Guiding Bonds

Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. Her most recent explorations confront the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade in Africans. She puts into practice Afronautics, a methodological frame she developed to approach colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future. Camille is a graduate of OCAD and has recently completed a PhD at York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change. Currently, she is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Turner is the recipient of the 2022 Artist Prize by the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her artworks are held in museums and public and private collections including: National Gallery of Canada, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Museum London, The Wedge Collection and The Rooms.

Aysia Tse (she/her) is an emerging artist majoring in Life Studies and minoring in Art and Social Change at OCAD University. Interested in the intersections of community education, art and activism, Aysia is building a socially engaged practice that connects to constructive action within communities. In addition to community arts, her creative practice is currently focused on movement-based and new media work with themes relating to madness, queerness, and diasporic identity.

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Annie Wong is a writer, community organiser, and multidisciplinary artist working in performance and installation. Conceptually diverse, her practice explores the intersections between the political and poetic in everyday life. Wong has presented across North America including at the Toronto Biennale of Art, Studio XX, SBC Gallery (Montreal, QC), and Third Space Gallery (Saint John, NB). She has been awarded residencies with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Power Plant (Toronto, ON), Banff Centre for Creativity and Art (Banff, AL), and the City of Calgary. Her literary works can be found in Koffler.Digital, The Shanghai Literary Review, C Magazine, Canadian Art, and MICE Magazine. She is currently the Curator of Programming and Public Engagement at Gallery TPW.

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Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She creates images, objects and projects in a wide range of media to explore how integration, diversity and assimilation is implemented and negotiated, and how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences. Zhang is interested in how culture is learned and sustained, and how the objects and iconographies of culture are remembered and preserved.

Recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at The Bentway (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. She is a member of EMILIA-AMALIA, an intergenerational feminist reading and writing group, and former member of collectives including Long Time No See and Angry Asian Feminist Gang.

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Alana Traficante is an arts organizer, writer/editor and sometimes curator based in Toronto. She facilitates networks in the artistic community through exhibition, book and space-making initiatives, with an interest in civic engagement, capacity building and mentorship. Alana holds an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University (2016) and a BA in Art History from the University of Toronto (2004). She has worked as the Executive Director of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography since 2018.​

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Dr. Daniela Bascuñán is an elementary teacher who engages practitioner research with students using storied approaches to relational knowledge. She is interested in the possibilities that emerge when inviting students’ individual and ancestral stories in a classroom, and how those stories are co-constituted with grand colonial narratives. Juxtaposing these stories generates productive tensions and inquiries about relationality, time, place, self, and Land. Daniela simultaneously puts students in the path of treaty education, as a way to equip them with the knowledges necessary to fulfill treaty responsibilities, while uncovering and disrupting the logics of settler-colonialism.

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Carmela Laganse is an artist and Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster University. Laganse’s practice engages with intersections of embodied experience and perception as well as exploring the agency embedded in objects and environments. Her work explores the impact of colonialism, diasporic communities and considers how these things contribute to material culture and identity. Working in a variety of media, she often builds interactive work or portable, modular environments that playfully and critically integrate physical, emotional, ritualistic, and intellectual processes through an intersectional lens.

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Immony Mèn is an artist, educator, and community-based researcher. He is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science at OCAD University. As an artist, he has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been awarded municipal, provincial, and federal arts council grants to support his work. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for understanding (specifically Khmer/Cambodian) diasporic experience through media praxis, critical race theory, and various forms of community engagement. Men’s practice takes the form of research-creation projects such as interactive installations, interdisciplinary performances, social artworks, and participatory community projects. Works include Receipts, Fabulous Ones, Post-Colonial Hot Ones, Traversal Residency, Passing through the Heart, Shadows!, Cite, Chthulucene, Powers of Kin, Everything in Place, and Taking Care of Business. Immony is co-director of Public Visualization Lab / Studio.

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Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her current research theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. Her work suggests that media production enables diasporic people to create forms of belonging that defy racialized ascriptions born from racism, colonialism, and their gendered dimensions. She is also a musician and filmmaker, whose work has received a number of accolades and has been presented internationally.

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Dina Georgis is an Associate Professor at the Women & Gender Studies Institute, at the University of Toronto. Her work is situated in the fields of postcolonial and sexuality studies. She draws on psychoanalytic concepts to think through how expressive and political cultures are responses to the affective remains of the past. Her book, The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East is published with SUNY (2013). Georgis teaches in the areas of cultural studies, feminist theory and queer studies.

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Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist and curator. Throughout his artistic practice, Morin investigates the impact zones that occur when Indigenous practices collide with Western-settler colonialism. Morin’s artworks are shaped, and reshaped, by Tahltan epistemological production and often takes the form of performance interventions. In addition to his exhibition history, Morin has curated exhibition for the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery and Burnaby Art Gallery. In 2016, Morin received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievements by a Canadian Mid-Career Artist. Morin holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto.

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Justine Woods is a garment artist, designer, creative scholar, and educator. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Media and Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University. Justine’s research and design practice centres Indigenous fashion technologies and garment-making as practice-based methods of inquiry toward re-stitching alternative worlds that prioritize Indigenous resurgence and liberation. Justine was born and raised in Tiny, Ontario, and is a member of the Georgian Bay Métis Community from the St. Onge and Berger-Beaudoin families.

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Nicole Neidhardt is Diné (Navajo) of Kiiyaa’áanii Clan on her mother’s side and a blend of European ancestry on her father’s side. She is an artist and illustrator whose Diné identity is the heart of her practice. She is passionate about giving back to Indigenous communities through her art and sees illustration as a beautiful, loving way to share Indigenous stories.

She has a BFA from the University of Victoria and an MFA from OCAD University. She has a multi-disciplinary arts practice and has been loving working in the field of children’s book illustration. She has illustrated When We Are Kind, written by Monique Gray Smith; the cover of Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids, edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith; and the fall 2022 release of the YA Adaptation of Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, adapted by Monique Gray Smith. She is currently living in Toronto, ON, and spends her days drinking coffee, illustrating, and taking her dog, Bannock, on long walks throughout the East End.