Emily Collins is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary researcher, arts administrator and PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies. She has worked across arts organizations in local and international settings, including the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Festival Scope (Paris), VUCAVU (Toronto), PUBLIC Journal (Toronto), and the Toronto International Film Festival. She holds graduate degrees in Arts and Culture from Maastricht University (Netherlands) and Cinema and Media Studies from York University (Toronto). Situated at the intersection of film and media, sound studies, cultural studies and gender studies, Emily's PhD research considers practices of deep listening, sonic epistemologies and embodied soundscapes. Namely, her project examines how sonic intervention and experimentation within audio-visual works can function as tools of resistance, instruments for disruption and modes of trans-sensory knowledge formation.

Hannah Schallert is a media and dance artist and researcher based in Montreal and Toronto. She holds an Honours BFA in Dance and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from York University, and is currently a first-year PhD student in Concordia University’s Communication Studies program. Hannah’s research interests include animation, special effects, experimental film, Science Fiction, archives and performance, and expanded understandings of dance and choreography in relation to moving image media. Her doctoral research will study animation movement, labour, and technology in the contemporary Canadian Visual Effects industry through the lens of embodied knowledge and performance. Hannah’s previous creative work has spanned live performance, installation, and dance film. Her current practice centres around found footage, collage, and animation, in addition to continuing to create projection-based pieces with dance artists. Hannah’s work has been presented at festivals and galleries in Toronto, including dance: made in Canada and Beaver Hall Gallery. She is a member of Immer and Roses artistic collectives. With Immer, Hannah recently completed 100 Years of Cinematic Solitude in 300 Moving Pieces, a dance film utilizing chronologically organized movement excerpts from the performances of women in world cinema over the past century as a basis for choreography and original video design.

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is completing a PhD in Communication at Simon Fraser University with a focus on cultural policy and artist-run visual and media arts organizations. In recent years, she has worked as lead researcher/consultant on various sectoral research and community consultation projects commissioned by visual and media arts service organizations. She has served on the boards of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres (BC) and VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver) and is currently a board member for Aphotic Theatre (Vancouver). Mariane has exhibited artistic and curatorial projects across Canada and has contributed texts to a number of artistic and scholarly publications.

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is completing a PhD in Communication at Simon Fraser University with a focus on cultural policy and artist-run visual and media arts organizations. In recent years, she has worked as lead researcher/consultant on various sectoral research and community consultation projects commissioned by visual and media arts service organizations. She has served on the boards of the Pacific Association of Artist-Run Centres (BC) and VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver) and is currently a board member for Aphotic Theatre (Vancouver). Mariane has exhibited artistic and curatorial projects across Canada and has contributed texts to a number of artistic and scholarly publications.

Kyla Rose Smith is a PhD Candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Her doctoral research is focused on women's consumer culture, domestic exhibitions, and sponsored film media at World's Fairs and the Toronto Canadian National Exhibition. She is currently completing a project which examines the linkages between multi-media art installations and retail merchandising. Kyla is a member of the editorial collective of Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies. As a student researcher for A/CA, Kyla works for Dr. Charles Acland (Communications, Concordia University) on the Canadian Educational, Sponsored, & Industrial Film Archive (CESIF). The project aims to document the wealth of Canadian non-narrative filmmaking which have been neglected in public record, expanding knowledge of Canadian moving image heritage.

Linda Grussani (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg) is a curator and art historian born and raised in the Ottawa area. Currently, she is working full-time towards completing a PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Over the last decade, Linda had held the position of Curator, Aboriginal Art at the Canadian Museum of History (CMH); Director, Indigenous Art Centre for Crown Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC); and has worked in the Indigenous art department at the National Gallery of Canada. Linda holds both a BA and MA in Art History from Carleton University and is a graduate of CIRNAC’s Aboriginal Leadership Development Initiative (2014-15) and the CMH’s Indigenous Training Programme in Museum Practices (2000-2001). Linda currently sits on the Indigenous Education Council for OCAD University, the Indigenous Collections Symposium Working Group for the Ontario Museums Association, and is a collaborator with the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative.

Linda Grussani (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg) is a curator and art historian born and raised in the Ottawa area. Currently, she is working full-time towards completing a PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Over the last decade, Linda had held the position of Curator, Aboriginal Art at the Canadian Museum of History (CMH); Director, Indigenous Art Centre for Crown Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC); and has worked in the Indigenous art department at the National Gallery of Canada. Linda holds both a BA and MA in Art History from Carleton University and is a graduate of CIRNAC’s Aboriginal Leadership Development Initiative (2014-15) and the CMH’s Indigenous Training Programme in Museum Practices (2000-2001). Linda currently sits on the Indigenous Education Council for OCAD University, the Indigenous Collections Symposium Working Group for the Ontario Museums Association, and is a collaborator with the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative.

Emily's work coalesces at the intersection of queer cinema and the queer archive. Her project seeks to understand if it is possible to build queer community trans-historically through the moving image. Theatre spaces and archives, subject to displacement and precarity, have also been venues of world-building and community creation throughout a queer history. Consequently, Emily is interested in the ways meta-narratives are constructed through these disparate but interrelated spaces. It is their hope that this project will focus on women loving women.

Treva Michelle Legassie is an interdisciplinary researcher, curator, artist and a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Legassie’s doctoral research investigates the impacts of artistic interventions on indeterminate landscapes that hold great ecological and cultural value but are seen by some as disposable. She suggests that curatorial interventions on such sites may allow for the revitalization and rehabilitation of indeterminate landscapes. Engaging in curatorial practice as research-creation, her dissertation explores the potential of emplaced arts to activate public spaces on the fringes.

Legassie is one of the co-founders of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective at Milieux and Assistant Director of the Speculative Life Cluster. Her writing has been published in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, PUBLIC Journal, The Senses & Society, InterARTive, JAWS and AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples. She has also curated new media based exhibitions such as Femynynytees (2018), #NATURE (2016) and Influenc(Ed.) Machines and co-ordinated Cheryl Sim’s YMX: Land and Loss after Mirabel.

Zoë Anne Laks is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. Her MA thesis, On Longing for Loss: A Theory of Cinematic Memory and an Aesthetics of Nostalgia, explored affective memory representations in film and proposed an original theory of nostalgia and nostalgic aesthetics. In her dissertation she is researching representations of posthuman memory in film and new media, specifically object-memories and their function as imaginative and non-indexical archives. Her current research interests include film and memory theory, posthumanism, object-oriented philosophies, and media archeology.