OUTREACH Online Symposium

Alexandra Hong (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, producer, and educator whose work spans social practice, participatory engagement, multimedia, and performance. Her work presents access points to complex issues, and suggests alternative frameworks to think about and experience the world. She is interested in exploring the borders of experience, questioning ways of gaining knowledge, and creating spaces for dialogue amid hardened ideologies. Alexandra’s projects are often created through collaboration in and with the community. Currently she co-hosts Guidance Council with Peter Rahul, a project by Gendai that takes the shape of a bi-monthly, casual drop-in for BIPOC collectives to share stories, gossip, and solicit advice from each other. Guidance Council re-invents forms of corporate networking, workplace gossip, and leadership training to focus on developing friendship, investing in each other, and mapping collective knowledge. She is part of Mast Year Collective, a collaboration with Farihah Shah that explores identity, belonging, the notion of changing homelands and the complications that arise when trying to preserve cultural inheritance. Alexandra’s work has been shown in Nuit Blanche Toronto, Luminato Festival, the Ryerson Image Centre, and presented internationally in South Korea, China, and Finland.

Jessica Thalmann is an artist and educator currently based in Toronto and New York City. She received an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from ICP-Bard College and a BFA in Visual Arts from York University. Thalmann has taught at the International Centre for Photography, Akin Collective, MacLaren Art Centre, Toronto School of Art, Gallery 44 and City College of New York.  She has been an artist in residence at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada, and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, California, USA. She is a recipient of grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.

Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at Aperture Foundation, International Centre for Photography, Camera Club of New York Baxter St, and Humble Arts Foundation (New York), VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver), Museum of Contemporary Art, Harbourfront Centre, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Varley Art Gallery of Markham, Angell Gallery, Gallery TPW, Art Spin, and Gales Gallery at York University (Toronto). She is represented by Christie Contemporary.

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Shellie Zhang (b. 1991, Beijing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. By uniting both past and present iconography with the techniques of mass communication, language and sign, Zhang explores the contexts and construction of a multicultural society by disassembling approaches to tradition, gender, history, migration and popular culture. 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.

Zhang has exhibited at venues including WORKJAM (Beijing), Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Museum Anchorage (Alaska). She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. She is a member of EMILIA-AMALIA, an intergenerational feminist reading and writing group. In 2017, She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. In 2021, she was a recipient of the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award. Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at The Bentway (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. 

Anthony Gebrehiwot is a multiple award winning visual artist, photographer and community leader whose creative lens re-visions photography as an ongoing dialogue of social change between subject and society.

A self-taught artist and photographer, Gebrehiwot founded XvXy-photo in 2014 focusing on studio portraiture. To date, he has worked with several notable brands such as Nike, Royal Bank of Canada, Vice Canada, Absolute, Hudson Bay, The City of Toronto and Linkedin to name a few. His work has been featured in over forty local and international publications such as the Star, the Globe and Mail, PAPER Magazine, Elle UK and Yahoo Lifestyle.

Sameen Mahboubi is an arts facilitator based in Toronto. He sits on the board of directors of Art Metropole and SAVAC and is a co-director of Hearth and Silverfish Magazine.