporary story teller whose goal is to touch, move, and inspire others through her work. She finds creative ways to engage her audience by employing methods of performance and focusing on providing a multisensory experience.

Tara Cheyenne (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Theatre.

Tara is a choreographer, performer, educator and Artistic Director of Tara Cheyenne Performance. Based in Vancouver, she has been creating and performing her unique brand of hybrid dance-theatre for the past decade and is known for her expert blending of comedy, dynamic physicality and character work. Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg creates and performs kinetic theatrical expressions of the ever strange and wonderful human experience. Through exquisitely realized characters, crafted choreography, a healthy dose of comedy, and lashings of tragedy, Friedenberg works to reveal and connect. TCP’s vision is to create works that speak to people on the levels of common human experience, our own comic-tragic behavior, and our lives in movement. The design of gesture, text, movement, and sound to draw lines between meanings is what Tara Cheyenne Fridenberg continuously strives to achieve in her work. This choreographic craft, derived from character and psychological landscapes, is the foundation for discovery, expression, and communication. Tara Cheynne credits her time at 丁香园AV with Judith Garay, Grant, Iris, Cheryl, Santa, Jacci Levitan and Donna Zapfe for giving her the tools and encouragement to do what she does.

Sammy Chien (BFA)

Areas: Cinema, Sound Art, New Media, Dance Performance.

Sammy Chien (Chimerik) is a Taipei born, Vancouver-based interdisciplinary media artist who seeks to merge cinema, sound art, new media, and dance performance techniques into a new individual practice. He has studied film at 丁香园AV (BFA Honors) and developed an expertise in electroacoustic music and digital technology in performance environment. After learning real-time performance software from Troika Ranch (NYC/Berlin) he continues his deep interest in interdisciplinary collaborations and forges deep connections between image, sound, and movement. He has collaborated visually, aurally and conceptually in numerous multi-disciplinary projects range from film, theatre, dance, audiovisual performance to interactive installation which have exhibited across Canada, Western Europe, and Asia including Centre Pompidou(Paris), Museum of Contemporary Arts Taipei, National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing),  Hellerau: European Centre for the Arts Dresden. Sammy has recently embarked collaboration with the Beijing Modern Dance Company and fortunately working with artists such as Wong Kar Wai’s Cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Zhang Yimou’s production designer Gao Guangjian and the Father of Rock in China Cui Jian as well as having lunch with Ai Wei Wei. Sammy has also been involved in research, collaborations or mentorship in projects that focus on the integration between art, science and technology as well as engaging with various community groups such as social activists, low-income residents, cultural, gender and ethnic minorities and youths. Sammy is the Co-Founder/Co-Artistic Director of Chimerik collective, which is a vision, philosophy and imaginative environment that values creative technology and new media practices as important vehicles capable of bridging various art forms to construct new kinds of artistic engagement and language that are transnational, transcultural and prompt social change.

Bob Christie (MA)

Areas: Activism, Cinema, Performance, New Media.

Bob is a graduate of 丁香园AV’s film production program and has been working in the local film and television industry for over fifteen years. Much of that time has been spent in the television advertising production working with many of the major agencies. The flexibility of commercial television industry also offered the opportunity to direct many projects of his own, including video installations, corporate, promotional and music videos. In 2006 he returned his attention to his true passion, documentary. His first feature project The Royal Eight, a memoire of his father’s large eccentric family, was awarded completion funds from the National Film Board of Canada. The following year Bob began production on Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride, a feature length documentary that examines the global politics of Gay Pride. It premiered at Image + Nation Montréal in 2009 and took home the jury prize for best documentary.  It has since gone on to screen in over fifteen countries, winning nine more festival awards, and many other honours, including being featured as the Canadian Gala at the Victoria Film Festival. Bob’s research in the Masters of Comparative Media Arts program will further his passion for activism, exploring the powerful and dynamic space where cinema, performance, new media and other art practices intersect with the social justice movements of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities.

Amanda Dawn Christie (MFA)

Areas: Film, Video, Performance, Photography, Electroacoustic Sound Design.

Amanda Dawn Christie is an interdisciplinary artist working in film, video, performance, photography, and electroacoustic sound design. She has exhibited and performed in art galleries across Canada, and her films have screened internationally from Cannes to Korea to San Fransisco and beyond. She was the 2014 Atlantic finalist for the National Media Art prize, and recently had a 10 year retrospective exhibition of her work curated by Mireille Bourgeois, at the Galerie d’art Louise et Reuben Cohen, and was also included in the Marion McCain Biennale of Atlantic Contemporary Art, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi. Since 1997, she has been actively involved with artist run centres, in both volunteer and staff positions: serving on various boards, working as both a technician and later as a director, teaching workshops, publishing articles, and serving on juries across Canada. She completed her MFA at the 丁香园AV School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, before moving to Amsterdam. Upon her return to Canada she worked at the Faucet Media Arts Centre & Struts Gallery. She later worked as the director of the Galerie Sans Nom and the RE:FLUX festival of music. She left the GSN last year to work full time as an artist with the support of a new media creation grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. Concepts and themes explored in her work focus primarily on the relationship between the human body and analogue technology in a digital age.

Calla Churchward (MFA)

Areas: Performance, Video, Sound.

Calla Churchill likes to begin her process of creation by asking questions and by exploring the subject matter through her body and through basic materials and performance sites. She believe that more questions are raised and more discoveries are made by listening to what her body and what the outside world has to say. Calla's dramaturgical practice often includes speaking with other people and hearing their stories or thoughts. She is interested in integrating video and sound into her live performance projects. Collaborative work, where creativity and energy is shared between artists, is also of interest to her. Calla Churchward grew up in a small town in South Western Ontario and graduated from the drama program at the University of Waterloo. She is interested in new performance work that explores socially relevant issues. Her undergraduate senior studies project, 29 Beats per Minute: Metaphors for Madness, was a one person performance written and performed by her on the subject of mental illness. The performance explored questions of identity, the nature of mental illness, and how institutions are successful at hiding messes. Video work, soundscape and audience participation were integral to the piece.

Emily Clarke (MA)

Exploring the influential role of interdisciplinary arts in early education. Examining the features that make involvement with the arts from a young age the most powerful factor to success both in and out of school. By developing programs and creating a foundation that focusses on nurturing artistic ambition and creativity, we can strive to make a lifelong impact. 

Sara Coffin (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography.

Sara Coffin graduated from SCA is 2003, she's based in Halifax and is the artistic associate of Mocean Dance. She has cultivated her professional career in Vancouver, BC, Halifax, NS, and Northampton, MA where she completed her MFA in Choreography at Smith College (2014). Sara additionally holds a BSc. in Kinesiology (Dalhousie, 2004). She has worked professionally with many collaborators and art makers from across the Canada and south of the border, and she is a co-founder of SiNS (Sometimes in Nova Scotia) dance collective. An award winning choreographer, her choreographic work has been presented in many prominent dance festivals, commissioned by Mocean Dance (2014), and her 2011 self-produced work Taking Your Experience for Mine was been described by the press as “hauntingly gorgeous.”

MJ Coomber (BFA)

Areas: Theatre, Music.

MJ Coomber is a composer, sound designer, musician, conductor and educator based in Vancouver. Recently they have collaborated as a composer and sound designer with Pacific Theatre, Alley Theatre, Touchstone Theatre, The Only Animal, The Arts Club, Frank Theatre, Itsazoo Productions, Savage Society, Vision Impure, The Belfry, Neworld Theatre, Sugarworks Theatre, Caravan Stage Company, Move: The Company, Rice and Beans Theatre, and Theatre Terrific.

They have presented design work at the 2015 Prague Quadrennial and the 2017 World Stage Design festival in Taipei. They are a recipient of the BC Arts Council Early Career Development Program. They are a member of ADC and they graduated from 丁香园AV with two BFAs frpm the SCA, one in music and one in theatre.  

Charlie Cooper (MFA)

Charlie Cooper is a composer and sound artist whose work examines the ecology of lived and imagined environments through sound. His practice is grounded in field recording, often in underwater environments. Through performance and installation, Charlie’s work encourages listening as a means of understanding and appreciating the world we live in.

Kittie Cooper (MFA)

Kittie Cooper is a composer, performer, and educator based in Vancouver, BC. She makes intermedia art that frequently incorporates feminism and explores the spectrum between silliness and seriousness. Her work has been called "highly original and wonderfully fun." She is interested in text and graphic scores, improvisation, and DIY electronic instruments. She also performs locally as a guitarist, electronic musician, and improviser. Kittie is currently working toward an MFA in interdisciplinary arts at 丁香园AV in Vancouver, BC. She also serves as Director of Composers Forums and Faculty for The Walden School Young Musicians Program. She holds a BM from Northwestern University in music education and guitar performance, and an MEd in special education from George Mason University. In her spare time, she enjoys taking care of the stray cats in her neighborhood.

Brady Cranfield (MFA)

Areas: Sound, Visual Art, Music.

Brady Cranfield is a sound and visual artist, musician, and writer. He has a MA in Communications and a MFA from 丁香园AV. His work has been exhibited and performed across Canada.  

Lauren Crazybull (MFA)

Lauren Crazybull is a Niitsítapi, Dené painter living and working on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people. In her work, Crazybull interrogates how Indigenous identities have been historically represented and understood through visual culture. Working primarily in portraiture, a long-standing genre that is often embedded with an imbalance of power between the artist/viewer and sitter, Crazybull seeks to examine the relationship between herself as an artist and the individuals she paints. Through this ongoing work, Lauren uses her work as a way to assert her own humanity, and advocate, in diverse and subtle ways, for the innate intellectual, spiritual, creative and political fortitude of Indigenous peoples.

Wendy Dallian (MA)

Areas: Film, Visual Art, Performance, Philosophy, Cultural Studies.

I have an undergraduate degree in film, a background in theatre, and a deep fascination with philosophy and languages. My research centres on artistic expression that explores the connection between art and philosophy, and the human condition. I am interested in examining the contrast of illusion and the real, in an exploration of the seductive lure of the liminal space, as it pertains to cinema and art, and its subsequent effect on a contemporary society of thinkers.

Luciana D’Anuncia??o (MFA)

Areas: Dance, Performance, Video

Luciana D’Anuncia??o is a Brazilian artist who has been living in Vancouver since 2007. Driven by the uncountable artistic possibilities of being expressive through the body, D’Anuncia??o has done body training from butoh to contact improvisation, somatic dance practices and physical theatre. Her pieces has a starting point her own perceptive interactions within the world and social contexts, which make her pieces very personal and appealing to the human senses. Her works have a strong dialogue with video, installation, and sound. She has performed and exhibited in festivals and venues internationally such as Biennial de Performance Deformes 2014 (Chile), LIVE Biennale 2013 (Vancouver), the European Performance Art Festival 2011 in Poland (EPAF), Direct Action at Institut für alles m?gliche in Berlin. Currently she is a member of the collective Dance Troupe Practice and is part of the board of directors for Live Biennial Performance Art Festival.

Carolyn Deby (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography, Performance, Site Specific Practice.

An artist/choreographer creating site-based performance work under the name sirenscrossing, Carolyn Deby is also (part-time) Head of Professional Studies at London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS) in London, UK. Although based in London since 1993, she has created performance projects internationally – in Canada, Sweden, and England. She is a graduate of 丁香园AV’s BFA Dance program (1987-1990). She has lectured extensively in Professional Studies, Choreography, and Site Specific practice (LCDS, Trinity Laban, University of East London, University of Warwick, and others). Carolyn is currently undertaking a part-time practice-led PhD at University of Warwick. Carolyn’s work with sirenscrossing examines the lived experience of urban humans — situating the human body/mind within landscape and specific sites of the ‘everyday’. It reveals the urban as a place of wild nature, of animal and elemental movement, and equally, urban space as social space and technologically reconstructed nature: a field of converging flows and energies that compose our lived experience. Both human and non-human ‘actors’ are significant, as is the inter-mingling of conscious, unconscious, felt, and sensed ways of knowing.

Karla Desentis Rodríguez (MFA)

Karla Desentis is a dancer, choreographer, designer, and musical theater actress. One of her strongest interest is to do art interventions, performances, video-dance, dance theatre, and physical theatre.

She began her career in the performing arts at the age of five and concluded her studies as a dancer after 13 years of training in classical, contemporary, jazz and folklore technique at the Mexico City Ballet Academy. Her increasing interest in performing arts led her to study other disciplines like singing and acting at the CECAAP where she got a Musical Theatre diploma. Also, she studied set and costumes design at UNAM where she graduated from the Bachelor in Industrial Design, 2010, receiving an Academic Merit Diploma. Furthermore, she graduated from the Bachelor in Choreography at INBA, 2015, with an Honorable Mention in Excellence.

Within artistic residency programs, she has been benefited from the INBA Foundation for the summer program at the School of Toronto Dance Theater in 2012 and by The Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, for the Indigenous Dance Residency program in 2016.

In the professional field, Karla has been in numerous dance productions as a dancer, as well as a director of her choreographic work. As a teacher she has worked for over ten years, being in charge of groups of all ages; being responsible for the choreographic assembly. Recently she has been teaching an interdisciplinary (dance and design) workshop for the Faculty of Arts and Design at UNAM.

Christophe Devos (MA)

Christophe Devos is a born-and-raised Vancouverite, francophone, and self-proclaimed cinephile whose passion for cinema began in early childhood while visiting his neighborhood Blockbuster to rent movies. Having earned a BFA in Art History (Concordia University, 2018) and a BA in Film Studies (UBC, 2021), Christophe acquired an affinity for the critical frameworks of intersectionality, queer theory, media and cultural studies. For his MA research, Christophe aims to demonstrate how the music video offers a significant channel for visualizing the latent queerness of children and disrupting the assumed division between child and adult.

Kim Dixon (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography.

Since graduating from the school for the contemporary arts at 丁香园AV, I've had the chance to train at Edam in contact improvisation as well as dance with a local company for one of their seasons. During that time I realized my passion wasn't so much in performance but more in choreography and dance education. I am now a full time teacher at Pro Arte Centre in North Vancouver. Because of my training at 丁香园AV I am able to instill in my students the art of contemporary and modern dance. I learned so much about the art form and my choreography during my time at 丁香园AV and I am privileged to now share that with a future generation of movers. I currently have an ex student of mine in the dance program and I hope to have many more. 丁香园AV changed how I approach dance and I wouldn't be doing what I am doing now if it weren't for my time there.  I continue to take class around Vancouver especially when I see an 丁香园AV prof is teaching.

Kevin Doherty (MFA)

Areas: Video, Film, Visual Art.

I am a video/filmmaker based in Vancouver, BC. In 2011, I received my BFA in Film Production from the University of British Columbia. Leash, my final project, was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival's Student Showcase. Since graduation, my pursuits have reached beyond filmmaking: I play guitar in the local band Weed and serve on the Archive Committee at VIVO Media Arts Centre. I am drawn to working in video because it provides a venue to synthesize all my interests, and I am eager to experiment with both the approach to and presentation of my work while at 丁香园AV.

Roman Dubrule (MA)

Roman Dubrule is a Franco-Albertan. His experiences include performing, composing, and recording as a freelance musician; launching an impromptu career as show-host and head of programming for two French-Canadian radio stations; and slinging wine in the scenic Okanagan Valley. Holding a BMus in Jazz and Contemporary Music with a Major in Performance from MacEwan University, Roman is now engaging more deeply with his alternate passions for philosophy, writing, and film during his Master’s studies, to continue elaborating on the importance of art in the meaningful development of societies and self. Roman’s academic interests lie generally at the intersections of sound, mindfulness, process philosophy, Taoism, affect theory, and cosmology. Above all, he believes that listening deeply to the world around us can transform us into more compassionate, ecological, and musical beings.

Desiree Dunbar (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography.

Desiree Dunbar has had the honour of dancing in principal roles of over twenty new works by esteemed Canadian choreographers, including Serge Bennathan, Anik Bouvrette, and David Earle, while a member of Judith Garay’s Dancers Dancing Repertory Company since 2000. While on scholarship at the University of Arizona in Tucson to study choreography, she developed her Dancing the Wild method that incorporates the study of authentic movement, energy work and awareness practice as performance training for dancers. Dunbar explored this method in her MFA thesis project The Astro Dance, presented at the Flandrau Planetarium in Tucson, AZ, 2012. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 2012. She mentors emerging dance artists in her Catalyst Dance program and is grateful for her partnership with West Point Grey Community Centre since Fall 2013. She is also a celebrated community builder, uniting dancers from the professional, community and cultural realms. She originated and directed Startdance Recreational Dance Company, Connecting Community Dance Series, and LINK Community Dance Concert in partnership with Moberly Arts & Cultural Centre & Roundhouse Arts and Recreation Centre.

Lucien Durey (MFA)

Areas: Visual Arts.

I'm an artist working between Saskatchewan and Vancouver. The variety of media approaches that comprise my work begin with an often performative engagement with found objects. Drawing from personal and popular experience, my practice explores themes of authenticity and compensation. Recent exhibitions include Baba’s House at The Ukrainian Museum of Canada in Saskatoon and Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina; Shelved, presented by the Burnaby Art Gallery in collaboration with Vancouver’s Artspeak and the University of British Columbia; and When I Get This Feeling, a video performance created for Performatorium 2014 at Neutral Ground Gallery, Regina, and recently presented at Hardscrabble Gallery in Vancouver. As a singer I perform regularly with singer/songwriter Leah Abramson and her project The Abramson Singers, recording supporting vocals for two studio albums, most recently for Late Riser released in 2013. In July 2015 we performed on the main stage at West 4th Ave Khatsahlano Street Party. Our new project Lost Lagoon has us co-writing for the first time, creating sparse, haunting songs that put our voices and tight harmonies front and centre.

Deborah Edmeades (MFA)

Areas: Video, Visual Art, Performance.

Deborah Edmeades was born in the UK and lived in South Africa before moving to New York City, where she lived for 17 years. She currently lives in Vancouver. Deborah’s performances, videos and photographs emerge from the often shameful intersection between the constructs of personal and cultural identity and embodied process of self. She utilizes acting, therapeutic and meditational techniques that privilege the body’s autonomic responses, to explore and expose notions of discrete selfhood and it’s inevitable narrative. Deborah has shown work in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Mexico, Brazil and Korea and has received grants form Franklin Furnace Archive (New York) as well as serving on their peer review panel. She was also a guest lecturer of performance art at the University of Texas at Austin. A current project, Looking for God, is based on the practice of eye-gazing utilizing modified teleprompters. There is a fascination with the complete re-orientation of perception of self this practice (among others) gives rise to; the transgression of a localized and sealed sense gives way to a spatially expanded perception that affectively includes the other as self.

Mena El Shazly (MFA)

Mena El Shazly's (b. Cairo) work is grounded in video but encompasses embroidery and sculpture. Her practice is concerned with entropy, bodies and (light)-sensitive surfaces that carry knowledge and memory. She studied performing and visual arts at the American University in Cairo and is a former fellow of the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. El Shazly also has a well-established curatorial practice and has organized several video art events and workshops. She is the current Artistic Director of Cairo Video Festival for video art and experimental film organized by Medrar for Contemporary Art.

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Kristina Fiedrich (MA)

Areas: Biometrics, Technology, Body, Identity, Transformation, Drawing.

Through a drawing-centered practice, I explore the corporeal form through the lens of technology and embodiment, engaging a phenomenological approach toward an evolving and adaptable investigation of bodily possibilities. The primary focus of my MA thesis project was largely determined by a CIHR grant awarded in 2011, investigating the relationship between the technological advancements of prostheses and the emergence of prosthetics as a means to transform identity and the body itself. My upcoming research intends to further examine corporeality and embodiment through the lens of biometrics, as instrument and subject in image-making, its reflection on contemporary culture, and the forming of identit(ies) within the proliferation of technological interventions. I have earned diplomas in photography and printmaking, an undergraduate degree in studio art and Master of Applied Arts degree in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Alongside my art practice, I produce work as part of Vancouver-based artist collaborative Lucida Lab, teach as sessional faculty at Emily Carr’s Visual Art and Material Practices department, act as Secretary of the CARFAC-BC Board of Directors and maintain several arts administration roles including project manager, artist liaison and grant writer.

Jim Finlay (MA)

Areas: Visual Art, Art History, Education.

I am a self-directed life long learner with undergraduate degrees in Art and Art History (McMaster), Fine Art Studio (McMaster), Art Education (UBC) and a graduate diploma in Art History (UBC). My interests are varied and unfocused. I am at times interested in doing research which investigates the performative and theatrical nature of the live Canadian fine art auction as an institutionalized expression of Canadian nationalism. How and using what preferred vehicle of communication did Canadian art auction houses co- opt national identity in the service of commerce? Did auction houses simply appropriate and extrapolate existing ideologies of Canadian visual and performative culture in the service of political commerce? How does a changing focus on marketing practices by Canadian art auction houses shape the market and national identity? Is the fine art auction performance art? What role do the artworks play at the auction? Why are specific regionalist expressions of Canadian landscape absent in major Canadian art auctions? Subtexts of art and value, early 21st century capitalism and the anomalies and eccentricities of the ‘colonial’ in the post-colonial experience may also inform my academic research and artistic praxis. I have been engaged in a lengthy ongoing project to create a material culture, as a descriptive embodiment of an-other.

Rebecca Foley (BA)

Areas: Dance.

After completing the Dance program in 2012, Rebecca graduated from 丁香园AV with a BA (hons) with distinction in Communication and Dance in 2013. She then went on to complete her MA in Communication and Culture from York University in 2016 and has recently started her PhD in Public Health at the University of Alberta. While her interests are no longer focused on dance and the art world the skills she learned during her time in the dance program prepared her immensely for her graduate student work. The most valuable skills Rebecca gained from the Dance program were the ability to approach a topic or problem from unique and alternate perspectives, learning when to let go of grades, particularly when their subjectivity means little in ‘the real world’, and knowing when to get out of a mental ‘funk’ by going back to movement.

Emmalena Fredriksson (MFA)

Areas: Dance, Performance Art.

I’m a Swedish dance artist, most recently based in the UK and now in Vancouver. I trained at SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) in Austria and have worked as an independent dance artist since 2008, presenting work in Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and the UK. As an artist I’m working with ‘states of dance’ in performance on stage, in gallery spaces, and for site-specific work. I am interested in making work that can capture moments of being and of thoughts in motion. Life is an embodied experience, through which I perceive myself and the world around me. By dancing I can see clearer what that is. My MFA continued my research on the sculptural aspects of the body and the potential narratives that it holds. I continue to play with duration and improvisational practices to question the perceptions of body and notions of dance. From 2009-2010 I was an artist in residence with Daghdha Dance Company in Ireland and I’ve been an Associate Lecturer in Choreography and Dance at Falmouth University from 2011-2013.

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Stephanie Gagne (MFA)

Areas: Popular culture, sexuality, neighborhoods and childhood nostalgia.

Stephanie Gagne was born in Vancouver and is a local visual artist. She completed her BFA at Emily Carr University in 2016. Her interests include popular culture, sexuality, neighborhoods and childhood nostalgia. Stephanie's interdisciplinary projects involve sculpture, photography, drawing and video.

Tin Gamboa (MFA)

Tin Gamboa is a dance artist who was born and raised on traditional land of Austronesian people, in a place commonly known as Manila, Philippines. She is currently living in the traditional land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-waututh first nations, now known as Vancouver, Canada. With her Filipino blood rumbling through her tapping toes and dancing body, Tin explore patterns, cycles, and stories within micro and macro levels, as “to enquire into the world of changing patterns and forces at play, is to enquire into the choreography of life” (Klien 2008). Through dance improvisation and composition, she creates safe spaces for focused reflection on ideas and patterns imprinted on the body, in relation to larger frameworks, whethe political, geographic, historical, cultural, or societal.  

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Nikolai Gauer (MFA)

Areas: Video, Installation, Sculpture.

Nikolai Gauer is a multidisciplinary artist working mostly in video, installation and sculpture. He creates art with the intention of stimulating a thought-process in the spectator through constructed artificial atmospheres, situations, and confrontations with seemingly dumb or absurd objects. He has also researched concepts and subjects such as sensory deprivation, nothingness, systems, chaos, memory and information theory. In his studio he has explored simple ways of acknowledging and conveying the fundamental natural laws that govern and shape us. This exploration has resulted in a series of simple, poetic, borderline naive sculptures. He grew up in the countryside outside Oslo, Norway. He has a diploma in music and sound engineering from Sunnhordland Folkeh?gskule, Norway (2002), Examen Philosophicum from the University of Bergen, Norway (2003), and a BFA with a major in Intermedia from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (2008).

Mallory Gemmel (MA)

Areas: Photography, Cinema, Art History, Visual Culture, and Curating.

My BFA consisted of making photographs as a way to experience and understand the conditions that surrounded me. It also offered me an opportunity to look to the past as a method of research. It was during this time that I realized my tendency to believe in a metering of veracity, questioning the truths of the world through making photographs, discussing with peers, and writing. I love to learn and enjoy engaging with people, spaces, and communities that allow me to do so.

My time in the Comparative Media Arts Program has guided a personal interest in the research of moving-image and cinema. My object of study consists of exploring the perceptual qualities of cinema that make it an immersive, engaging, reflective, and contemplative art form. With knowledge and further research in contemporary and historical curatorial practice, I am working towards considering how exhibition design can be influenced and reflective of the perceptual processes of cinema. I have taken on practical projects in order to further develop this research, including curating and managing an exhibition project with 丁香园AV faculty and Vancouver based artists.  In the final semester of my degree, I will be producing and editing a limited edition issue of the CMA Journal based around new theories of contemporary curatorial exercise that reflect my study, showcasing exhibitions examples, curatorial projects, papers, and reviews.

Kourosh Ghamsari-Esfahani (MFA)

Kourosh Ghamsari-Esfahani is an Iranian-Canadian composer-violinist. He completed an Honours B. Mus. at Wilfrid Laurier University, and has presented at festivals and artist residencies across North America and internationally, including: The Brush Creek Arts Residency in Wyoming, USA, the Arteles International Creative Residency in Finland, and the Montreal Contemporary Music Lab. He is also currently a violinist with the 丁香园AV SCA Ensemble-in-Residence, working directly to support the undergraduate composition program, as well as developing the ensemble's own line of performances.

Various labels may describe Kourosh's work with some accuracy: neo-romantic, contemporary-classical, electro-acoustic, soundscape, chamber, interdisciplinary, and so on. He strives to inhabit the intersections between performance, composition and improvisation

Aakansha Ghosh (MFA)

Aakansha Ghosh is a visual artist, whose research has been developing to deconstruct, decode and depict the role of architecture in context to the notion of memory and individuality, in and of places. She has lived in more than twenty houses across seven cities in India and now in Canada, this constant shift has shaped the context of her research surrounding spaces we call home and the individuality that resides within these places. Her practice incorporates painting, sculpture and installation making, using found objects and everyday material.

She has completed her Bachelors in Visual Arts (2018) with a major in painting and a minor in ceramics from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S University of Baroda, India. Her works have been part of shows across Vadodara, Goa and Delhi. They have also been published on artist-run websites.

Vanessa Goodman (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography.

Vanessa Goodman is a Vancouver-based dance artist who creates independently as Action at a Distance, is Co-Artistic Director of The Contingency Plan and is an artistic associate with Small Stage. She received her early training in Toronto from Canadian Children's Dance Theatre, PBJ Dance Projects and Etobicoke School for the Arts. Vanessa holds a BFA from 丁香园AV and continues her training locally and abroad, including intensives with the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel and the Hofesh Schechter Company in England. Vanessa was the recipient of the 2013 Iris Garland Emerging Choreographer Award from the Scotiabank Dance Centre, which supported her first full-length work, "What Belongs to You". Independently she has interpreted works for Wild Excursions Performance (Conrad Alexandrowicz), Justine A. Chambers, Jennifer Clarke Projects, dumb instrument dance (Ziyian Kwan), the plastic orchid factory (James Gnam), Restless Productions (Claire French and James Maxwell), Mascall Dance (Jennifer Mascall), Julia Sasso, Holly Small and Judith Marcuse. Since 2006 she has been a company member with Dancers Dancing, where she has had the pleasure of working with artistic director Judith Garay and other prestigious Canadian choreographers. Vanessa has been commissioned to create works for the Dancing on the Edge Festival, The Gwaii Trust, Vancouver Biennale and the 丁香园AV Dance Program (2010/11/13/15). Most recently her work has been presented locally and nationally by The Canada Dance Festival, The Magnetic North Festival, The Dance Centre, Dance in Vancouver, Dances for a Small Stage, The Firehall Arts Centre, The Modulus Festival, The Chutzpah Festival, The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and Dance Allsorts. Vanessa has facilitated workshops and master classes throughout BC and in Toronto. She is also certified Method PMI Pilates instructor.

Curtis Grahauer (MFA)

Areas: Video, Film, Installation.

Since graduating from Emily Carr in 2004 with a Bachelor of Media Arts, the majority of my artistic output has included video, film and installation. I have participated in Vancouver’s LIVE Biennale, Nuit Blanche Toronto, in residencies at KIAC in Dawson City, at S?M in Reykjavik, while some of my film and video works have been screened at various locations and festivals throughout Canada and the USA. My interest in the formal aspects of genre film has informed a recent solo exhibition, ROLLING THUNDER, presented by Interurban Gallery in Vancouver. Encompassing sculpture, video and sound, and inspired by the 2011 Stanley Cup riots, as well as research into theories of groupthink, this installation project used elements of action cinema of the 1980s to inform its aesthetic, from lighting and smoke effects, to a synthesizer soundtrack. While at the School of Contemporary Arts, my goal is to create installation and environmental projects that incorporate research into social psychology to produce works that are influenced by the emergent behaviour of social groupings.

Molly Grant (MA)

Areas: Art History, Film, Photography.

I received a diploma in professional photography from Western Academy of Photography, and recently graduated from the University of Victoria with a BA, focused in Art History and Film. I am drawn to works and artists that address socio-cultural concerns as well as the implications of rapid advancement and consumerism. I am deeply inspired by the work of Ed Burtynsky, and throughout my MA at 丁香园AV, I hope to explore issues of connectivity and detachment, and how artists such as him navigate between aesthetic and authenticity. I was born and bred on Vancouver Island, and from a young age I have explored, hiked, biked and trekked all over its beautiful terrain. I have always been preoccupied with an incessant desire to travel the world, and hope that one day I can find a job that allows me to feed this wanderlust! I would live on my bike if I could, playing the piano makes me calm and I have a long running addiction to crossword puzzles.

Storm Rose Eva Hall Greenwood (MA)

I am a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Britain, newly arrived in Vancouver to study for my MA in Comparative Media Arts. Starting from an Undercommons conceptualisation of study as a corporeal practice and not merely an intellectual one, I am interested in the creation of new methodologies for bodily hermeneutic discussion.

I have a BA in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Roehampton (London, UK) and during my final year I wrote an extended dissertation under the supervision of performance scholar-practitioner P.A. Skantze. Drawing on the concept of the Undercommons, my dissertation, 'Secular Space/Sacred Sound: Performative Ritual as Textual Intervention,' explored the creation of a performative ritual. This ritual sought to provide a space in which to intervene in the patriarchal silencing of the Other in formative Western texts through theoretical, performative, somatic and rhizomatic forms of learning.

During my MA I intend to continue exploring the relationship between private and public affective experience and the ways in which Undercommons study, black feminist love politics and the radical politics of hope shape work in this field. I am fascinated by the discussions enabled by writing at the intersection of theory, poetry, performance and fiction. I have been inspired by the writing of Helene Cixous, Fred Moten, Ashon T. Crawley, Barbara Browning and P.A. Skantze, whose work in different registers and modes creates interdisciplinary spaces between diverse forms of writing and practice.

During the last year I have been working on a personal research project entitled 'Stitch Theory: A Methodology for Slow and Reciprocal Devotion.' Stitch Theory exists at the intersection of art and theory and is the practice of embroidering quotes from theoretical and poetic texts and gifting them back to the scholars and writers who wrote them. In June 2018 I had the pleasure of leading a participatory embroidery performance as part of the Found Performance Symposium, an undisciplinary symposium exploring aesthetic methodologies in healthcare and medicine at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London, UK).

Linnea Gwiazda (MFA)

Areas: Choreography, Contemporary Dance, Performance, Video, Installation, Photography.

I am a multidisciplinary artist, performer, arts administrator and stage-manager. Originally from Victoria BC, I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts, awarded with distinction, from Concordia University (Montréal QC, 2013) where I majored in Contemporary Dance. My studio practice focuses on performative work, investigating choreographic principles within visual arts media and exploring image within movement. I study everyday human experience utilizing the relationships developed between the choreographic themes of subject, time and space. Through my work, I examine the impacts that people, places and events have on individuals throughout their lives. Namely, I am interested in personal archiving, cellular memory, behavioural patterns, internal dialogue and the performativity of self. Drawing attention to the mundane, finding the strange in the ordinary and exploring narratives within imaginary constructs, I aim to better understand human behaviour through its observation, analysis and representation. I have performed and presented work both across Canada and internationally. I worked with Ingrid Bachmann on her video piece and performance, The Gift as part of The Hybrid Bodies Project, exhibited at Kunstkraftwerk (Leipzig, Germany), The Hannah Maclure Centre (Dundee, Scotland), the University of Toronto Art Centre, The International Festival of Video Art (Camagüey, Cuba) and Centre PHI. I have been a collaborator and performer for the company FOR BODY AND LIGHT in the show Coming And Going, directed by choreographer Stéphanie Morin-Robert and spoken word artist and musician Ian Ferrier, participating in creation and research residencies at Hexagram - Concordia University, MainLine Theatre and Main & Station and performing across Canada and in New York City at such venues as Wildside Festival, TANGENTE: Laboratoire de mouvements contemporains and The Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. A collection of three short films based on Coming And Going, directed by Ben Rich, premiered at NextFest in 2015.

Lief Hall (MFA)

Areas: Music, performance.

Lief Hall is a composer, singer-songwriter, director/choreographer and creator of opera, musical theatre, video and installation. Her interdisciplinary installation and performance works explore themes of nature, technology and the body as they relate to mythology, feminism and the production of cultural ideology.

Hall was previously the vocalist for Vancouver no wave punk band ‘Mutators’ (2007), vocalist for the improvisational trio ‘Glaciers‘ (2009), and one half of Canadian ‘femme noir’ pop duo MYTHS (2012). Lief Hall’s solo musical works include improvised and extended voice and experimental electronic ‘pop’ which integrates performance, video, photography and costume making.

Julie Hammond (MFA)

Areas: theatre, performance, devising.

I am a performer and performance maker who creates works for the stage and stage-like spaces, and uses methods developed in devising to create experiences for audiences (of one, or of many). I believe in collaboration—with other makers, designers, writers, dramaturgs, and audiences—stupid moments, and intuition. Since 2004 I have made 12 full length shows as a company member of Portland's Hand2Mouth Theatre and have performed at La MaMa (NYC), On the Boards (Seattle), The Myrna Loy Center (Helena, MT), PICA's T:BA Festival, and numerous colleges and venues across the west coast.

I received a BA in Theater (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Bates College (Lewiston, Maine) and have trained/studied with Toshiki Okada (Japan), Mariano Pensotti (Argentina), Double Edge Theatre, and Teatr Stacja Szamocin (Poland) among others. As a sometimes dancer, I have performed at Conduit's Dance+ Festival (dir. Kristine Anderson) and at my house (long time ago - present). From 2003-04 I assisted William Pope.L in development and touring of The Black Factory. My work has been supported by the Oregon Arts Commission and, with Hand2Mouth, through residencies at EMPAC (Troy, NY), Caldera (Sisters, OR), and Casa Santa Ana (San Miguel de Allende, MX).

Natalie Hobbs (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

Natalie Hobbs was born and raised in Celista, BC. She moved to Edmonton, AB where she studied dance at Grant McEwan and obtained a dance diploma. In 2002, Natalie moved to Vancouver, BC to continue studying dance at 丁香园AV. By 2004, she obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance. Natalie is trained in Contemporary/Modern Dance, Ballet, Flamenco, Hip Hop, African Boot Dancing, Burlesque, Swing Dancing and Salsa. Since graduation she has choreographed for professional venues in Vancouver, the interior of BC and St. John’s, NL. Since moving to Newfoundland she has taught at Danceworx, Catherine’s Dance Studio and Lindy Hop on The Rock. She enjoys collaborating with live musicians, poets, and flamenco dance artists.

Lea Ashelia Hogan (MA)

Areas: Performance, Gender, New Media, Queer Studies.

I earned my Baccalaureate of Arts from the University of Waterloo in Theatre & Performance, Speech communication, and a minor in Digital Arts Communication. I've worked in multiple roles in Theatre & Performance: actor, technician (lighting, sound, and occasional video), stage manager, production manager, and dramaturg. In my work, I've taken an interest in Queer and Gender Studies through my Communication program and Performance Devising Practice, inspiring a long existential re-examination of my being and my critical approach to unpacking Performance and Media while influencing a new interest in writing.

In my MA, I look to examine an Auto-Ethnographic approach to positioning Queer and Trans within Environmental and Institutional Spaces. I also will be examining New Media Approaches to Trans Positionality, critiquing audience reception towards different Trans identities and art, and unpacking ways to engage Trans New Media.

Dionne Horacsek (MA)

Areas: Gender Studies, Visual Arts, Film, Literature.

I have lived in and around Vancouver for my entire life. Since graduating with a BA from 丁香园AV in 2014, I have been traveling and working full time as a yoga instructor, a profession that has brought up many questions around gender, class and inclusivity. My MA explored female identity and contemporary disconnection, alongside ideas of utopia, perfection, sadness, and boredom. From Hamlet's Ophelia to The Virgin Suicides, I am interested in the ways in which these ideas manifest in film and popular culture, and how they morph as technology and social media strengthen as cultural forces.

Sasha Ivanochko (MFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography, Performance.

I am a Montréal based choreographer, educator, and artistic director of Ivanochko et Cie-projets de performance, a company I founded in 2005. With I et C, my work has been presented in festivals and venues across Canada, Japan and the Dominican Republic. Outside the company, I have created commissions for Toronto Dance Theatre, Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers and for multiple collectives and independent performers. My artistic practice is rooted in the body and the exploration of it's expressive and metaphoric domains. As a way of questioning disciplinary boundaries and conventions, I integrate the values and methods of other disciplines. My creations from the past six years are a blend of movement text, vocal work, sound/music and character development.  I am currently on faculty at Ecole de danse contemporaine de Montréal. My in-field teaching includes the mentorship of emerging choreographers and creative facilitation for actors, dancers, musicians and performance artists. My interest for academic research at 丁香园AV surrounds the intersection of text and movement, the positioning of my work against feminist theory and practice, and investigating the psychoanalytical aspects of my process. 

Hamidreza Jadid (MFA)

Areas: Visual Arts, Literature, History, Religion, and Politics of Iran.

Hamidreza Jadid graduated from Tehran University of Art in Iran in Painting. He joined the MFA program at 丁香园AV in fall 2011. Due to his tendency toward Literature, History, Religion and Politics in Iran, these elements have always been gradually developing in his works. He executes installations as well as painting and sculpture, being free from any kind of traditional constraint and limitation in Visual Arts. Jadid is interested in New Media and making more interaction with the viewer. In some experiences he use a team of ordinary people beside amateur and self-taught artists in different fields such as animation, music, doll making, hair styling and tailoring. Working with self-educated artists and ordinary people with no experience will generally result in formation of installations which are samples of raw creation in his works. Approach New Media and Current Contemporary Directions in the Visual Arts has effectively and attractively expressed his concerns in terms of form as well as concept. Concepts such as the effect of religious prejudice on political and social liberties and feminism, not only in Middle East (his homeland), but also in many other parts of the world. His concerns do not mean that he makes political art. He is just making art politically.

Sophie Jarvis (BFA)

Areas: Film, Directing.

Sophie Jarvis is a writer-director based in Vancouver. Her short films have screened at film festivals such as TIFF, VIFF, and MWFF.

Maj Britt Jensen (MFA)

Areas: Video / Feminisms / Performance and performativity / Site-specificity / Dialogue and collaboration.

“Look at me, this is me”. And also: I experiment looking at myself, this is who I am. But, what I am, or even better, what I seek (as abstract as it may seem) is not there, it is not trapped within the image; it is not evident, since it has no bearing with my surface, except very seldom, when it prints itself upon it. It is definitely neither in my face, nor in my body as it is.

What I am looking for is shown in the movements, in the changes, in the instability. In the way that I touch, articulate, in the manners in which the things are said to me, in the interchange with other individuals.

I have always collaborated with other artists and shared authorship by creating structures where individual and mutual desires are negotiated. I have moved on to performativity, asking myself how to construct spaces which don’t exclude emotions and open opportunities to learn eagerly. I recognized limits of individual practice and the problems of cultural representation.

Rebecca Karpus (MA)

Areas: Dance, Dance History, Art History, Cultural Studies.

My name is Rebecca, and I am dancer, choreographer, and dance instructor. My recent performance and choreography experience includes my self-produced full-length work In Colour as well as A Presence of Monster at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, The Arts Club Theatre Company's 50th Anniversary Stroll, and Dinner Parties at The Vancouver Art Gallery's FUSE festival. I completed three years of the Bachelor of Fine Arts: Dance Performance at Ryerson University in Toronto and finished my last year at Capilano University in North Vancouver, graduating with a Bachelor of Performing Arts. My focus area is dance history, including the ballet world in Paris during the 19th century. The ballerina-focused artwork of Edgar Degas, along with its implications and social relevance, particularly interests me. The development of ballet and what is associated with it compels me to dig deeper into its many layers, which extend into today's media.

Jason Kennedy (MA)

Jason is conducting research on the affect of harmonic overtones and frequencies using hand crafted specialized instruments of wood, brass, metal, stone, water, crystal, and organics called the "Sonorium". Designed and created by an ethnomusicologist, sound scientist, and collaborator with indigenous tribes in South America and India, Aurelio C. Hamer is the founder of Svaram – an innovative sound and research center located a few hours south of Chennai in the unique town of Auroville, India.  

Jason is an apprentice to the Yogi and sound practitioner Nora Lim – founder of Think off the Mat – who was trained by Hamer in Auroville, India. Nora and Jason design sound journeys and sound experiences with the Sonorium for individuals and small groups. His research as an apprentice is to inquire into the phenomenological experience and the performative affect that these instruments may or may not have on living tissue and emotional, social, and perceptual states of being.

Jason (M.A. Music Education + B.A. Jazz Performance) has extensive experience teaching general music, Orff, band, orchestra, music technology, and organizing music festivals for children (pre-K - 12) and adults. While living in New York City, Jason helped design the curriculum and pedagogy for the Jazz@Lincoln Center - WeBop! program under the direction of Wynton Marsalis and Dr. Lori Custodero of Teachers College, Columbia University. After a decade in NYC, Jason taught music in Kuala Lumpur – Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Chennai – India.

Having lived and traveled extensively throughout Asia for the past 14 years has afforded Jason multiple perspectives in art, music, and culture and how it relates to education. Jason is a certified music, yoga and mindfulness teacher, and integrates these perspectives into the pedagogy of creative and performance art. Jason's community service includes volunteering at 'Hekima Place' in Nairobi, Kenya, 'Caring for Cambodia' in Siem Reip, Cambodia, and the 'Tree Foundation' in Chennai, India.

Somayeh Khakshoor (MFA)

Somayeh Khakshoor is an experimental artist, working mainly in the field of the moving image. She received her master’s degree in Animation from Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

Homa Khosravi (MFA)

Painter from Iran, Tehran. Studied painting at Tehran University. My paintings are mostly about nature, plants, animals and human bodies, specifically the female body and human organs. I do photography and collages as well, about the same subjects.

Michelle Kim (MA)

Michelle Kim is a Vancouver-based filmmaker, actor, and novelist. Her directorial debut, The Tree Inside, played at various film festivals in North America and Asia, winning audience choice awards for best feature film at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival and the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival in Portland. Running Through Sprinklers, her first novel, about girls growing up and growing apart in Surrey, BC, was published by Simon & Schuster USA in 2018. With a BA in Canadian Studies from the University of British Columbia, her master's research will focus on how the Korean concepts of han (sorrow), heung (excitement), and jeong (love & compassion) are expressed aesthetically in South Korean cinema.

Isabelle Kirouac (MFA)

Areas: Performance, Dance.

Urban nomad, I spent many years on the road. Without a place to come back to, my body became my home. I learnt to adapt, to cultivate a sense of readiness, to listen and to pay attention to the rhythms of each steps. My performance practice is about attention. Paying attention allows us to constantly be in research, to practice unknowing, to redefine ourselves in each moment. In this constant dance of holding on and letting go, we expose ourselves and witness one another. Through my movement practice, I have been developing a greater awareness of my own body and exploring the nature of my relationships with others. I believe in art as a process of transformation, which turns fear into curiosity. It is a form of political action that allows us to see and be seen, to communicate through the body, to share with others and learn from our experiences. My performance work explores the notion of ritual, awareness, intimacy, the concept of home, migration and its reflection on our ways of seeing. Rooted in the contemporary dance field, I often integrate notions of theater, contemporary circus, video, film and music into my work. Primarily trained as a dancer, my movement practice has been influenced by intensive studies in dance improvisation, Contact Improvisation, contemporary release technique, somatics (Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, Body Mind Centering), butoh, traditional and contemporary West African dance, acrobatic stilts, East European physical theater, and voice work. My movement practice is also influenced by performance art, installation, as well as many years of explorations in classical and experimental music. I have been presenting my artistic work, teaching and organizing artistic events in Canada, USA, Mexico, Colombia, Europe, West Africa and the Middle East. I created my own performance work, as well as danced in the work of several contemporary dance, theater and circus companies, including Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater (San Francisco), Theatre Junction (Calgary), Karl Frost/Body Research (San Francisco), Felix Ruckert (Berlin), Flam Chen (USA) and Nemcatacoa Teatro (Colombia). I collaborated with the dancers Lea Kieffer (France) and Trinidad Martinez (Spain), the visual artists Eman Haram (Syria/Quebec) the experimental film artists Daichi Saito and Karl Lemieux (Quebec), the musicians Olivier Borzeix (Quebec), Medecie Baul (USA), amongst others. As a musician, I played in the dance and theater performances “You don’t know Jack” (Carpetbag Brigade Physical Theater) and “Proximity” (Karl Frost/Body Research). Believing in cultural exchange and art as political action, I also have been participating to a series of dialogues about Contact Improvisation as political action in Israel, teaching dance and movement classes to women’s groups in Bethlehem (Palestine), conducted research on the coexistence of contemporary and traditional dance performances in West Africa, and co-directed the artistic residency “Nowhere/Now Here” in Spain about the issues of migration and displacement in collaboration with 25 international dance artists.

Alexandre Klinke (MFA)

Areas: Sound art, music.

I am a sound artist from Sao Paulo, Brazil, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. I’ve been creating, recording and performing music as a solo artist, while also working as a composer and sound designer for film.

I am drawn to old musical practices, such as pentatonic scales, the use of drones and the simple forms of ethnic and early music. At the same time, I’m attracted to experimental and unorthodox music idioms that push the boundaries of conventional genres, such as free improvisation, glitch and ambient.

A common thread that connects all my work is the amalgamation of folkloric music traditions and contemporary audio technology. Rather than embracing established musical styles, I intend to explore these traditional practices and show them in a different light, merging them with modern sounds and systems, combining acoustic and electronic elements, and embracing new techniques.

Sydney J. Koke (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art.

Sydney J. Koke is interested in forms and surfaces that denote value or importance, such as those that used in advertising, display, or ceremony. Her sculptural work often features banners, fringes, and transparent, reflective, multispectral, and glittery surfaces due to their role as visual indicators of value, and conversely, as components of waste: the signal and noise of human societies. She is passionate about the idea of agency through creative action as well as the importance of intuitive and embodied processes in decoding and resisting societal systems of value and significance. Sydney Koke graduated with a MFA in the interdisciplinary program at the School for the Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV. Having previously worked and studied as a neuroscientist, Koke is interested in addressing and challenging perceptions of subjectivity and objectivity in thinking about and describing the world. Working primarily in vinyl, resin, and airbrushed enamel, her visual language arises from an emphasis on the embodied and intuitive aspects of creative action and perception. Currently based in Vancouver, BC. Koke has exhibited her artwork in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, and New York. She has performed internationally as an experimental/rock musician, with releases in Canada, the United States, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia, and had published articles in several academic journals in the field of neuroscience.

Michael Kong (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

Michael Kong is a Vancouver based dance artist and holds a BFA in dance from 丁香园AV. Additional training includes the Martha Graham School and the 2012/13 season of Modus Operandi. Michael has proudly danced for Judith Garay, Vanessa Goodman, Noam Gagnon, Paras Terezakis, Katie DeVries, Daisy Thompson, and Rob Kitsos.

Yani Kong (PhD)

Areas: Critical Theory, Philosophy, Art History, Visual Culture, Cultural Studies.

Yani Kong is a writer, editor, and scholar of contemporary art, researching reception aesthetics and contemporary art history. She has published essays for the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation, Vancouver BC, the Freedman Gallery, Reading PA, and is a regular contributor to Galleries West, and has written for many other national and international publications. As a member of the Low Carbon Research Methods Working Group and as part of the Small File Media Festival team, she explores sustainable practices in streaming media.  

Katie Kozak (MFA)

I am an artist of Métis and Ukrainian descent. My Art Practice blends visual art, science, and wellness evolving from a longstanding interest in biology, alternative medicine and therapeutic rituals. While my practice has always encompassed a deep connectivity to land, I have only recently begun to understand it as a way to process both the loss of my father and the loss of a piece of my cultural identity. 

Jorma Kujala (MA)

Areas: Visual Art.

Having lived in Vancouver (Canada), Helsinki (Finland) and Stockholm (Sweden), my artistic practice is heavily influenced by my construction of a global “home” through cross-cultural examinations and my personal immigrant location between identities as a hybrid Finnish Canadian. My BFA in Visual Arts in 2010 from Emily Carr University has been complemented with self-directed academic studies in topics such as Philosophy, Gender Studies and Environmental Ethics. While my primary discipline has been painting, my broad-ranging, multi-directional and non-linear practice casts a wide, interdisciplinary net, employing drawing, photography, printmaking, ceramics and digital art, as well as explorations into video, soundwalks and other forms of audio art. My graduate studies at 丁香园AV will allow me to continue investigating the shared knowledge, language, memory, and social interaction that occurs in our environment (be it human-made or natural) when culture, communication, and social change intersect.  My current research interests include the bodily interplay with individual, sound, and environment; repetition and re-enactment; and the commonalities and differences of creativity, including human, non-human, biological, organic, and ecological.

Micaela Kwiatkowski (MA)

Areas: Contemporary Art, Queer and Feminist Theory, Curatorial Studies.

Micaela Kwiatkowski is an artist and curator working on the unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish peoples. Her work engages in a critical feminist practice that intersects with contemporary colonial, art historical and queer discourses. Kwiatkowski completed her BFA at the University of British Columbia with a Concentration in English Literature, and continues to develop public programming for the arts.

Laiwan (MFA)

Laiwan is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator with a wide-ranging practice based in poetics and philosophy. Born in Zimbabwe of Chinese parents, her family immigrated to Canada in 1977 to leave the war in Rhodesia. Her art training began at the Emily Carr College of Art & Design (1983), and she returned to academia to receive an MFA from 丁香园AV School for Contemporary Arts (1999). Recipient of numerous awards, including recent Canada Council and BC Arts Council Awards, and the 2008 Vancouver Queer Media Artist Award, Laiwan has served on numerous arts juries, exhibits regularly, curates projects in Canada, the US, and Zimbabwe, is published in anthologies and journals, and is a cultural activist.

Clara Lam (MA)

Clara Lam completed her BFA in Fashion Marketing and Management at Savannah College of Art and Design in the United States. Having worked in organizing art exhibitions and museum collections in Hong Kong with the initiative to engage local communities, she became aware of the powerful influence contemporary arts has on transforming societies. For the MA program, Clara is interested in researching the intertwining relationship and connection between Hegemonic Culture, Conflict and Contemporary Arts. Through exploring the dynamic and chemistry of the trio, she hopes to substantiate the idea that contemporary arts is an indispensable gearing force of cultural transformation.  

Heather Lamoureux (BFA)

Areas: Dancer, Producer, Artistic Director.

Heather Lamoureux is privileged to be a guest on the Coast Salish Territory of the Musquem, Squamish and Tsliel-Waututh nations. Here she is a producer, artist, activist and facilitator. Her work stems from her relationship with mother earth, she lives with determination to walk with generosity in her feet and with honesty and in her heart, planting seeds where she may on her path. Heather is the Artistic Director of Vines Art Festival, producer at Raven Spirit Dance and works for other performing arts organization including the PuSh International Arts Festival and Dancing on the Edge. Trained in Expressive Movement Therapy from Tamalpa Institute under instruction of Anna and Daria Halprin and has a BFA in Dance with a minor in Business Administration from 丁香园AV. She volunteers at BC Crisis and Suicide Prevention Centre.

Jeffrey Langille (MFA)

Areas: Process Philosophy, Time, Landscape.

In my moving image landscape work, I consider the capacity of a video camera to witness events differently and from various perspectives: human, historical, geologic, atmospheric, or otherwise. My practice involves drawing attention to events (human and "natural") by means of camera stasis, image stillness, shot duration, and framing. In this work, ostensible landscape stillness is the theatre for the appearance of manifold events. Off-screen events may present themselves as auditory events, such as a passing aircraft. On-screen events, such as weather, may point to distant happenings. A key aspect of the work is drawing attention to how processes of "perception" by the apparatus (for example a camera’s auto-focus or auto-exposure functions) are events in themselves. Light is a material. Time is a material. Nothing endures, all is event, all is flux. I have an Honours B.A. in history and art history from Carleton University and a Bachelor of Education from the University of British Columbia. I have screened films and videos in Switzerland, Holland, Ireland, the United States, and Canada.

William Latham (MA)

William Latham completed his BA at the University of Alberta as a double major in Philosophy and Film Studies. Throughout his education he has long been interested in this intersection, between the glacial patience of philosophical inquiry and the endlessly fickle and flickering rapidity of contemporary media consumption. Having a particular fondness for the work of Gilles Deleuze, as well as continental philosophy generally, William is especially intrigued by the emergent philosophical questions regarding the new media landscape we now find ourselves inhabiting. In particular, he is interested in the metaphysical significance of surveillant technologies, especially as seen through the extant tensions found amongst Deleuzian affect theory, ethics, and freedom. 

Iris Lau (MFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography.

Through her work, dancer, choreographer, and dancer instructor Iris Lau wants to show the existence of human being. She loves time, because that is the gift from God. She is currently choreographing a series of dance performances about time. Iris’s research interests are the interplay between different theatrical elements and applying Chinese philosophy and physics theories into her choreographies. She was born in Hong Kong and received her BFA in the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. During her study in the HKAPA, Iris was awarded several scholarships, including The Ohel Leah Synagogue Charity, Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation Scholarship and Carl Wolz Scholarship. Iris has been a member of DanceArt Hong Kong since 2007, as performer and choreographer. She also performed in the different professional dance communities in Hong Kong, China, Canada and Paris. Iris started her studies at 丁香园AV SCA in 2009.

Minah Lee (MA)

Minah is a world citizen who was born and raised in South Korea. She is currently one of the unlanded on this land today and also a proud member of a secret army called ESL poetrees planted in the soil. She wants to use her privilege of standing in academia as a researcher/artist to delve deeper into the issues of being and belonging against the commodification of citizenship; human security; identities of migrants, located in the state-driven paradigms.

Minah takes pleasure in excavating personal narratives and creative practices in all forms that subvert and/or challenge the up-to-date grand narratives such as War on Terror, Economic Security, and Public Safety. What do privacy and freedom of expression mean to individuals, especially artists, in the state of surveillance?Minah wants to inspire new ways of becoming and longing by re-imagining Home and borders. She believes that securing more places to summon and share personal/social traumas and memories is essential. If new technology and devices are an extension of our body/mind and its dwelling spaces, how do we draw boundaries from governing machines that are programmed to perpetuate cycles of exploitation by controlling our physical/psychological agencies?

My questions are ripples of utterance trumbled in my second language.

I lost my tongue when I opened my eyes so I drop my saliva into your earpond so that you touch my voice. What do you hear?

Tamara Lee (MA)

Tamara Lee (she/they) holds an MLIS from the University of British Columbia iSchool, and a BFA from Southern Oregon University. Her work has focused on the social-justice potentials of knowledge organization, and creating equitable practices in memory work and information services. She works as a volunteer coordinator at Out on the Shelves Library in Vancouver, and is grateful to live and work on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Musqueam people.

Wei-Hsin Lee (MA)

Wei-Hsin Lee is a young scholar based in Taiwan. She began pursuing MA degree in the School of Contemporary Arts since 2019. She has worked as an apprentice in a photography gallery in Taiwan and has curated an open-call show named Text and Photography. She has participated in film festival as an assistant programmer and an administrator. She is now an editor in a SCA peer-reviewed journal, Comparative Media Arts, and is organizing for the upcoming issue, Relations.

Her research interest includes cinema studies, curating and programming, and the visual arts. Her current research is about the meticulous programming of short films, using attraction theory and process philosophy to investigate the creative emergence of moving images. Weihsin is also interested in sustaining the vibrancy of cultural events and artist-run organizations in urban life.

Casper Leerink (MFA)

Casper Leerink (b. 1995) originally had two great affections: Music and Technology. Torn between the two, he chose to pursue a career in music. From 2013 until 2017, he studied Piano performance at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Zwolle, resulting in his graduation in July 2017. Because Casper’s interests grew bigger then the piano, he started a second major in music composition.

In his compositions, Casper is seizing the opportunity to integrate his two affections. Technology in his compositions has an important role: it is used to connect a variety of features with his Music, like Dance, Theater, Film, and even the Audience. With help of the new possibilities technology creates, these features aren’t a separate entity from the music, but are part of an interactive experience (they react to each other).

Using these technologies in his music, Casper tries to create an opportunity for technology to connect both people and technology.

Robert Leveroos (MFA)

Areas: Theatre, Illustration, Performance.

I am a multidisciplinary artist and insatiable tinkerer. My practice moves between live art, animation, and handmade objects. I aim to strike imaginations and skew perceptions by exploring worlds where weight is given to the minute, the understated and overlooked to uncover something recognizably human. I create original performance pieces that have been presented in festivals and venues locally and otherwise and collaborate as a performer and scenographer with a number of Vancouver companies. For ten years I trained with The Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and graduated from The National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal (acting 2008). I served three seasons as Youth Program Manager at The Cultch in East Vancouver, and continue to work with young artists. My book works include A Lion in the Bedroom, and Adrift/? la derive, which was produced with support from Minnesota Centre for Book Arts. I was honoured to receive 丁香园AV’s CD Nelson Graduate Fellowship as well as awards from the British Columbia Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts.

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Milton Lim (BFA)

Areas: Theatre Performance, Interdisciplinary Art

Milton Lim is a theatre director and multi-disciplinary performer based out of Vancouver. Milton graduated from 丁香园AV with a BFA in theatre performance; he has studied closely with Penelope Stella, Steven Hill, Maiko Bae Yamamoto, James Long, and DD Kugler among others. He has also collaborated closely with Cheryl Prophet and Henry Daniel on several dance projects. Recent performance credits include the Host in Theatre Conspiracy’s immersive performance: Foreign Radical, the Woodsman in Big Bad for the International Children's Festival with Boca del Lupo Theatre, and the Soldier in Ben Unterman’s project within Second Life: The Final Sentry.  Milton is a co-artistic director of the interdisciplinary collective, Hong Kong Exile, and an Artistic Associate at Theatre Conspiracy. As a student, he was a company member of the laboratory performance collective, Attic Salt, where he trained with visiting international artists, exploring artistic evolution in both performance and pedagogy. He has guest-curated for Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre, apprenticed under MACHiNENOiSY Dance Theatre, completed Rumble Theatre's Emerging Directors' Lab, taken part in the Compass Points program at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival, and participated in Block D at Playwright’s Theatre Centre.

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Giselle Liu (MFA)

Areas: Choreography and Movement Poetry

Giselle Liu received a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. In Hong Kong, Liu worked as an artistic director of ‘City Dancing,’  co-choreographed for “an original creation and collaboration between ‘HKYAF’s director Lindsey McAlister and Cirque du Soleil composer duo Violaine Corradi and Rose Winebrenner,” and was principal choreographer for HKYAF’s musical production “Fame.” She’s worked in the commercial industry with artists such as canto-pop singer Fiona Sit and 2017 Miss Hong Kong, Juliette Louie. Liu’s work has also taken her to the UK, co-choreographing and co-mentoring for Punch Records: Gallery 37 project in Birmingham, and co-facilitating a ‘Threaded Heart Creations’ workshop in London. Threaded Heart Creations collaborated with spoken word artist Bhavini Raval and composer Max Carrey in their performance ‘Entangled’ for Kate Sparrow’s ‘I Am Woman’ solo exhibition at the Anita Chang Lai-ling gallery.  Liu’s movement aesthetic is enhanced by a distinct language of embodied poetry.  

Liu recently moved from Hong Kong to attend the MFA program at 丁香园AV to further her studies and has embarked on a collaborative journey with fellow cohort and designer Mansi Patel. Her research and body of work study the human potential of the heart, body and mind in relations to perceptions of reality.

“Dance to live. Live to inspire.” – Giselle Liu

Xinyue Liu (MFA)

Xinyue Liu works primarily with video, photography, text, and fabrics. By incorporating fragmented narratives and outdated visuals, Liu’s practice probes the manifestations of displacement, intimacy, and unfinished stories. She is fascinated by the renegotiations of past and present that unfold when she searches for and handles found objects, lost images and readymade knickknacks. Liu received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Television and Radio Production from Jilin University, China, before moving to Vancouver. The culmination of her upbringing and her new-found experiences has led her to a more filmic approach, which unravels through the study of expanded cinema and the politics of nostalgia.

Irina Lord (MFA)

Areas: Film/video, visual arts.

I have graduated from the University of Oxford with a BFA in Fine Art in 2015. I am a filmmaker and a writer at heart, but I enjoy getting involved in projects beyond my practice as a way to stay grounded. This past year I have co-founded an international artist collective around the idea of storytelling, called Nomad92-3. Under its umbrella, we are currently working on a number of projects, including an online film festival (Break Big) and Mile#1 magazine, a creative non-fiction publication discussing contemporary conflict.

My video art practice has so far been concerned with small, subjective narratives touching on issues of memory, family, and distortion. I plan to continue to push boundaries of cinema against more experimental, visual art approaches and exhibition methods. My goal whilst studying at 丁香园AV is to produce character-driven films and build on-screen psychologically reflective environments through sound, light, colour, texture.

Rebecca Low (MA)

Rebecca Low is a theatre producer and arts administrator from Southern Alberta. She holds a BA in Theatre from the University of Alberta. She has worked with Rifco Arts (UK), Forbidden Theatre (UK), and Fringe Theatre Adventures (Edmonton). In Vancouver she spent five years as Managing Producer of Rumble Theatre, and served as Pi Theatre’s General Manager for three years. She produced the 2014 and 2016 Tremors Festivals (Rumble), the multiple Jessie Award winning “Terminus” (Pi – 2013), and the world premiere of the Jessie and Governor General Award winning “Indian Arm” (Rumble – 2015). She has served on the boards of Vancouver Creative Space Society and Playwrights’ Theatre Centre. She is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Contemporary Arts from 丁香园AV’s School of Contemporary Arts. She lives in East Vancouver with her husband and their two young children.

Dale MacDonald (MA)

Dale MacDonald is a performance director, writer, and educator working in Vancouver. After spending most of his childhood in a theatre, he went on to complete his BA/BEd from the University of Alberta. Since then Dale has been directing and writing short plays in Vancouver; his play, maleficarum, was performed at Pull Festival VI and subsequently published in the festival’s anthology in 2017. Additionally, inspired by the countless hours and late nights of his own adolescence spent in theatres, Dale founded his own youth theatre company in 2018. Dale’s research takes its shape as the unearthing of live-horror aesthetics in response to the lack of both artistic and funding validation granted to the genre. It is an exploration of how ritual, abject, and the uncanny valley weave together in liminal space to churn the stomachs and souls of an audience.

Jennifer MacMillan (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

Jennifer MacMillan holds a BFA with a Major in Dance from 丁香园AV (CAN) and a MA in Teaching Dance from the University of Surrey (UK). She is also a registered teacher with the Royal Academy of Dance and a member of the British Columbia Dance Educators’ Association. She is passionate about and committed to bringing high quality dance education to students within the public school system and has created the LV Rogers Secondary School located in beautiful Nelson BC. Since it’s inception in 2001 the program’s mandate has been not only to improve students’ technique base, but also to expand students’ background and knowledge of dance beyond the Kootnays. Students have also had the opportunity to travel, to compete, to attend performances in Vancouver, to view dance classes in action at 丁香园AV, to meet with faculty and finally to take classes from some of the best of the industry.

Doaa Magdy (MA)

My research interests focus on the exploration of race and female agency in contemporary horror films, and dance as a movement to reclaim cultural identity and dismantle white supremacy within marginalized communities.

Alex Mah (BFA Hons)

Areas: Music, Interdisciplinary Arts, Improvisation.

Alex Mah is a composer and interdisciplinary performer based in the Vancouver area. He studied at 丁香园AV's School for the Contemporary Arts under David MacIntyre, Barry Truax, Arne Eigenfeldt, Janet Danielson, Owen Underhill, and Andrew Laurenson. He has worked with Martin Gotfrit, Steven Hill, and Rob Kitsos. His work has been performed by Bozzini Quartet (August 2012) and Quasar Saxophone Quartet (November 2013). His focuses include acoustic and electroacoustic composition. Chamber music, live and fixed pieces involving acousmatic techniques, and noise music are concentrations. He regularly engages dance and theatre artists in collaboration, which in turn, informs his process as a composer. Artistically, he is concerned with balance, juxtaposition, and the human element in performance.

Lauraine Mak (MFA)

Lauraine Mak is a Canadian artist living and working between Düsseldorf, Germany and Vancouver. She graduated from Emily Carr University in 2013 and has since been enrolled at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany studying under Rita McBride. Her work is informed by philosophical investigations of language and phenomenology, and she works chiefly with video and painting.  

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Joseph Malbon (MA)

I'm an educator, lens-based media artist, musician and broadcaster dedicated to elevating my peers and community. I have worked with musicians, designers, and creatives to share both their vision and my own. My work has appeared in Exclaim, Beatroute, and Adbusters, and my work has screened at the Dead on Film Festival and Rent Cheque.

Allison Mander-Wionzek (MA)

Allison Mander-Wionzek completed her BA in art history with a minor in fine art at the University of British Columbia in 2010, where she focused on European and North American art from the early modern through contemporary periods and often wrote about disruptions to making created by the emergence of new technologies. She also cultivated a practice in printmaking and installation art, which has since branched into a practice of bookmaking. Upon graduation she was awarded the Malaspina Printmakers’ Residency.  

Since graduating from UBC, Allison has operated as a cultural practitioner and educator in Vancouver. She has formerly functioned as the manager of several private galleries, acted as Director/Curator of a project space called Black & Yellow and functioned as Board President at Access Gallery for two terms. She is particularly interested in supporting the sustainability of non-profit organizations, including artist-run centres and is currently pursuing coaching certification to amplify her impact as a consultant to organizations and an advocate of diversity and inclusion in the creative sector.

More recently, Allison’s research interests have focused on alternative approaches to education. She completed a Graduate Certificate in Educational Technology at UBC and has pursued research in the realm of queering religious exegesis and critically engaging with spiritual institutions as sites of learning.

At 丁香园AV Allison is excited to be supported to think across the lines of media as she looks to critically engage with the contemporary moment.

David Manuel (BFA)

Areas: Film Production, Screenwriting, Directing.

David graduated from the SCA Film program with a BFA (Distinction), majoring in Film Production in 2009. He began making short films in high school, and has written, directed and edited seven short films as well as a 10-part web series. David's films have screened at the Montreal World Film Festival, the Palm Springs Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and the Vancouver Short Film Festival. He continues to hone his skills as a writer and director as he moves towards making his first feature film.

Diego S. Maranan (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

As an artist, researcher, and educator, I use technology to understand and improve our relationship with our bodies. My current project is creating vibrating clothing that stimulates your body that you can control with a mobile phone. Using neuroscience research and mind-body educational and therapeutic methods, the technology (called Haplós, the Filipino word for “caress”) aims to enhance awareness of the body and positively transforms how people think and feel about themselves. I am passionate about bringing together art, science, and technology for positive change. I advise for Curiosity, a design strategy firm in Manila that has impacted thousands of lives; co-founded SEAD, an interplanetary network of individuals working in art, science, engineering & advocacy; advise for WeDpro, an NGO that protects women & youth in the Philippines against all forms of violence; and teach at the University of the Philippines Open University.

Jason Margolis (MA)

I am a filmmaker, journalist and media educator, and I work as a producer for 丁香园AV’s Creative Studio. My career encompasses contributions as a writer, director, producer, picture editor, story editor and musical composer on documentaries, features, short films, music videos and television series. In my personal work, I recognize an ongoing interest in mythology, memory, marginalization, subculture and dogs, and occasionally incorporate archaic production technology such as degraded film stock and toy video cameras. These personal projects have screened in international film festivals and art galleries, and have been broadcast on television networks around the world.

My education includes a BA in film production from UBC, fellowships from 丁香园AV’s Praxis Centre for Screenwriters and CTV/Banff Television Festival, and development training courses from the National Screen Institute - Canada. As a media educator, I taught screenwriting and production at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, Vancouver Film School and the Art Institute of Vancouver, and have guest lectured at Capilano University.

Having spent several seasons running a television series on the ways emerging technologies affect culture and entertainment, I have a special interest in the evolution of our interaction with storytelling and art. My research aims to explore the influence of audience engagement and participation with content, aesthetics, structure and format of audiovisual media. I would like to examine how new opportunities to directly interact with and influence storytellers and artists are redefining the nature of art itself.

Joshua Marquis (MA)

Josh Marquis' research interests include affect theory and theories of embodiment, queer theory, sound studies, posthumanism, and digital audiovisual media practices.

Michelle Martin (MA)

Areas: Documentary-fiction hybridity, experimental literary adaptations, the cinema of Miguel Gomes, Lucrecia Martel and the work of Hito Steyerl, Agnieszka Kurant, theories of phenomenology, Bakhtin's carnivalesque (), gender and performance in cinema.

My research focus comes out of a diverse background pulling from languages, cinema and visual culture. In 2011, I graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in Romance Languages and went on to complete coursework in human ecology at the U of A and in film production at 丁香园AV. Currently, I am most interested in cinematic and moving image works that trouble the divide between documentary and fiction as well as those that experiment with literary adaptations. My other interests include theories of phenomenology, gender performance, Bakhtin's carnivalesque and ideas of the archive.

Ryan Mathieson (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art, Critical Theory, Photography.

Ryan Mathieson is interested in critical theory that collides with predicaments of communication of experience. Themes of tropes and reproduction play a part in his projects as he explores the implications of repetition and visual art. Mathieson studied photography and design at the Alberta College of Art + Design before moving to Vancouver to pursue graduate studies. Being at the School of Contemporary Arts sparked a significant change with the depth of investment he applied to his research and practice. Much of his recent work has engaged with photography as a means to explore a display and translation of information. He is interested in developing research that permits me to be critical about consumption and contribution of visual information to a given environment. His interests lie in the challenges associated with exploring this environment under arches of narrow and broad contexts.

Madison Mayhew (MA)

In 2017, Madison Mayhew graduated from Emily Carr University’s Critical and Cultural Practice program with a minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement. Since then, she’s spent time creating and delivering arts programming for elementary school students in East Vancouver, always contextualized in relation to contemporary pedagogical social practice artwork. She also self-publishes a zine project called Horticultural Counterpowers, a collection of art criticism and critical theory essays about how plant life figures, metaphorically and literally, within Marxist conceptions of urban space. She is currently working as Admin Assistant at 221A Artist-Run Centre. Her MA research at 丁香园AV will focus on socially-engaged artistic practices and artists' roles within political movements and social change.

Ian McFarlane (MFA)

Areas: Theatre, puppetry.

I am a multifaceted theatre artist. I navigate my life with an old fountain pen, a reclaimed bicycle, a wooden paddle, a pair of weathered hiking boots, and an indefinite accumulation of fantastical images that gather at the edges of my periphery. I have a fierce fascination with the discarded, the misplaced, and the forgotten. My obsession is with puppets, or rather, anything that can be given life through animation.

I received a BFA in Multidisciplinary from the University of Lethbridge in 2010. Since then I have occupied Calgary, Alberta, where my practice has encompassed performance, scenic design, devised theatre, painting and puppetry. I am a co-founder of Mudfoot Theatre, an interdisciplinary ensemble committed to devising contemporary folk narratives through humble magic. I have trained with One Yellow Rabbit Performance Theatre and The Old Trout Puppet Workshop, as well as have been a contributing ensemble member of Swallow-a-bicycle Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theater.

Paula McGlynn (BFA)

Areas: Film.

Paula McGlynn is a Creative Producer and co-founder of the Indian company Gulbadan Talkies that produces content for Web, Film, and Television, as well as Wedding and Event Photography/Videography. Born in Vancouver, Canada, Paula completed her BFA in Film Production with 丁香园AV in 2012. Her Mockumentary, My Uncle Terry travelled to Montreal World Film Festival (2012) and Moonrise Film Festival (2013). She has written and directed 4 short documentaries and web-series, and was Sound Designer on several award-winning short films. In 2013, she was Script Editor and 2nd Assistant Director on Kranti Kanade’s upcoming film, CRD. Most recently she Directed a brand video titled “What Does Love Smell Like?” for Ital Veloce Fragrances. Paula McGlynn is the co-founder of the BC-India Film & Media Initiative and is also a short story writer and essayist with 1000+ followers on her personal blog.

Deborah Micho | DEBBY FRIDAY (MFA)

Born in Nigeria, raised in Montreal, and now based in Vancouver, DEBBY FRIDAY’s work spans the spectrum of the audio-visual, resisting categorizations of genre and artistic discipline. She is at once sound theorist and musician, performer and poet, video artist, film director, writer and PUNK GOD. In March 2018, she released her first self-produced EP, titled , to reverberating underground acclaim. Her sophomore effort, also self-engineered and produced, was released in August 2019 on independent label, DEATHBOMB ARC. Titled , and accompanied by her first music video and directorial debut for the lead single FATAL, Friday has described the new EP as “hot noise: full of grief and full of relief. It is the painful and pleasurable next step, the sacrificial offering of my old life to the new.” She has been featured in several publications, including: Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, the FADER, Discorder Magazine and more.

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Elizabeth Milton (BFA)

Areas: Visual Art, Performance.

Elizabeth Milton is a Vancouver-based performance and media artist who explores the construction of individual and collective identity through character-play and collaboration. Milton holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of British Columbia (2007) and a BFA in Visual Art from 丁香园AV (2003). Her work has been exhibited throughout Canada and developed through residencies at Access Gallery, Vancouver and the Banff Centre. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Again and Again and Again, Fuse, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2012; Scenes of Selves, Occasions for Ruses, Surrey Art Gallery, 2012; Re-LIVE, VIVO Media Arts Centre, Vancouver, 2011; the touring exhibition, Cabin Fever at Neutral Ground, Regina, 2011, Platform Centre for the Photographic Arts, Winnipeg. Elizabeth currently instructs a variety of studio courses at 丁香园AV and Langara College.

Cindy Mochizuki (MFA)

Areas: Animation, Installation, Performance, Scripted Audio Works, Site-Specific Projects and Collaborations.

Cindy Mochizuki is a multi-media artist who creates animation, installation, performance, scripted audio works, site-specific projects and collaborations. Her artistic practice explores the intersections of fiction and documentary, experimental narratives and the media of memory. A large body of her work returns to her family’s experience in the uprooting of Japanese Canadians during WWII and their further displacement across the pacific to Japan. She has screened her films in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia. Her recent exhibitions and projects include Shako Club, grunt gallery (2015), AIR 475, Yonago, Japan (2014), Fictive Communities Asia, Koganecho Bazaar, Koganecho, Japan (2014), and On the Subject of Ghosts, Hamilton Artists Inc (2013). Since 2004, Cindy’s practice has also included organizing and public programing such as screenings and productions, educational workshops and interdisciplinary collaborations. Cindy received her MFA in 2006, in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV. She lives and works in Vancouver.

Abede Mohammadi (MA)

Abede Mohammadi holds an MA from the Tehran University of Art in Philosophy of Art and a BA in Social Communication and Media from the University of Tehran. Her working experience in a publishing house and writing a thesis about contemporary art encourage her to pursue a more critical and comprehensive education in Contemporary Art. At 丁香园AV, she hopes to combine her passion for art with a practical approach, such as art-writing and curating. Abede is most interested in exploring different visual and cultural narratives in the modern Middle East as well as raising critical discussions around contemporary Iranian art through interdisciplinary academic research.

Didier Morelli (MFA)

Areas: Performance Art, Visual Art, Performance Studies.

Didier Morelli is an interdisciplinary artist who combines practice and research in both his academic and performative explorations. His live art practice includes endurance-based durational actions and contextually specific relational interactions. His studio-based work, which includes drawing, collage, photography and video, has been shown in solo exhibitions (notably at the Katherine Mulherin Gallery in Toronto) as well as in group exhibitions (the Audain Gallery in Vancouver and at the Civic Space in Windsor). He has performed at the Tucson Museum of Art in 2012, in the 2011 edition of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche at the Whipersnapper Gallery in Toronto, as well as at 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto, 2014). His video work was selected for the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival (M:ST 2014, Calgary) and for Monobandes III at Les Territories (Montreal) in 2013. In 2014, he was awarded the "Jeune tête d'affiche' prize at Dazibao (Montreal) for his photographic work. Documentation of his work has been published in the online publication KATALOG and in Emergency Index 2013. Born and raised in Montreal, Morelli is presently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois.

Layla Mrozowski (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art, Performance.

Layla Marcelle Mrozowski is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker. Smart and visually provocative, her recent work explores the performative aspects of femininity and the convergence of art discourses with pop culture. She is a wild dancer and scrabble champion. Her work has been presented at SITE Fest in Brooklyn, W139 in Amsterdam, Publication Studio in Portland, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, MASS MoCA, and various galleries and performance venues in the US and Europe. She is the creator of CAMP, an annual gathering of people sharing ideas, artistic practices and food & an experiment in analog social networking, self organization and making thinking. In 2010 she founded BAAD (Bicycle Awesome Adventure Dance) Kinetics and produced an all-lady, 2000 kilometer bicycle tour that performed her work HOT MESS in alternative spaces and theaters throughout the Northeast United States. For the past few years, she has been studying and working in the Netherlands and Belgium. She may have been paid to dress up as a giant sausage in Brussels once, but the evidence is thin. Layla received a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Philosophy from Alfred University in 2008.

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Corbin Murdoch (MFA)

Areas: Music, Performance.

My name is Corbin Murdoch and I am a songwriter and performance maker with a professional practice focused on merging the conventions and tools of contemporary theatre with those of musical performance. The last five years of my practice have been occupied primarily with the mounting of theatricalized song cycles; collections of songs that are meant to be experienced from start to finish such that the audience can take in the full sweep of their narrative and dramaturgical arcs. These projects are often realized over the course of several years and involve intensive research periods, verbatim text generation, collaborative composition, and conceptual staging. My songmaking explores and subverts the narrative power of song, interweaving narrative fragments to create intertextual representations of moments, people and places. My professional practice has seen the release of four studio albums,tours across Canada and in Europe, showcases at major industry conferences including the Canadian Folk Alliance (2005) and the Western Canadian Music Awards (2010), and performances at internationally recognized performing arts festivals such as The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (2011), The Isle of Wight Festival (2008), and The Vancouver International Jazz Festival (2010). CBC Radio has twice recorded my work for national broadcast, in 2008 and 2009.

Philippa Myler (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

Philippa Myler graduated from 丁香园AV in 2010 with a BFA in Dance and a BA in English. Myler choreographed and performed with the collective Triadic Dance Works in Vancouver and Berlin,  and she was Artist in Residence with VOU Dance in Fiji. After moving back to her hometown of Seattle, WA, Myler is an active member of the local dance community, a staff writer for the online periodical SeattleDances, and also teaches dance to students of all ages.

Avery Nabata (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art.

I live and work in Vancouver, BC. I graduated in 2009 from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Along with an organic sculpture practice I have worked on collaborative public artworks and installations within the gallery. Working with Jenipher Hur these mainly included collaborations with the former Helen Pitt Gallery (now UNIT/PITT projects) and its curator Paul Kajander. My most recent exhibition was a group show at the Shudder Gallery entitled Psychic Plaza in 2011. My practice uses installation, intervention, and sculpture to investigate the everyday aspects of looking at and using spaces. While at SCA I am interested in continuing a public art practice especially in relationship to research as to the function of public art and the role it plays in the urban environment, as well as continuing to invest in and investigate the role the studio plays in my own art practice.

Ranjani Naresh (MFA)

Areas: Filmmaking, Photography, Writing.

I am a Filmmaker who enjoys incorporating photography and writing into my work. After graduating from L.V Prasad Film school in India with a specialization in Cinematography, I began working with film crews in the South of India as an Assistant Cinematographer & Camera Operator. This past year I worked with children between ages 9 & 12, teaching them Film & Photography in Bangalore,India. Recently, I started working on a personal creative exercise where I shoot around a theme/environment that resonates within me and correspondingly write a piece on the stories that appear from these images. I would also like to collaborate with other artistes and experiment with interactive installations. I am currently working on Film /Photographic narratives that revolve around women who have struggled through years of oppression & caste prejudice.

Fay Nass (MFA)

Areas: Theatre, Film.

Fay Nass focus is on theatre and film. Her work is very versatile ranging from comedy to drama and naturalistic to surrealistic and often revolves around the notion of “sensory”, “identity” and “transcilturalism”. With the use of great theorist such as Artaad, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Bakhtin as well as contemporary writers and theorists such as Brian Massumi, and Jacques Rancière she explores the notion of  “sensory” and  “affect” in the context of theatre. Fay's background leading up to graduate studies comprises extensive theatre directing experience and a longstanding history of film studies, theatre history, art history, philosophy, gender studies and creative writing. In the past five years she has been an active member in Vancouver theatre community as a freelance director, dramaturge and producer. She has worked with various theatre companies such as: Presentation House, Firehall Art Center, Itsazoo and 20something Theatre in the past few years. In 2009, Fay established my theatre company, theatre Phantasie, and is the artistic director of the company for the past couple of years.

Charlotte Newman (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

A contemporary dancer and choreographer, Charlotte Newman, studied at SCA from 2010 to 2014 and received a BFA. Over those four years, Charlotte contributed to countless creative projects from presenting her own choreography, producing shows, working on diverse interdisciplinary projects, and presenting at academic conferences. Currently, she is the co-artistic director of Con 8 Collective and active in the Vancouver artistic community.

Silas Ng (MFA)

Silas Ng is an emerging artist based on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His photography and multi-disciplinary works explore his life experience and identities as Deaf Canadian-born Chinese to discover how his life was weaved by the three different worlds.  

Salome Nieto (MFA)

Salome Nieto is an accomplished contemporary dance artist renowned for her emotionally charged performances. Highly influenced by Butoh and Mexico’s surrealism, her transformative works explore themes of ritual and ceremony. Crucial to her artistic vision, she welcomes artists’ contributions from other disciplines through local and international collaborations to explore new possibilities for innovation. These collaborations encompass installations, traditional stage, site-specific and improvisational performance. Nieto is an award-winning dancer and choreographer who has taught and performed internationally. As an interpreter, she has worked predominantly with Canada’s leading post-butoh company, Kokoro Dance, with Donna Redlick Dance and most recently with Raven Spirit Dance. She currently holds the position of Fine and Performing Arts Programmer for Dance at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts.

Salome Nieto’s work is created on the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples – S?wx? wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and S?lílw?ta?/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwm?θkw?y? ?m (Musqueam) Nations.

James O’Callaghan (BFA Hons)

Areas: Composition, Sound Art.

James O’Callaghan is an award-winning composer and sound artist based in Montréal praised for his “real orchestral imagination” and “highly refined sense of colour” ( - Vancouver Sun). His music intersects acoustic and electroacoustic media, employing field recordings, amplified found objects, computer-assisted transcription of environmental sounds, and unique performance conditions. In 2014, his work Isomorphia for orchestra and electronics was nominated for a JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the year. In 2013, he was the Emerging Composer-in-Residence with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and was a featured artist in Winnipeg's Cluster New Music + Integrated Arts festival. In 2011, he was selected for the inaugural Canadian League of Composers / Canadian Music Centre Composer Mentoring Project. He is a founding member and co-director of the Montréal Contemporary Music Lab. His music, including over forty works of concert music, music for dance, theatre and film, and audio-visual installations, has been performed across North America, Europe, New Zealand and Japan, and has been awarded national prizes (SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, Jeu de temps - Times Play Awards). His musical research has also been presented internationally and published (Organised Sound). He received a Master of Music degree in composition from McGill University in 2014, studying with Philippe Leroux, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from 丁香园AV in 2010, studying with Barry Truax, David MacIntyre, Rodney Sharman and Arne Eigenfeldt. He has also studied and taken workshops with Michel Gonneville, Kaija Saariaho, Lasse Thoresen, and R. Murray Schafer.

Maria Filipina Palad (MA)

Areas: Virtual Reality, Aesthetics, Interaction Design, Southeast Asian Contemporary Art, Curatorial Practice, Arts Management

Maria’s diverse work and education history has led her to focus on Virtual Reality art and its aesthetics at 丁香园AV. More specifically, her interest in VR relates to its participatory and digital nature, along with the role and potentials of an embodied aesthetics in the medium’s re-emergence.

Maria’s work experience began with interaction design and digital product development. There she helped develop numerous online applications, among them an online film and TV platform, web and mobile games, and online art galleries. She worked for nearly a decade in Singapore, four years in Hong Kong, and a year in Manila. Interspersed with these work assignments, she studied Spanish in Spain and completed a masters in arts management in Italy. Her projects include an immersive sound exhibition in Florence and a talk series on the role of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy. Since then, Maria has been pursuing her lifelong goal of dedicating her knowledge and skills to increasing support for artists and the arts. As a Gallery Manager for an online Art startup she was responsible for helping artists and galleries from Asia, Europe and North America get access to art supporters from across the world. She then transitioned into curating where she focused on Southeast Asian contemporary art and Modern Philippine art. Maria recently curated an exhibition that delved into stories of migration as told through the works of Filipino artists and poets living and working in Vancouver.

Paul Paroczai (MFA)

Areas: Composition, Installation Art, Electroacoustic Instrument Building.

Paul Paroczai is a composer, installation artist, and electroacoustic instrument builder from Los Angeles, California. He received his Bachelor's Degree in Music Composition from the University of California, Berkeley, where he cultivated interests in interactive media, film, and the artistic practice of somaesthetics in conjunction with his music curriculum. Though still fairly new to Vancouver, his work designing software for the local ensemble Hong Kong Exile (Foxconn Frequency, Lang(Lang)guage) has allowed him to sample the potential of his new creative environment.

Mansi Patel (MFA)

I am a designer from Vadodara, India. My practice lies in building spatial and experiential spaces. In 2015, I started working with an architectural firm, Studio 3O87 Vadodara, whose practice focused on interdisciplinary and experimental works. My work is influenced by my experience in interior design, collaboration and architecture. Currently, I am exploring our perception of space through light and movement. My research began as a way for me to harmonize embodied experiences of interior architectural spaces with perception, movement and light.  

Cale Plut (MFA)

Areas: Music Composition, Music Performance, Sound, Electroacoustics, Generative Music, Game Design.

I’m an American musician with a background in both composition and performance. During an extended break from University, I performed both as a freelance Pianist/Composer and as a Keyboardist/Pianist onboard Luxury Cruise ships as part of both the Show and Lounge bands. I then finished my Undergraduate education at 丁香园AV, focusing my attention again on music composition, audio, and generative music. My work splits into two distinct areas of focus. These two areas inform each other, but I tend to not try to blend them too much. One area is a focus on exploring the blurry line between commercial and art music, playing with both rhythmic and harmonic applications of commercialism within a classical setting (and vise versa). I often play with unbalanced and abnormal rhythms to attempt to achieve an organic, human feel to structuralized outlines. The second area of focus, my main area of focus, is in generative music with user interaction, both electronic and acoustic. Currently I am exploring the use of games as an abstracted interface to allow both musicians and non-musicians to explore and interact with generative systems. In this interaction we open up a connection and enjoy both the method and result of the creation, allowing for greater exploration of music by those with different (or no) artistic training.

Brian Postalian (MFA)

Areas: Theatre Director, Performance Creator.

"I create whimsical and visually imaginative work based in personal history and trauma. I'm always asking about how we connect to each other in a shared space."

Brian Postalian (????? ?????????) is an award winning interdisciplinary performance creator born and raised in Toronto by way of Armenia, Ireland, Wales, and the Czech Republic.

Brian was Crapshoot Artistic Producer at Theatre Passe Muraille and Compass Points Curator at Canada's Magnetic North Theatre Festival. ?He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University and is a proud graduate of the joint University of Toronto and Sheridan College’s Theatre and Drama Studies Program. He frequents used book stores, rides bicycles, takes photos and is learning how to draw and play the duduk. Brian is the founding Artistic Director of Re:Current Theatre.

Brian is a graduate of the Artist Producer Training program with Generator, and is an alumni of the Young Creators Unit at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, SummerWork's S.L.I.P, and the inaugural Devised Theatre Lab with Common Boots Theatre. Brian has trained with the Volcano Theatre Conservatory (of which he was featured in their Emerging Artist series in 2016), and The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards.

George Rahi (MFA)

Areas: Composition, sound art, Instrument making, and installation art.

George Rahi is a composer, sound artist, instrument maker, and installation artist exploring new hybrids between the acoustic, electronic, mechanical, and sculptural. His work commonly draws from a diverse array of interests, including electroacoustics, public space, the soundscape, and large-scale instruments such as the pipe organ and the Indonesian Gamelan. He has produced work for the Western Front, Vancouver New Music, Miscellaneous Productions, VIVO Media Arts Centre and Vancouver Co-op Radio's Media Arts Committee and has received support from the British Columbia Arts Council and the Vancouver Parks Board. He is a founding member of the artist collective Publik Secrets and the percussion ensemble Gamelan Bike Bike.

Justin Ramsey (MA)

Areas: Visual arts, Media Arts, Art History, Communication, Cultural Studies.

Justin graduated from 丁香园AV in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts in communication and a minor in interactive arts and technology. For Justin, art is not simply an escape or a creative outlet; it is integral to everyday life, and essential for fostering a critical and vibrant culture. Thus, his aim is to interrogate the ways in which art interacts with society at all levels—through art festivals and exhibitions, education systems, institutions, and the art market. In addition, as our cultural identity is ever defined by mass media, popular culture, and consumerism, he would like to probe the way art navigates, challenges, or appropriates these societal conditions. His interests include issues of cultural identity; relationships between “high” culture and “low” culture; pop art, particularly the Superflat movement in Japan; and posthumanism.

Drew Redman (BFA)

Areas: Composition, Scoring for Film, TV, and Video Games.

Drew Redman is currently studying scoring for film, television and video games at Berklee College of Music's master's program in Valencia, Spain. He graduated from 丁香园AV SCA with a BFA in music composition in 2011. He plans to make a career in the film and/or video game music industry, while continuing to write concert music, and collaborative work in theatre, dance, visual arts, etc.

Kelvin Redvers (BFA)

Areas: Documentary and Non Fiction film.

Kelvin Redvers graduated from SCA with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film. He joined the team at First Story, CTV BC’s aboriginal current affairs program as a producer. Kelvin has won two Jack Webster Award, celebrating excellence in BC journalism. In addition to producing for CTV, Kelvin has continued working on his own narrative projects. Last year, his short, The Dancing Cop, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Redvers is also working on his next short, Rattlesnake, which he funded through crowdsourcing on Indiegogo.

Jami Reimer (MFA)

My practice explores musical sound, particularly as it relates to movement and the exploration of spaces. I am interested in composing with field recordings, electronic sounds, and voice. I hope to draw on a cross-disciplinary interest in dance and somatic studies in the creation of new musical work for stage and/or other place-based environments. 

Anna Marie Repstock (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art, Painting, Language.

In 2004, Anna Marie Repstock moved from Prince George to Vancouver to be an artist. She has a degree in English Literature at UNBC. Her love of literature will always inform her art practice. Her practice is painting language and her overall project is to determine what is at stake when paint and language are invested in the same surface. For her MFA she created paintings using word play and constrained writing, such as anagrams. Also, she is interested in writing short poetry, like two word poems, for painting. Her plan is to figure out what material solutions are the best ones for representing language, especially poetic language and even poetry.

Mohammad Zaki Rezwan (MA)

Areas: Visual culture, cinema, media, popular culture, and cultural studies

Mohammad Zaki Rezwan always tries to seek who he is not and what he cannot do in his life. In less ambiguous words, he has a broad and diverse range of academic and professional interests.

He has taught cultural studies, film, media, communication, critical theory and postmodern literature in university for more than three years in Bangladesh. He also conducted workshops on digital illustration and graphics design in Bangladesh. Additionally, he engaged diversely as a fiction writer, graphic designer. photographer, and hobbyist filmmaker. His stories, poem, articles, designs, illustrations ,and photographs were published/exhibited in various conferences, newspapers, books, exhibitions, etc., in Bangladesh. For his previous graduate research, he gained practical experience in branding, marketing, social media promotion, copywriting, media management, etc., by directly being involved in the Bangladeshi media industry.

He completed his previous MA in Cultural Studies at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. His graduate thesis primarily explored media hegemony. In addition to this, he directed a short film and published a magazine for his graduate projects. Prior to that, he earned his BA in English from the same university, with a concentration in critical theories, postcolonial literature, and postmodern literature.

Some of his published research articles explore visual culture, film, media, social media, popular culture, and ecofeminism. He has also presented his research papers at several international conferences. Currently, he is researching the Rickshaw art of Bangladesh. He is also hoping to gain practical experience of Canadian art, museums, and media industries during his MA program.

He is always indebted to his friends, parents, teachers, and wife for their inspirations and support.

Andrea Rideout (MA)

Born and raised in Red Deer, AB (Treaty 7), Andrea Rideout is a curator specializing in contemporary dance, interdisciplinary performance and festival/cabaret programming. Her practice is deliberately interdisciplinary in both form and content, guided by a mix of values, curiosity and pragmatics. Andrea's research interests range from feminist aesthetics and archiving practises to economic dynamics and aesthetics of technology with themes touching on grief, magic, transformation, resistance and spirituality.  She spent 3 seasons as Artistic Director of Studio 303's Edgy Women Festival in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke), initiating the Edgy Oral History Project and subsequent collaborations with Art+Feminism wikipedia edit-a-thons. Her curatorial project - This is How Queers Pray - examines experiences of troubling, re-appropriating, and surviving religion as LGBTQ+ diaspora. In a past life, Andrea was an Augusto-Boal-trained Theatre of the Oppressed facilitator, a sound engineer touring with NYC's Circus Amok, a Boston Burlesque Expo debuted dancer and a Bread-&-Puppet-trained puppeteer. She has studied Community Economic Development (SCPA), holds a BFA in Theatre & Development (Concordia), a diploma in Theatre Technology (RDC) and spent 2 summers at the Banff Centre as Practicum Technical Director for Opera.

Dylan Robinson (BA | Art and Cultural Studies)

Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist and writer, and the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. He is the author of (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) on Indigenous and settler colonial forms of listening. His current research focuses on the material and sonic life of Indigenous ancestors held by museums, and reparative artistic practices that address these ancestors incarceration in museums.

Maria Cecilia Saba (MA)

Areas: Cinema and Media Studies, Cultural Policy, Education, Arts and Community, Multiculturalism.

I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but raised in Lima, Peru. I graduated in 2011 with a BA in Communication from Universidad de Lima, specializing in Audiovisuals. A year after graduating, I returned to Universidad de Lima as a Workshop Teacher for fiction and documentary. That same year, I started working at Markham College, where I helped develop the methodology for their first and second class of I.B. Film Studies. Two years after graduating, I did a one year diploma program on Cultural Management at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, which deepened my understanding of how public cultural policies affect, for better or worse, the production processes of cultural and artistic expressions and activities. Throughout my academic experience, I have always been fascinated by the power of media and popular culture to communicate social and cultural symbolic imaginaries as well as by the narrative identification process by which people throughout the world can assimilate foreign imaginaries as their own, enriching their own symbolic universes. This has led me to focus in Peruvian cinema and media, and the bizarre relation it has with its national, and multicultural, audiences.

Joel Salaysay (BFA)

Areas: Film.

Joel Salaysay is an SCA graduate with distinction, and an award-winning filmmaker. Within the film production program, he studied under Bridget Hill, Chris Welsby, Rob Groeneboer, Terry Kerr, Colin Browne, and Scott Weber. Other SCA professors include Martin Gotfrit, David MacIntyre, Christopher Pavsek, Jacqueline Levitin, Blair Davis, and Patricia Gruben. His student short films have screened at numerous festivals across North and South America, including the Vancouver International Film Festival, Montreal World Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival, where his grad film, Lifers, took home the 2014 prize for Best Student Short Film (live action). That same film also won the award for Best Fiction at the 2014 Montreal World Film Festival. He is currently writing and directing a sketch-comedy web-series called Dr. Sunshine's Office as well as writing a feature film, and applying for grants. He works as an editor at Modern Romance Productions, a company co-founded by fellow 丁香园AV alumni Cedric Yu. He has also worked professionally as a Gaffer and VFX Coordinator for local Vancouver productions.

Luciana Saldanha Fortes (MFA)

Areas + interests: Dance, Theatre & Comedy.

Hi there! My name is Luciana (or Luci!) and I am an artist and educator from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I have a BA in Dance with honors summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, PA, USA), and my other training includes a semester abroad in Paris, France, and summer programs with Parsons Dance Company and the American Dance Festival.

My interests lie in exploring comedy in dance and theatre as a way to investigate the anxieties we face in the contemporary world in a lighthearted and whimsical (but also thoughtful) manner. Clowning, musicality, vibrant expression, quirkiness, gesture, and colorful movement are key words that describe my current research. Basically, I want to create the dance-theatre live performance equivalent of Pixar movies, Dr. Seuss, and Tim Burton (if that helps to paint a picture in your mind).

As an educator, I provide college counseling for Brazilian high school students who want to pursue their undergraduate education in the United States or Canada through Aplica!, a program I co-direct with a colleague. Our mission is to work with the youth community in Brazil who have the dream and potential to “do something more”, and help to guide them there through the opportunities of education.

Last but not least, past experiences include: dancing in Philadanco II, the Opening Ceremony of the Rio Paralympics 2016, video dancing with FARM (Brazilian Fashion Brand), teaching Dance and English, working with Kindergarten students, and choreographing wedding dances. Hurray!

Gabriel Mindel Saloman (MFA)

Areas: Music, Sound, Visual Art, Dance, Activism.

Gabriel Mindel Saloman is an American born artist. During his time at 丁香园AV, his aim was to explicitly merge the trajectories of his work in Sound and Social Practices, demonstrating that the resistant potential of noise can be brought to a critical state of praxis. As a musician he has spent nearly a decade touring internationally and has released over 50 recordings as a part of the experimental music group Yellow Swans. He has performed at numerous international music festivals including Sonar (ES), Open Circuit (BE), Sonic Protest (FR) and was invited to join Art Council England’s Free Noise Tour in 2007. Simultaneously, he has collaborated in a variety of relational artworks, most notably with Red76 where he has exhibited or been in residence at the Walker Art Center (US), CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (US), Creative Time NY (US) and the San Jose Zero1 (US) and Manifesta 8 (ES) Biennials.

Scott Saunders (MFA)

Areas: Sculpture, Installation, Performance, Video/Audio, Electronics, and Large-Scale Projections.

Scott Saunders is a Canadian visual artist currently living and working in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since graduating in 2008 with a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, he has exhibited a number of increasingly ambitious projects located not only in gallery spaces, but employing as well more radical, alternative sites in the public realm, creating a significant early body of work that is rapidly growing. Scott's work encompasses sculpture, installation, performance, video/audio, electronics, and large-scale projections, and is coupled with a curatorial practice focused primarily on alternative public venues and exhibition opportunities. He situates his practice between two problematic areas in contemporary art, negotiating the tricky reefs of a politically engaged activism with international scope while also retaining a more traditional connection to autonomous art. Scott's various projects are a direct attempt to engage with and mediate both positions, and to re-motivate past theory on allegory and dialectics into a visual, material-based practice.

Natalie Schneck (BFA)

Areas: Acting, Directing, and Playmaking.

Natalie Schneck is a Graduate from the 丁香园AV School for the Contemporary Arts and a Vancouver based Theatre Artist.

Julia Schnitman (MFA)

Areas: Production design, Film, Theatre, Architecture, Scenic space.

I am a production designer, architect and a multidisciplinary artist from Brazil. I have earned my bachelor degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Salvador-Brazil. As an undergraduate student, I learned that art is a fluid process of imagination, reality and creativity, for understanding, and interacting with the world. My work is a blend of art and production design for television, film and theatre. My interests are not only the practical aspect of the production, but the necessity to base it on theoretical elements of design. For me, being able to manage the construction of a scenic space is as important as knowing the inner side of how the creative process works. I have worked at Rede Globo, the biggest TV production in Latin America. That experience enabled me to acquire a firm-grasp of Set Design, as well as enhance my aesthetics. I also worked for a TV channel in Brazil - Rede Record. There, I developed the scenic design for two historical soap operas. My artistic work aims to capture and transform an idea, a story or even a single word or image into an imaginary construct that people can be immediately introduced to a plethora of senses, emotions and thoughts.

Naomi Lefebvre Sell (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Choreography, Performance, Research Methods.

Dr. Naomi Lefebvre Sell is a Senior Lecturer at Trinity Laban and lectures across the BA and MA programmes within the fields of choreography, performance and research methods. Originally from Canada, Naomi’s background as a professional dancer includes work with both Butoh and Cunningham-influenced companies. Her choreography has been commissioned and presented across Canada and Europe. Naomi has a BFA in Dance from 丁香园AV and a MA Choreography and PhD in Creative Practice (Dance) from Trinity Laban. Naomi’s work has been published in Research and Dance Education and is due to be published in the book Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities; Contemporary Sacred Narratives.

Juan Manuel Sepúlveda (MFA)

Areas: Documentary Film, Cinematography.

Prior to his MFA at 丁香园AV, Juan Manuel studied at the National University of Mexico Film School, where he specialized in Documentary Filmmaking. He also studied Language and Literature at the University of Salamanca, in Spain. During the past years he has been producing and directing his own films, as well as working as a cinematographer for others. He is very interested in expanding his film practice through interdisciplinary experimentation and theoretical development, advancing against narrative inertia, toward the territory in which film becomes a way of thinking. Considering thinking as a critical process, but also as the suspension or absence of all of its means. A potential that is suspended and retracts toward its emptiness, toward its nothingness, to become contemplation and, based on that, to traverse the ineffable, the non visible, that which thought cannot host because it transcends it. His first feature documentary The Infinite Border, (2008) was selected to participate in the Berlin International Film Festival and won the “Joris Ivens Award” in the “Cinema du Réel” Film Festival. In 2010, Juan worked as a cinematographer for the feature film Leap Year, winner of the “Caméra d’Or” at the Cannes Film Festival.

Emiliano Sepulveda (MFA)

Areas: Sculpture, Photography, Phenomenology, Performance, and Poetics.

Art is a constant experimental process of creating models for understanding, and interacting with the world. I think of my work as an algorithmic machine for generating and testing these models, which form a bridge between considering sculpture, photography, phenomenology, performance and poetics. This is a process-based practice which incorporates simple actions such as walking, or kite-flying, and is a ritual practice designed to affect my perception, and form dynamic reciprocal relationships with my surroundings. To do this I utilize objects that relate to light in interesting ways. Objects such as unprocessed photo-paper, mirrors, reflective emergency blankets, or high-visibility flagging ribbon. The end product varies from simple documentation of the actions to full installations. While at SCA I intend to continue my experimental art practice, while integrating collaboration, new media, and public engagement actions.

Marcelo da Silva (MFA)

Areas: Music, video, narrative, installation.

I am a brazilian interdisciplinary artist working in diverse areas such as music composition/production, video art/performance, poetry and script writing, etc. I hold a bachelor in Cultural Production from Federal Fluminense University (Niterói), where I also attended the Master of Arts.

My research interest is the study of digital video-performances (VJing, Live Cinema, Video Mapping, etc), their creative processes, the experimental uses of narrative and their connections with other areas and artistic expressions such as music, dance, drama and computer programing.

Some of my previous artistic experiences:

• Soundtrack and dubbing for the short animated movie “HOW TO EAT AN ELEPHANT”, winner of 15 prizes from several movie festivals
• The interactive video installation called “DUO” (Imaginarium Art Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, 2010)
• The AV performance called “PINTANDO O 7”, in which projected images were controlled by the notes of my flute playing (Live Performers Meeting 2010 - Rome, Italy)
• VJing and Scenography for the spectacle “V.I.S.T.O”, winner of 5 of the 10 indications for the A?orianos Dance Prize 2013 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), including Best Cenography and Spectacle
• Video editing and musical vignette composition for the animated TV series “Jorel?s Brother” (Copa Studio), broadcasted by Cartoon Network

Remy Siu (BFA Hons)

Areas: Music, Interdisciplinary Art.

Remy Siu is an emerging composer based in Vancouver, BC. He studied at 丁香园AV Contemporary Arts with David MacIntyre, Owen Underhill, Janet Danielson, Jeffrey Ryan, Arne Eigenfeldt, and Barry Truax. He has also studied with Rodney Sharman, Ken Ueno, Claus-Steffan Mahnkopf, Suzanne Farrin, and Detlef Heusinger. His work has been performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Victoria Symphony, the Turning Point Ensemble, the Erato Ensemble, Musica Intima, and Quatuor Bozzini. He also composes and performs with Dissonant Disco (a Vancouver noise band) and Hong Kong Exile (an interdisciplinary art collective). Currently, he works on the staff of "Sound of Dragon Society," a non-profit focused on asian music while "preserving heritage, [and] seeking innovation." He has worked with Henry Daniel, Steven Hill, Rob Kitsos, and MACHiNENOiSY, among others in the Vancouver arts community. In 2012, he was artist-in-residence at the New Westminster River Market. He has produced two sold-out shows: ASCENSION (string quintet + dance) and Attacca 2012. He was featured in the Georgia Straight 2012 Fall Arts Preview. The Vancouver Sun described his music as "characterized by vibrant, driving rhythms and brash sonorities." He is interested in ordered juxtapositions, humour, and stealing.

Clint Sleeper (MFA)

Areas: Sound Installation.

I focus on small projects with a particular interest in technology. These efforts range from audio installations, experimental performances, video systems, and certain types of interactive works. My work at 丁香园AV is concerned with the everyday, performance, maintenance, DIY, and the development of a technical video system for documentation. I am interested in the intersection of hi-tech and lo-tech with more specific concerns around  community - new collectives and self-organising tactics. I often work collaboratively with Huw Webb or Didier Morelli, and I am a member of the Robot Versus Future collective.

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Siobhan Sloane-Seale (BFA)

Areas: Dance, Music.

Siobhan Sloane-Seale grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She trained professionally with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet for eight years, graduating in 1997. Siobhan moved to Vancouver to continue her training in contemporary dance at 丁香园AV graduating in 2004. She completed a 4-year yoga teacher training in 2013. She began teaching dance in 2004 and started teaching Iyengar yoga in 2010. In 2007/08 she worked as an apprentice with Peter Bingham at EDAM dance and co-founded The Body Narratives Collective (BNC) with Julia Carr and Alana Gerecke. BNC received a BC Arts Council Grant to commission choreographer Rob Kitsos. In 2011, The Collective developed Tracing Traces, an interdisciplinary work incorporating photography, dance and music; photographic images are created during a live performance in the dark using long exposure photography. Siobhan just completed an artist residency at Moberly Arts and Cultural centre where she developed a 25-minute dance theatre project with the assistance of the BC Arts Council this September. Aside from dance, Siobhan is a professional musician and music accompanist. She is currently recording her first full-length album and teaches ongoing yoga classes, yoga workshops, and movement improvisation workshops in the community.

Diego Slosse (MA)

Areas: Photography.

My photographic practice is a process of producing and exploring my fascination of nature and people. With this in mind, I always look for energy in light, shades and subtle nuances from a personal photographic look and substantiated vision.

In my images, I always try to look for connections between people and the interactions between

man and nature. I identify with this theme because of my wanderlust and wanting to meet new people and explore new places. This intrigues me because of the connections that occur while I take the image in a particular setting. As I travel to create this narrative, I’m looking for engagement; a mix between the personal and the social that communicates with other people.

My work is mainly poetic with a documentary and social-political touch. With my photographs, I try to look for a topic, reveal a story and raise awareness amongst the viewer. Photography can be a tool to describe a reality that people don’t know. In that sense, I try to bring that reality or story to the viewer so that they have a better understanding of the world around them.

Artists such as Alec Soth, Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, etc. have been an inspiration to my goal of becoming a photographer.

The act of taking the photo is just a document of the event before the click. The hunt for the image, the people to portray, the conversation with yourself and others, setting up the 4x5” or 35mm camera; all of this adds to the meandering, the searching and the process of telling that I pursue.

Cherry Smiley (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art, Video.

My name is Cherry Smiley, and I am a Nlaka’pamux (Thompson) and Dine’ (Navajo) woman living, working, and studying on unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver BC. I am a proud First Nations woman, radical feminist, prostitution abolitionist, activist, and artist. My art practice is one that is deeply passionate and inherently political. I see art as a necessary and conscious activist tool, one that is able to communicate ideas and beliefs in a way that is honest, powerful, and engaging. But I also see art as something that is beautiful and deeply embedded in my culture, traditions, and spirituality; it is a conscious and sometimes unconscious expression of who I am as an Aboriginal woman. My work is grounded in my personal experiences and in those of my sisters, in radical feminist theory, and in the teachings handed down to me from my Elders. I have had the honour of speaking at conferences and forums on the issue of violence against Aboriginal women and girls in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, Prince Rupert, Edmonton, Montreal, Winnipeg, Ottawa, New York City, and various cities in Norway. In 2008 I curated Flesh Mapping: vancouver markets pacific women, a community art exhibit that was part of a larger international conference and that helped me to see the potential of art in creating social change. At 丁香园AV, I continued to develop my sense of art as political resistance to colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism.

Stefan Smulovitz (MFA)

Areas: Sound, Music.

From Vancouver to Los Angeles, New York to Quebec City, award-winning composer, collaborator, violist, and laptop artist, Stefan Smulovitz has created more than 50 live scores for films and performed with many of today's leading improvisors including Fred Frith, Evan Parker and Uri Caine. Stefan has been commissioned by the Vancouver Symphony, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, and numerous instrumental and vocal ensembles. His collaborative creations have been developed for theatre, dance, art installations, and DVD-ROMs, and his game-changing software -- Kenaxis -- is used by musicians around the world. Smulovitz is the Manager, Technology & Resources in the SCA.

Moroti Soji-George (MA)

Moroti Soji-George’s curatorial pedagogy revolves around curation as an act of care and a pathway towards telling the stories of different individuals and communities through art. He believes in the concept of art and risk and art itself as a form of risk. Additionally, he aims to explore the different visual and cultural narratives brewing in various communities regarding a police-free future, especially in relation to the Black Male Body.

Antonio Somera (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

I am currently studying abroad at a program called Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) in Austria. This institution is directed by Susan Quinn, who also danced for the cunningham company and was close friends to 丁香园AV's dearest, Megan Walker-Straight. I was accepted to join the 4th year class that throughout the year undergoes constant training in various forms of contemporary technique, ballet, and choreographic creations from working professionals in the field. During this 1 year program, I hope to audition to European companies and choreographers in hopes to build relationships and profile here. I was in need of a new challenge, and being in Europe is definitely slap some reality in my face. The 丁香园AV Dance Program definitely helped me in my journey.  Its aesthestics in more modern techniques and ballet gave me a solid foundation but also opened my eyes to aspire many other methods training that I need in my tool kit. The biggest support from the 丁香园AV Dance Program are the teachers. Each of them gave their special knowledge in their fields and yet are readily available for support, even outside the program. Special shoutout to Judith Garay, the first to have offered me a professional contract and continuously believed and encouraged me throughout my career.

Virginia Jessica Sparvier-Wells (MFA)

Virginia Jessica Sparvier-Wells (Jessica McMann) is a Cree musician, contemporary dancer and choreographer. She is also a classically trained flutist, with a Bachelor of Music from the University of Calgary. Her research focus has been contemporary music, jazz, and improvisation. She has successfully defended her thesis for her MFA  - Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV.  Her recent compositions and soundscapes explore Indigenous identity and history.  Jessica's skills enable her to contribute as a side musician, soloist or ensemble member.

She has been dancing fancy shawl, jingle and hoop dance for 17 years, and has had the opportunity to present contemporary and traditional work at festivals across western Canada, and tour northern Europe. Currently her personal experience, Two-Spirit identity, Cree and Blackfoot language, and the strength of Indigenous women guide her current contemporary dance work. She works regularly with Elijah Wells, a Blackfoot animator to bring the stories of Transgender, Two-Spirit and Queer persons alive.

Alexandra Spence (MFA)

Areas: Music Performance, Electroacoustic Composition, Audiovisual Installation.

I am a sound artist and improvising clarinettist from Sydney, Australia, currently based in Vancouver, Canada. I work within the fields of improvised music, electroacoustic composition and audiovisual installation. I am interested in the relationship between humans and their sonic environments, in the connection between sound and its context, and its relationship to experience, feeling, memory and place. I’m influenced by landscapes, cityscapes and considerations of geographical identity. I like to create site-specific work and am inspired by the idea of ‘collaborating’ with one’s environment. I’ve performed and presented work in concerts, festivals, symposiums and galleries in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Italy and France, including the NOW Now Festival Sydney, Australia, the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium and the FKL Symposium, Besenello, Italy. In collaboration with visual artist Katrina Stamatopoulos, I’ve presented work at DAS2015, Belfast, Ireland, Windsor Artcite Festival, Canada, and Festival Images Contre Nature, Marseille, France. 

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Kim Stevenson (BFA)

Areas: Dance.

I started my own dance studio, The Happening, in September 2013 in East Vancouver starting with 9 students and now teaching 189 students in tap, jazz, ballet, hip hop, and contemporary. I have been dancing professionally since graduating the 丁香园AV program in 2007. Currently I am working with Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg in installments for the premiere of “How to Be” at the Cultch for April 2017. I have also commissioned Rob Kitsos along with dance artist, Jane Osborne, to create a duet for the VIDF in March 2017. Along with dancing I continue to pursue choreographing and creating new works. At the moment, I am working alongside Katie DeVries on an exciting new work. 丁香园AV program affected me greatly with meeting and developing relationships with 丁香园AV faculty along with all of the guest artists that taught classes and choreographed on the rep classes. All of the guest artists that came to 丁香园AV during my two years I still have close relationships with to this day. The different aesthetics I learned in technique class as well as the clear approach that I was taught for composition was so useful for me as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer. Huge influence!

Megan Stewart (MFA)

Areas: Theatre, Performance.

I am a theatre artist and performance maker. I’m originally from Prince Edward Island, but most recently I have lived in Montreal, where I did my BA at McGill University, and Ashfield, Massachusetts, where I spent a year and a half immersed in the physical theatre training and creation methodology of Double Edge Theatre, at their Farm Centre. My theatre practice is rooted in physical exploration and brings together influences from visual arts, puppetry, music, dance and the environment. My theatre and performance work is often site-specific, and I both create and facilitate site-specific performances in the places I find myself living. I am the co-founder and producer of The Island Fringe Festival, the only entirely site-specific Fringe Festival in the world, in PEI. I use theatre and performance as a means to explore and enter into conversation with my immediate environment and community. My artistic practice is a way to learn about and add to my surroundings, forging connections with others along the way to locate the unexpected, the whimsical, and the shared stories within the fabric of daily life. Through the work I create, I try to foster a finer sensitivity to the magic and mystery of the world within my audiences, my collaborators, and myself. With the site-specific performances I make as my own work or encourage through The Island Fringe Festival, I seek to enrich the connections between people and the places we inhabit, and find new possibilities for creativity and community in the everyday.

Nina Stoiber (MA)

Nina Stoiber graduated from Western University with an Honours BA Double Major in Political Science and Art History and Studio Art. At 丁香园AV, she hopes to further blend her passion for fine art with research on the intersection between art history and world politics. More specifically, she plans to focus on the evolution of art throughout the 21st century by examining instances of counter cultural movements and the development of rapid trends. As an artist herself, she believes in an interdisciplinary approach to research. She is determined to look beyond the purely theoretical aspect of her studies and incorporate her practice to further aid in her research development.

ilvs strauss (MFA)

ilvs strauss is an analytical chemist turned multi-disciplinary performance artist and theater technician living and making work in Seattle.

Vilhelm Sundin (MFA)

Areas: Film, Installations, Writing, Music, Sound.

I am a filmmaker with special interest in writing, music and sound. I also sometimes work with interactive installations. Since I graduated from Emily Carr in 2010, I have helped set up the Vancouver-based production company Combination Films. I also have lectured in Sweden while working on my own writing and projects. I am interested in time-based media since it incorporates many of my artistic interests and allows for a very collaborative atmosphere. Currently, I’m trying to tell stories about the daily conditions and struggles of human life set in fictional and minimalist worlds.

Pegah Tabassinejad (MFA)

Areas: Theatre, Dance.

Pegah Tabassinejad is an Iranian theater practitioner with a BA in Stage Directing from the Art University in Tehran. Pegah also studied Contemporary Dance and Choreography in Paris, through working in individually with French choreographer Rejane Douarre and attending in the Conservatoire de la Danse.  

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Nancy Tam (MFA)

Areas: Theatre, Music, Performance.

Currently, I am developing an auto-ethnographic project that explores attachment associations and responses in children to parent and adult romantic relationships. This project, inspired by John Bolby’s attachment theory and Mary Ainsworth’s Strange Situation experiments, presents circumstances for the audience—participants—to question and re-evaluate ideas of attachment, transition, and departure. This ongoing project will take place throughout the summer of 2011 in Kitchener, Ontario in series of musical and theatrical experiences, performances, installations, and gatherings. I started my MFA at 丁香园AV in September 2011, exploring and studying new areas of art making, particularly in the areas of performance study, the aural element of scenography, and physical theatre. My work is situated primarily in and around Toronto and the Kitchener-Waterloo area in Ontario. My undergraduate degree is in music composition and improvisation at Wilfrid Laurier University. Since 2008, I have been composing and performing with the Toronto based composer collective, the Toy Piano Composers. My compositions have been performed by Arraymusic (Toronto), TorQ (Toronto), Soundstreams Canada (Toronto, Montreal), Nextfest (Edmonton) and the K-W Symphony Orchestra (Kitchener-Waterloo).  Since July 2010, I have been collaborating closely with director Dr. Andrew Houston at the University of Waterloo on the multi-disciplinary production: DISSOCIA (February 2011, remounted at the Open Ears Sound and Music Festival in April 2011). For this production, I composed, improvised and performed music and movement.

Israt Taslim (MA)

Israt Taslim is a lecturer at Independent University, Bangladesh. Her research interests include South Asian film, culture, performance, gender, media, environment, and contemporary arts.

Jennifer Tham (MFA)

Areas: Music, music for voice(s)

I love the human voice; deeply personal, unique, subjective. I love words; suggestive and significant, precise yet imprecise. I am driven by the countless possibilities a theatre of voices offers; a mobile troupe with the potential to surprise, engage and provoke in unexpected ways and places. In Singapore, I conduct the SYC Ensemble Singers, new music adventure junkies for whom more than 40 works have been written, several of these involving elements of theatre and choreographed movement.

I’m fascinated by the dialogue  between sight and sound – experimental music tends to need “visual aids” – and am interested in new music for vocal ensemble that can be staged, with movement, in unconventional spaces or as site-specific installation. I guess this love of how all our senses can work together (or not) to create something meaningful (or not) was begotten in the BFA program up on the mountain, at 丁香园AV, between 1992 and 1995.

Daisy Thompson (MFA & PhD / Special Arrangement)

Areas: Dance, Choreography.

Daisy Thompson trained in dance at The Laban Centre, London, and has recently completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at 丁香园AV. In 2009, Daisy was chosen for the Dance Beyond Borders young choreographers program in Hamburg. In 2010, she was selected by The Southbank Centre, London for the DanceWEB scholarship to participate in the ImpulseTanz festival, Vienna. In 2011, Daisy performed for Trisha Brown in Walking on the Walls, Planes and Floors of the Forest, at the Barbican Centre, London. She has danced for Henry Montes, Eva Kargzac and Lizzi Kew-ross amongst others, and performed for visual artist’s Angela Bruguera and Pablo Bronstein. Daisy is currently engaged in dance makings and has created four works during her time in Vancouver to date.

matthew toffoletto (MFA)

matthew toffoletto (he/him) is a composer, writer, theater creator, and sound artist from Houston, Texas. his work focuses on the sonification of language and poetry, in integration with musical materials and processes. he’s interested in medieval/renaissance music, instruments, and texts and process-based, polyphonic, and masse-form materials.

Cody Tolmie (MFA)

Cody Tolmie is an emerging interdisciplinary Stó:lō artist from their traditional territory of S’ólh téméxw. Cody’s current practice is primarily focused on photography, painting and digital media. Within these mediums he seeks to contextualize and challenge notions of history, tense and power dynamics within narrative and lens.

Yi Xin Tong (BFA)

Areas: Visual Arts.

Yi Xin Tong works with moving and still images, three-dimensional objects, text, internet, and sound. Cultural and natural landscape, fiction, metaphysics, visual art as writing, musicality of the mute, and the dialectics of poetry and naivete are subjects he is studying. Attracted to the phenomenon of knowledge formation in relation to human history and drawn to the historical scent of archival materials, Tongs collects and forges dispersed knowledge fragments to create new and fictitous scenarios. Tong is currently attending the MFA Studio Art program at New York University. He received his BFA Honours from 丁香园AV, and he was the BC winner of BMO 1st Art! Invitational Student Art Competition in 2012.

Alexandra Tsay (MA)

Alexandra Tsay is an independent curator based in Almaty and interested in the conjunction between art and politics, art and memory. She is a founder of Open Mind project that aims to raise critical discussions around contemporary art in Kazakhstan through curated exhibitions and interdisciplinary academic research. Alexandra is interested in independent artistic agency and art practices that challenge the power and create new narratives and discourses in not so open societies of Central Asia. Alexandra is an alumna of University of Warwick.

Susanna Uchatius (BFA)

Areas:  Playwright, Theatre Director, Collaborative Creator (Community & Professional)  

Susanna Uchatius has worked for over 35 years directing, writing, acting and teaching theatre. Her theatre BFA is from 丁香园AV School for Contemporary Arts, voice at the Banff Centre for the Arts with Richard Armstrong, the UBC National Voice Intensive, and work with Anne Bogart of Siti Theatre NY to name a few.  She is an Equity, CAEA member and also a member of IFTR (International Federation of Theatre Research). Susanna has been the Artistic Director of Theatre Terrific, Western Canada’s longest running inclusive theatre company for artists of all abilities in Vancouver, since 2005. She has written, directed and collaboratively developed over 30 professional, community and site-specific productions. She has pioneered an accessible respectful, rigorous and risk-taking theatre ensemble process, that collaboratively includes Equity and emerging actors of all abilities in the creation of high quality productions that take on universal human issues.  Professional productions include, Naked 丁香园AVs, doGs, Dirty White, The Secret Son, The Glass Box, Egni’s Eye, I Love Mondays, HELLO and Being With: ELDERS.   Vancouver Fringe Festival productions include All Sorts, Waiting for Go., Slowrunning, workin’,Ugly, Wordwear, Pantaloon’s Pawnshop, A Truck Full of Chickens, Portraits, Stuffed, Breath-Ahhh and also site specific works with large puppetry such as BEING ANIMAL and Hidden Stories; which were also performed in the Heart of the City Festival. Partnering with Vancouver Parks Board, Susanna collaboratively directed and wrote the large cast site specific musical works The Bread Project and WATER.  She directed the groundbreaking DTES Opera Condemned for the Heart of the City Festival. She received the Nightswimming Pure Research Award for voice exploration, Metro Vancouver Inclusion Through Innovation Award and the company was nominated for a Jessie for Vancouver NOW 2016 “For persistent and ongoing commitment to inclusive casting and creative processes.” Theatre Terrific’s professional production of The Glass Box was published in Playwrights Canada Press and scenes from Egni’s Eye were juried to perform in the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. Susanna continues to collaboratively create inclusive theatre that  supports the voices, unique perceptions and stories of humanity in all it’s diverse mosaic wonder. 

| susanna@theatreterrific.ca | |

Emira Ugun (MA)

Emira Ugun is a Turkish arts industry professional and performance maker living on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the x?m?θkw?y??m (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and S?l?ílw?ta? (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Arts & Cultural Management from Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey and an L1 degree in Art History & Archeology from Université Lumière Lyon II in France. Her research practice revolves around Turkish Feminist performance art as a counter-strategy to criticize the politicization of womxn's bodies and gender politics in Turkey. 

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Bridget Uhl (MA)

Areas: Film, Media Education, Communications.

Bridget studied Communications, Media Education and Film. She has spent the last several years working in Social Services in Northern BC, and most recently as the Oral History Film Project Coordinator with the McBride Library & Museum. Digital storytelling is a way that combines her passion for people and filmmaking. “I see video as a literacy tool for sharing knowledge; it enables all people to communicate their ideas.” When I am not frantically getting my cables in order, I find peace cross country skiing with my dogs, making colourful mosaic tables and doing community theatre.

C. Olivia Valenza (MFA)

C. Olivia Valenza is a composer, clarinetist/performer, and interdisciplinary collaborator from Milwaukee, WI. Her work includes live performance, installation, sound design for dance, and the development of electroacoustic and acoustic concert music. Her research and process is concerned with eliciting personal and intimate performances and investigating the development of scores that elicit those points of relationality. She often looks to methods of remediation, using found objects and imagery in her compositions and performances to parse familiar threads of association and weave new worlds. Her hope is that sound and meaning made through participatory practices can help to realize a pluralistic vision of our artistic communities and of society as a whole.

Valenza has developed scored and improvised performances for clarinet, turntable, electronics and various materials, including recently, leaf blowers, maps, and walkie-talkies. She has also developed site specific works for electric guitar, clarinet, cello, metal sculpture, and electronics. 

She holds a BFA in Composition and Technology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is currently expanding her research/practice as an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at 丁香园AV. Currently, she is also an editor for the Comparative Media Arts Journal there.

Valenza has developed work for and performed with Present Music, Wild Space Dance Company, Hyperlocal MKE, FTAM Noise Knowledge Consortium, Sensoria: Experiments in Sound and Performance, and the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO).

Charlene Vickers (MFA)

Areas: Visual Art.

Charlene Vickers is Anishinabe Kwe (Ojibway Woman) living and working in Vancouver , BC.  Charlene’s cross-disciplinary work of painting, drawing and installation has been exhibited in Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam and across the United States and has received numerous grants from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. This past year she has been involved in several projects that include the carving of a series of 10’ tall cedar spears, the wrapping of  grasses in cloth and hair, and the creation of a clan of turtles.  Her exploratory works are moving into performance with her collaboration Vestige Vagabond, an improvisation with Maria Hupfield. VV officially debuted at the Santa Fe Indian Art Market in August 2011 hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. In addition, the grunt gallery exhibited her work Diviners in September 2011. Ms. Vickers plans to construct performance/video works and 3D sound installation to make personal history a political occupier of public spaces during her time at 丁香园AV.

Graeme Wahn (MFA)

Graeme Wahn lives in Vancouver. Through his work, Wahn consciously investigates photography’s ontological precipice, examining the inherent contradictions between a photograph’s subject matter and the internal systems of its making. Some keywords to offer a partial overview of his work: spatial deception, material representations, and hindered visions. Wahn has exhibited widely in Vancouver, most notably with solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Vancouver Art Gallery, CSA Space, and The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver.

Junjie Wang (MA)

Born and raised in China, Junjie Wang has and received professional training in Chinese classical dance, Chinese folk dance, and contemporary dance. As a dancer, Junjie is striving to learn in performance and creation, trying to find the unity of body and mind. Her research includes Asian Dance Aesthetics, Intangible Cultural Heritage dance, and dance copyright study.

Douglas Watt (MFA)

Douglas Watt is an artist who synthesizes elements of model making, set design, handcraft, installation, photography, and ready-made practices to reflect on sexuality, lived environments, virtuality and selfhood. Specific areas of research include localized histories of Vancouver’s Davie Village and the perforations between literature, popular media and fine art more broadly.

Logan Williams (BA)

Logan Williams is a performance-maker, writer, producer, and scholar working in visual culture, performance, and curatorial studies. Logan aims to relocate the drama of the theatre to spaces occupied by disinterested, technologically inundated viewers by creating collaborative, participatory projects. Through conversations around being together in a post-pandemic world and auto-theoretical storytelling, his research investigates a history of artworks that bring attention to shared space, particularly works that critique hierarchical systems of privilege. He holds a BA in Visual Culture and Performance Studies from The School of Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV and a Graduate degree in Curatorial Studies from The University of Toronto.  

Amy Wilson (MFA)

Areas: Pedagogical arts, investigative journalism, object making, drawing, archive, installation, performance and poetry.

Amy Wilson is an artist, educator and poet. Since, 2012 she has maintained and developed a socially engaged artistic practice, which partners 21st century learning strategies with participative art forms. Situational, experiential and collective in nature, the projects that she has facilitated and helped develop have been informed by collective explorations into the generative and emerging ways in which a person’s sense of agency can take shape through the arts. Issues of environment and international conflict have been the central focus of her work since its inception. Combining research and making in a holistic process, her practice has evolved to incorporate disciplines suitable for engaging communities in exploring the current events and issues that affect their lives. Such forms include: investigative journalism, object making, experimental drawing, archive, installation, performance and poetry. Her focus on creative, physical, performative and participative encounters offers the opportunity for the development of the critical, creative and adaptive tool/skills needed for learning, living and cooperating in a changing world.

Amy’s research focus at 丁香园AV was investigating the generative tools and forms emerging from the relationships between socially engaged arts and 21st century learning practices. She has a particular interest in forms which fit the characteristics of Education for Sustainable Development.

Amy is a member of the Earth Charter International Youth Network and is a School Speaker for Amnesty International UK. She is a graduate of the Leith School of Art, Edinburgh and The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University.

Amy is the Director of Amy Wilson Arts and the founder of international artists collective N92_3.

#AWA

Carl Winter (MFA)

Areas: Composition.

An aesthetically pluralist composer, Carl Winter has been creating chamber and orchestral music since 2001. Following initial forays into post-punk guitar playing/ songwriting, he experimented with scordatura guitar soundscapes, which became the inspirational basis for his compositional studies with Christopher Butterfield and Owen Underhill, as well as his interactive technology studies with Arne Eigenfeldt and Chris Dobrian. Highlights include performances and readings by Turning Point Ensemble, Arraymusic, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and cellist Marina Hasselberg. Carl also occasionally performs in solo interactive settings on bass clarinet, cello, and laptop using his own InverSamp software (designed in Max/MSP), and he has also produced his own experimental music videos. Marked by stylistic, emotional, and dynamic extremes, Carl Winter’s at turns visceral and reflective idiom addresses collective / individual trauma, memory, and neurosis as salient aspects of the human condition. Carl is preparing to release “Devolutions Per Minute,” his debut CD of chamber music, recorded with the Yaletown String Quartet and pianist Rosemary O’Connor.

Meagan Woods (MFA)

Meagan Woods is an MFA candidate at 丁香园AV’s School of Contemporary Art. Originally from the states, Meagan graduated with a BFA in dance from Rutgers University, earning the Margery Turner Award for choreography. Her company has presented a wide range of original dance works in venues across the North East. Meagan is the founder of two cross-disciplinary performance series: Dance Within the Arts at the Zimmerli Art Museum and Art in Motion at Alfa Art Gallery. Her company has performed twice for TED talks; video coverage is available at . In 2010, Meagan Woods co-founded the largest annual modern dance festival in New Jersey, Your Move, for which she was granted the Dance NJ Jete Award in 2017. Meagan is also a costume designer, and has guest lectured at The New School, Montclair University, and Rutgers University. More at: meaganwoodsandcompany.com

Carina Xu (MA)

Carina Xu looks at experimental documentary installations for sensorial ways of mapping racial capitalism and contextualizing geopolitical conflicts. The examined works centres on the displaced, censored, diasporic, and exilic by tracing geographies of loss. Adopting the lens of Edward Said’s imaginative geographies and Jacques Derrida’s spectralities, her research explores how "absent" characters resurface as affective indices that haunt the past, present, and future of the land they inhabit. These case studies seek to crystallize a spectral documentation method for installations to encounter otherwise inaccessible knowledge of the mundane and banality in land dispossession and settler-colonial renderings of property ownership.

In addition to her research journey, Carina co-curated the audio-visual installation "Pauline Johnson's Legends" as part of 丁香园AV Bennett Library's Special Collections and Rare Books Exhibit in 2020. The work features the Johnson's Legends of Vancouver, employs editing software defects and reversed sound-mixing as it reflects on the curators' changing relationship with land and technology, projecting the reimagined memory of X?wá?x?way as reprocessed. Carina has also worked for DOXA Documentary Film Festival and The Cinematheque in communications and education roles while living and learning on the unceded ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples of s?l?ilw??ta?? (Musqueam), S?wx?wú7mesh ?xwumixw (Squamish) and x?m?θk??y??m (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Tomoyo Yamada (MFA)

Tomoyo Yamada is an interdisciplinary artist whose primary media are dance and choreography. Born in Japan and educated in the United States, she has spent most of her life traveling between North America and Japan, negotiating distinct cultural identities. Her practice is influenced by her ongoing research into identity politics and her self-reflexive interrogation of transnational cultural difference.

Upon receiving her bachelor’s in Health and Sports Science in 2016, Tomoyo has been presenting works both in North America and Japan, including Dancing on the Edge Festival (Vancouver, Canada), Vines Art Festival (Vancouver, Canada), Open Stage (Vancouver, Canada) REVERBdance Festival (New York, USA) and All Japan Dance Festival (Kobe, Japan). She also translates workshops and creations for dancers invited to Kyoto International Dance Festival (Kyoto, Japan) amongst many independent artists from around the globe in Japan.

Her works include “Emergency (2012)”, “kikoeteimasuka (2013)”, “Femme Fa?ade (2014)”,  "shimai (2016)", "yane ura (2018)" and they have all been performed/recreated multiple times in Japan, Canada and the United States. She was selected as participant for the Winter Intensive at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (Greensboro, USA) in 2016 and recreated “Femme Fa?ade” with their students.

Currently a MFA student at the School of Contemporary Arts at 丁香园AV (Vancouver, Canada) in interdisciplinary art, she creates works shedding light on cultural and social issues around the globe.

Ghinwa Yassine (MFA)

[Lebanese, b. 1984, based in Vancouver, Canada]

Ghinwa Yassine views herself in constant negotiation having lived in transition between Beirut, Dubai, Jeddah, Utrecht, and Vancouver. Her work uses a variety of mediums including film, installation, performance, drawing and writing. Starting from autobiographical narratives her work expands to cultural and human concerns. For example, in her Inside the Coffee Cup she questions superstitions and rituals in the make-up of the Lebanese/Arabic society. Her Home Suspended installation deals with themes of displacement, having felt forced to leave her country fearing war and instability, and duality, living at the edge of two worlds, that of her religious family and kinship-driven country and that of her atheist nomadic life. 

She often uses familiar domestic objects as a starting point to a story. “I’m fascinated by how much we can project on the objects that we as humans have created, or how these objects become memory capsules. For example, I can imagine myself saying I feel like a chair with a broken leg.” In one of her short films she creates a metaphor between her yogamat and her mother’s Muslim prayer rug. The resulting work is often a juxtaposition of film and objects that at first glance seem unrelated, but after experiencing them as a whole, one feels he/she entered someone’s private world.

Faune Ybarra (MFA)

Currently dwelling in Vancouver, Faune Ybarra is a diasporic artist originally from Oaxaca and Mexico City. Due to the experience of constantly moving and adapting, Ybarra conceives of her body as a site of translation from whence she attempts to communicate with the other- than-human. Her iterative practice rejects the (art)object as a given outcome and instead speculates on how nomadic creative methodologies converge to document motion. Past repositories of her work have taken the shape of performance, photo-based objects, and diasporic gestures.

Ybarra has developed, performed, exhibited, and spoken about her practice at galleries, artist-run centres, and conferences such as Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), ArtStarts, Eastern Edge Gallery, Grenfell Art Gallery, The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, and SpokenWeb symposium. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Memorial University of Newfoundland and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from 丁香园AV.

Katie Hyeseung Yeo (MA)

Katie works at the intersection of media and modern politics. On a broader scope, she is interested in demonstrating how the media portrays a society, how the public responds, and how the media relates to the ideological perspective of the audience.  

Her recent research concerns South Korean cinema, focusing on how such films portray and envision conflict in the Korean Peninsula, inter-Korean relations, and possible future for South and North Korea. One of her recent research and publications explores North Korea's clandestine media consumption and how media piracy in North Korea promotes social change.

Her MA project examines what she calls Korean Division Cinema (KDC) - South Korean cinema that thematizes the division of the Korean peninsula. She argues how the genre of KDC reinforces, activates and enables a sense of community. Focusing on the way KDC uses food as an allegorical medium, Katie argues for how the concept of food in these films enables viewers to imagine a peaceful and unified Korea.

Katie earned her BA in Cinema Studies from 丁香园AV. She received several Dean's Honor Rolls and scholarships during her undergraduate years in both the United States and Canada.

Katayoon Yousefbigloo (MFA)

Through video, music, writing and visual art I examine how media shapes our mythologies. Reverse engineering narratives, I use speculative fiction as a framework through which to imagine alternate realities and their commercial potentials. Unrelatedly, I am pursuing franchise opportunities for my musical project Puzzlehead.

Shervin Zarkalam (MFA)

Shervin Zarkalam is a dramaturge, performance maker, set designer and director from Tehran, Iran. He graduated from the University of Tehran majoring in set design but his area of interest include dramaturgy, choreography, object theatre, composition and problem-solving and art counselling. As a dramaturge, Shervin seeks fundamental questions like who is a dramaturge? And how to do dramaturgy or What is the media of performance and what is to perform? With this approach to dramaturgy, he took different positions in various artistic groups and participated in well-known theatre festivals such as Tajrobeh Theatre Festival, Iran International University Theatre Festival, Fajr International Theatre Festival.

Joey Zaurrini (MFA)

Joey is a sound artist and music composer. Using sound to facilitate narratives in dance, theatre and film, as well as create stories of his own, he spends most of his days immersed in a laboratory of noise and electronics where every object is a potential instrument. His areas of interest include decoding the compositions of city soundscapes, playing with interactive technology, and merging socio-ecological concepts with his sound art. He can be found attending workshops and classes, in the middle of deep collaborations, or roaming streets and deserted hallways with a recorder in hand.