Musqueam Welcome
Mary Point, is a proud member of the Musqueam Indian Band – formerly Musqueam Community Planner and Facilities Manager, she is the currently the Manager of Indigenous Relations at Vancouver International Airport (YVR); and the Relationship Manager for the Musqueam Indian Band – YVR Airport Sustainability & Friendship Agreement. Mary helps to further develop the relationship between Musqueam and YVR, facilitating the elements of this agreement and exploring new opportunities to learn from one another and work together. Mary is an accomplished Indigenous professional that weaves culture, protocol, and best practices into strategic planning for those seeking to do business with First Nations individuals and organizations. She has worked throughout British Columbia for two decades, developing strategic partnerships with a range of First Nations communities and local businesses.
Manuel Axel Strain is a non-binary 2-Spirit artist from the lands and waters of the xʷməθkʷəyəm (Musqueam), Simpcw, and Syilx peoples, based in the sacred region of their q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie) and qʼʷa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen) relatives. Strain’s mother is Tracey Strain and father is Eric Strain. Tracey’s parents are Harold Eustache (from Chuchua) and Marie Louis (from nk̓maplqs). Eric’s parents are Helen Point (from xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) and John Strain (from Ireland). Although Strain attended Emily Carr University of Art + Design, they prioritize Indigenous epistemologies through the embodied knowledge of their mother, father, siblings, cousins, aunties, uncles, nieces, nephews, grandparents, and ancestors. Creating artwork in collaboration with and reference to their relatives, their shared experiences become a source of agency that resonates through their work with performance, land, painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound, and installation. Their artworks often envelop subjects in relation with ancestral and community ties, Indigeneity, labour, resource extraction, gender, Indigenous medicine, and life forces. At VIVO Media Arts Centre and in broader contexts of art spaces, Strain is affirming Indigenous protocols (with specificity to xʷməθkʷəyəm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ, q̓ic̓əy̓, Secwépemcand Syilx) and ways of being in tangible and material ways to honour the institutions’ stated values of Indigenization and Decolonization.
Participants
Amber Berson is a writer, a curator, and an Art Historian. She holds a doctoral degree from Queen’s University where her SSHRC-funded research examined artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She most recently curated Souper Spaghetti (2021, with Manon Tourigny), Utopia as Method (2018); World Cup! (2018); The Let Down Reflex (2016-2018, with Juliana Driever); TrailMix (2014, with Eliane Ellbogen); and *~._.:*JENNIFER X JENNIFER*:.~ (2013, with Eliane Ellbogen); The Annual Art Administrator’s Relay Race (2013, with Nicole Burisch); The Wild Bush Residency (2012–14); and was the 2016 curator-in-residence as part of the France-Quebec Cross-Residencies at Astérides in Marseille, France. She is a co-lead at Art+Feminism, a project that works for a more equitable Wikipedia, and was the 2019-2020 Wikipedian in Residence at Concordia University. She is also the Executive Director of The Visual Arts Centre in Montreal.
Jade Courchesne (郭舜婷) is a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, working towards an MA in Cinema and Media Studies. Her research interest lies in raciolinguistics, featurism and in fluid diasporic identities, with a focus on the intersection between queer and mixed race theory. Her work on anti-racism has been published in Ricepaper Magazine, and she most recently worked with The Witch Institute, a symposium aiming to complicate, reframe, and remediate media representations of witchcraft, magic and feminist mythology
Ann Marie Fleming is an independent writer, filmmaker, producer and visual artist. She works in live-action fiction, documentary and animation. Her graphic novel, “The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam” (pub. Riverhead Books) based on her award-winning animated doc of the same name, won the Doug Wright award for Best Canadian Comic in 2008. Her animated adaptation of Bernice Eisenstein’s “I was a child of holocaust survivors” for the NFB was on “Canada’s Top Ten” list 2011, “Window Horses:karaoke project”,an animated music video, premiered in 2010 at NXNE. She is currently developing “Window Horses”, an animated feature where Stickgirl goes to a poetry festival in Iran. She recently completed “Big Trees”, an animated musical about real estate in Vancouver, and “Stories Sarah Tells”, a portrait of Sarah Polley for her Governor General’s award. Stickgirl Poetry Oracle, her iPhone App, is available on iTunes for free. Ann Marie is the inaugural recipient of VWIFTV’s spotlight award for artistic innovation, 2011 and received a visionary award for best short film from theWIFTS foundation. As well as her own art practice, she gives lectures on her her work, the art of adaptation, visual storytelling and the animated documentary.
Yasmin Jiwani is a full Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender and Violence, as well as lead editor of Girlhood, Redefining the Limits, and co-editor of Faces of Violence in the Lives of Girls. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies. Her research interests include mediations of race, gender and violence in the press, as well as representations of women of colour in popular media. She was the Concordia University Research Chair in Intersectionality, Violence and Resistance (2017-2022).
Karen Knights is Archive Manager and Special Projects Lead at the VIVO Media Arts Centre’s Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive. She has over two decades of accumulated experience at VIVO as Librarian, Archivist, Distributor, Programmer, and Development Coordinator since 1984. As an independent curator and writer she has undertaken historical surveys of the archives at artist-run centres Satellite Video Exchange Society (VIVO), Western Front, Ed Video Media Arts Centre, and EM Media. She contributed to monographs for artists Sara Diamond (National Gallery of Canada) and Jin-me Yoon (Women In Focus Lateral Gallery).
Knights’ current focus is on activating the CDMLA collections through a series of archivist internships, digitization projects, and exhibition series. Recent CDMLA projects include Celebration’ 90: Gay Games III (Digital Museum Canada), Women & West Coast Labour: 80 years of action for equity in domestic and workplace labour; several iterations of the EATa and Sticky Impulse archival exhibition series, as well as the collaborative ARC archival research and remediation series, Recollective. In 2020, she curated two programs for the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival Media Showcase. Knights’ is currently Lead for VIVO’s Archive/Counter-Archive case study – Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediations and researcher with Dr. Sara Diamond’s SSHRC, Crossing Fonds.
Karin Lee is a Canadian media artist and filmmaker. Born and raised in Vancouver, B.C, Karin’s films are influenced by her upbringing: both her parents were activists who worked in the downtown Eastside, with her father running a Chinese communist bookstore at 33 East Hastings from the mid-1960s to ’80s. Her interest in Chinese Canadian identity, feminism and social justice activism informs her narrative films, experimental video, documentaries and original web series she has written, directed and produced since 1991.
In 2022, Karin won a Golden Sheaf award from the Yorkton Film Festival, and multiple awards from the Hollywood North Film Awards including Best Documentary and Best Director for Incorrigible. In 2005 she received a BC Leo Diversity in Cultures Award. In 2001, Karin received a Gemini: The Canada Award, from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television for her groundbreaking documentary Made in China, about Chinese children adopted in Canada.
In 2022, the documentary: Incorrigible – A film about Velma Demerson was released. Lee’s 2018 solo show at at the SUM Gallery (Canada’s first Queer Art Gallery) featured My Sweet Peony Remix, Small Pleasures and Portrait of a Chinese Girl. She launched her web series: Plan B, a comedic drama set in a women’s sexual health clinic. She is currently in post-production on a short period drama: The Girl with Big Feet (Ts’ekoo Buke Ncha)（羅馬腳)
Karin was recognized by the City of Vancouver and awarded the Mayor’s Arts Award for Film and New Media Artist in 2014. She was honoured in 2017 for a Spotlight Award for excellence in Education from the Vancouver Women in Film and Video Society. She was an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Theatre and Film Production and Simon Fraser University in the Asia Canada Program in the department of Humanities since 2007.
Susan Lord holds a PhD from York University. She is Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University and is the Director of the Vulnerable Media Lab https://vulnerablemedialab.ca/
Her research interests have landed in the areas of cinema and media arts, archives, gendered spaces and the city, and Cuban cinema and visual culture. She has undertaken curatorial projects of media arts and worked with artists’ groups and artist-run centres for over 30 years. The Vulnerable Media Lab is dedicated to the social ecology of media arts collectives and collections, and to the preservation, migration and remediation of media arts archives by women, Indigenous peoples, LBGTQ2 and regional producers. She co-investigator of Archive/CounterArchive (counterarchive.ca) and PI for the project “Under the Shadow of Empire: Minor Archives and Radical Distribution Networks”. The VML, an infrastructure and research environment, is restoring all of Sara Gómez’s documentaries at present. With Maria Caridad Cumana, Susan is co-editor of The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution, a collection of essays, interviews and documents about the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez is recently published with University of Indiana Press. Other books include one on the visual culture of gender and violence– Killing Women: Gender, Violence and Representation (with Annette Burfoot) Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006. She also published Fluid Screens: Expanded Cinema and Digital Cultures (with Janine Marchessault) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007; Paperback edition 2008) and New World Coming: The 1960s and the Shaping of Global Consciousness (with Dubinsky et al) BTL 2009. As a member of the 30+ year Public Access Collective which publishes the journal PUBLIC: art, culture, ideas http://www.publicjournal.ca/ Susan has edited two recent issues – Archive/Counter Archives and HAVANA.
Mandana Mansouri is a displaced Kurdish artist and writer. Her exile started long before moving anywhere. She started forgetting her mother tongue when she went to school in 1988. Now she is remembering. As a physical being, she is an uninvited guest on the stolen land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw, and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ First Nations. In her mind, she is dancing with her people in front of a fire.
Midi Onodera is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist who has been making films and videos for 35+ years. In 2018, Midi received the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts. Her work is laced with markers of her experiences as a feminist, lesbian, Japanese Canadian woman. She has produced over 25 independent shorts, ranging from 16mm film to digital video to toy camera formats. Her film The Displaced View (1988) was nominated for Best Documentary at the Gemini Awards. Skin Deep (1995), her theatrical feature, screened internationally at festivals including the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Since 2006 she has made over 500+ Vidoodles (defined as bite- sized 30 second to 2 minute video doodles). For the past 12 years she presents an annual video project addressing themes of language, media, politics, and the everyday. Her online videos can be viewed at: www.midionodera.com
Dr. Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda (b. Guadalajara, 1973) is a Mexican-Canadian interdisciplinary media artist and cultural historian with a research focus in feminist media art history. She is Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University where she leads criticalMediaArtsStudio (cMAS). cMAS is an interdisciplinary research-creation studio that produces work that interrogates how old and new technologies have and continue to shape our sense of self through a theoretical lens informed by media and feminist theory.
Gabriela is the author of Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) winner of the 2020 CALACS Book Prize. She is also the author of several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and research-creation projects on feminist media art and archival practices in the Americas. Other research interests include the intersections of sound, race, and gender; the environmental entanglements of digital technologies; the histories and theories of embodiment and performance; the aesthetics of interactive art; and Latin American art and its diasporas.
Her video and sculptural installations that explore the body as a site of cultural, gender and bio-political inscriptions have been exhibited in Canada, Mexico, France, India, Chile and the U.S. She is a member of the art/mamas collective based in Vancouver, BC and has been a board member of various artist-run-centres in Canada including CAFKA in Kitchener-Waterloo, RedHead Gallery in Toronto, and VIVO Media Arts and Access Artist Run-Center in Vancouver. She has served as jury and reader for ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and CAA and is the Vancouver regional coordinator of TFAP (the Feminist Art Project) Rutgers University.
Viola Thomas, born and raised in Tk’emlups Te Secwempemc, is the daughter of Louise and Lawrence Thomas and granddaughter of Faustine and Andy Manuel and Lucy and Alex Thomas. She has lived and worked across Turtle Island in various management and leadership roles. She has a vast working knowledge in governmental affairs at the executive level in both federal and provincial governments. Her spirit name ‘Anemki Wedom’ translates to ‘Thundering Spirit Voice’ and was bestowed upon her by Elder Josephine Mandamin, Water Walk Grandmother. Viola is a past member of the Tk’emlups Council and has firsthand experience with the increasing demands of leadership.
Viola has served and worked in a voluntary capacity for many feminist and Indigenous not-for-profit organizations. She has held key leadership roles: President of National Association of Friendship Centers; President of United Native Nations; President of Healing Our Spirit Aids Society; Executive Member for Quebec Native Women; Board Member Ontario Native Women’s Association; BC Native Rural Housing Corporation, Board member Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre; Advisory Committee Member YWCA; Councillor for Tk’emlups Te Secwepemc; Board member Native Court Workers. Presently, she is a member for the Coalition for MMIWG2S Union of BC Indian Chiefs, City of Vancouver Advisory Committee; Elected Board member for not-for-profit organizations Inter Pares and Board member Protecting of Sisters Society.
Loretta Todd Female. Cree. Metis. White. Writes (been to Sundance Writer’s Lab). Directs (many films, lots of festivals). Thinks (essays full of tersely cogent remarks or flamboyantly theoretical analysis). Produces (she’s experienced the labyrinth). Challenges herself and others and makes things happen. And yes, she has many awards and accolades. Known for lyrical, expressionistic imagery combined with strong storytelling skills, Todd tells truths that are haunting, funny and real.
Ana Valine is a Vancouver-based writer and director whose films have screened and won awards internationally. She is an alumna of the Canadian Film Centre, WIDC at Banff, and the TIFF Talent Lab. She has written and directed several short films and two features; Sitting on the Edge of Marlene and Once There Was a Winter. Her films have traveled to Spain, Russia, India, Busan, Turkey, Armenia, New York, Iceland, and more, and have been recognized for their tense family relationships and bittersweet dark humour. Ana is currently writing her third feature screenplay and finishing a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Zainub Verjee, currently the Executive Director of Ontario Association of Art Galleries, Toronto, is an accomplished leader in the art and culture sector and over four decades has shaped culture policy at all levels of governments and contributed to building of cultural institutions and organizations in Canada and internationally.
Newly politicized at Simon Fraser University in the mid-70s, fully engaged with Feminist Labour history as well as Artists-run-centres, the setback of the Applebaum-Hébert Cultural Review Committee Report (1982) and second wave of feminism was seized upon by Zainub to put the agenda of women and race on the table. The following two decades saw major cultural policy work in Canada, and it is appropriate to mention Zainub’s central role in making the case of racial equity right at the centre of this development. She further connected these issues with trade through her work with the International Network for Cultural Diversity included promulgating the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, adopted in 2005. Going beyond her call of duty, she selflessly enabled forming alliances, articulating new aesthetics and embedding issue of racial equity firmly into the evolving discourse. She defies an easy classification: a community organizer; artist and critic; prolific writer and speaker; institution builder; reformer and change agent; educator and mentor; and, public policy and legislation developer.
A trailblazer, she was directly instrumental in the founding of these cultural institutions (In Visible Colours; B.C.Arts Council; Vancouver Asian Heritage Month; Racial Equity Office in Canada Council for the Arts) and developed policy initiatives, advanced vital interests of artists, and created spaces and access for artists across different disciplines in Canada.
Zainub has served as a public servant over decades of an effective role on all sides of the table. At City of Mississauga, her work as the inaugural Director led to setting up of its Culture Division and the first Culture Master Plan. A decade prior to this, she was engaged by Gordon Campbell, Canadian diplomat and the 35th Mayor of Vancouver on his landmark Vancouver Arts Initiative as part of Cultural Planning for Vancouver.
As Senior Policy Advisor, Department of Canadian Heritage and Program Officer at the Canada Council for the Arts, she served on cross-sectoral portfolios. Almost for a decade, she was the Executive Director of Western Front. Prior to that she Co-Directed/Founded InVisible Colours, a widely and critically recognized and impactful International film and video festival of its kind in Vancouver and in Canada.
Zainub is an accomplished writer, critic, curator, contemporary artist and public intellectual. At the forefront of the two decades of cultural politics of the 1980s and 1990s in Canada, Zainub was the co-founder and Festival director of the critically acclaimed In Visible Colours: An International Film/Video Festival & Symposium for Third World Women and Women of Colour (1988-90). She was co-guest editor of The Capilano Review and has published in numerous academic, cultural and critical fora including, Leonardo Journal (MIT), Kinesis, Parallelogram, Fuse, Horizon, Canadian Art Magazine, Journal of Art and the Public Sphere etc. She is invited to speak nationally and internationally, on cultural policy, contemporary art and cultural diplomacy.
Fueled by passion, vision, and a staunch conviction about art as public good, she is a mentor and role model for generations. In the wake of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the federal government attempted to reach out to citizens by means of a public commission of inquiry. Known as Spicer Commission, she was appointed as the Official Moderator for Citizen’s Forum for Canada Future (1991). Among many appointments to Boards, she is proud of her work at the B.C. Arts Board that led to the legislation B.C.Arts Act and the formation of the institution B.C. Arts Council. Among others, currently she sits on the Advisory Board of ArtsBuild Ontario and is the Chairperson of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. She was invited as an expert for the Opening and Closing ceremonies of Vancouver Olympics 2010.