Aashna Thakkar (she/her) is an Indo-Canadian interdisciplinary artist, film festival programmer, and writer living in Toronto. Prior to becoming the Manager of Programming at the Regent Park Film Festival in 2021, she held the role of Program Coordinator in 2019. Additionally, she has worked at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival with the Docs for Schools program and is currently the Lead Programmer of Breakthroughs Film Festival.

Ananya is an award-winning Arts Administrator, Producer and Writer who was born in India, and moved to Canada when she was ten years old. For seven years, she was the Executive Director at the Regent Park Film Festival (RPFF), Toronto’s longest running free community film festival. At RPFF, Ananya also founded and directed the Lieutenant General Award-winning and Governor General Award finalist (Honourable Mention) project, Home Made Visible (www.homemadevisible.ca), where she worked to preserve old home movies for BIPOC families across Canada.

With 13 years of organizational experience, Ananya consults in areas of research, programming, financial and project management, grant writing and community engagement, supporting Senior Arts Administrators in solving problems,  getting things done and increasing capacity for positive change across the organization.
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Driven by her experience programming for a community-based film festival and consuming media alongside her own kids, Ananya is motivated to cultivate greater diversity both in front of and behind the screen in the Film and TV industry.

As a filmmaker, her short experimental films and documentaries have screened locally and internationally, including the Berlinale, the Images Festival, at UNICEF, and at the Toronto Urban Film Festival, where her film "Castles on the Ground" won Best Film. 

As a recipient of CBC/Radio-Canada and Canada Council for the Arts Creation Accelerator funding, Ananya is currently producing and writing a kids’ animated adventure mystery series , created with collaborator Fiona Raye Clarke.

Katharina Niemeyer is a media theorist, professor at the School of Media (Faculty of Communication) at the Université du Québec à Montréal, director of CELAT-UQAM (Centre de recherche Cultures-Arts-Sociétés) and co-curator of the TOTAL SCREEN exhibition.
Her research focuses on the relationships between media and (digital) technologies, temporalities, memory, and history. She recently co-edited the book Nostalgies contemporaines : médias, cultures et technologies, published in 2021 by Presses universitaires du Septentrion. She is a member of the editorial board of the journals MAST (Media Art Study and Theory) and Memory, Mind & Media (Cambridge University Press). Katharina Niemeyer is also council member of the International Association for Media and History and co-founder of the International Media and Nostalgia Network.

Elizabeth Mudenyo is a Scarborough-based poet, community-engaged artist and arts manager. She has worked all sides of the film festival circuit, with groups like the Regent Park Film Festival, Hot Docs, and the Racial Equity Media Collective, among others. She managed Home Made Visible, an award-winning nationwide archival project capturing the joys of BIPOC home movies. She continues to immerse herself in arts programming engaging the voices, imaginations and knowings of Black and Brown communities.  She is collecting tools in curation, placemaking and social justice organizing. 

Elizabeth is a fellow of The Watering Hole and the Poetry Incubator. Her work has appeared in Write Magazine, Arc Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, CV2, and elsewhere. Her first poetry chapbook, With Both Hands, was published through Anstruther Press. She is an MFA Candidate at the University of Guelph.

Monica Lowe was the Distribution Director at the Winnipeg Film Group since 2006. She spearheaded many important projects, such as the re-striking of Guy Maddin’s Archangel and the construction of a climate-controlled media vault. She was the Editor on Finding Focus: Framing Canadian Métis and First Nations on Film, and the Managing Editor on Place: 13 Essays, 13 Filmmakers, 1 City. Monica founded the Women’s Film & Video Network in 2015 and is one the founding members of VUCAVU, a comprehensive distribution platform for independent Canadian film and video. Monica served as the Chair of Nuit Blanche Winnipeg between 2012 and 2018. In July 2018, Monica was promoted to Deputy Director of the Winnipeg Film Group.

Niki Little is a mother, artist/observer/curator, and arts administrator. She is one of the founding members of The Ephemerals, who were long listed twice for the Sobey Art Award. She is of Anishininew (Oji-Cree)/British descent from Kistiganwacheeng (Garden Hill FN, MB), based in Winnipeg. Her interests lay in artistic and curatorial strategies that investigate immersive and non-linear storytelling, multi-generations, continuums, and consumption. For over 12 years, Little has been an art and cultural worker producing large creative projects through an Indigenous and community-based lens. From 2019-2021, she was the Artistic Director at imagineNATIVE (Toronto), the world’s largest presenter of Indigenous screen content. Prior to imagineNATIVE, Little was the Director of the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition (NIMAC) where she organized Listen, Witness, Transmit (2018), a national Indigenous media arts gathering in Saskatoon, SK that included roundtables, performances, screenings, and exhibitions. As an independent curator, Little co-curated níchiwamiskwém | nimidet | my sister | ma soeur, at the 2018 La Biennale d’Art Contemporain Autochtone (BACA) in Montréal and surrounding areas and co-hosted Migration, a three week on the land residency with Becca Taylor in Demmitt, Alberta. Little was part of the commissioned co-curated exhibition Nests for the End of the World (2020) at the Art Gallery of Alberta.

Julia Polyck-O’Neill (she/they) is an artist, curator, critic, poet, and writer. She is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Visual Art and Art History and the Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University (Toronto) where she studies digital, feminist approaches to interdisciplinary artists’ archives, and is the incoming 2023-25 Michael Ridley Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Guelph. She is a postdoctoral affiliate of the Archive/Counter- Archive Project, a member of the Feminist Media Studio, and a Research Associate with the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York. Her writing has been published in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (The Journal for Aesthetics and General Art History), English Studies in Canada, DeGruyter Open Cultural Studies, BC Studies, Canadian Literature, and other places. Her four poetry chapbooks include Material (Model Press), and Everything will be taken away (above/ground press).

Anjo-marí Gouws is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Toronto. Her current project, Personal Clutter: The Diary as Domestic Archive, 1960-1980, is a continuation of her interest in women’s work, feminist archives, and forms of personal documentation. She is also writing a monograph on experimental filmmaker Anne Charlotte Robertson.

​​Jeanine is a Mi'kmaw epit/woman. She is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Her SSHRC-funded research examines the photographic materials and record of Mi’kmaq persons and relations while situating myself as a Mi’kmaw epit/woman in this continuum of kinship relations through photographic self-portraiture. This work is grounded in Indigenous Studies disciplinarity focused on Indigenous feminisms and critical Indigenous theory with a methodological engagement in relationality, situated knowledges, and eroticanalysis. As a Mi’kmaw film photographer, she uses self-portraiture to dismantle settler colonial representations of self (corporeal/body and personhood) and collective nationhood/peoplehood experiences through a critical response to archival images of Mi’kmaq women. This research creation work recognizes Mi'kmaq women’s self-determination and corporeal (body) sovereignty, and points to a continuum of socio-political relationality that has been ignored in the archives. In this work, she acknowledges that, as Indigenous peoples, we are not solitary “objects” or “subjects,” but are embedded in spiritual/religious relations with other humans and more-than-human peoples in storied places, across time and space.

Geneva Gillis is a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto studying community museums in Ontario. She holds a MA in History from McMaster University and a MMSt from the University of Toronto where she critically examined the relationships between historiographical practices, memory, and interpretation used for public engagement with community histories in the GLAM sector. Geneva’s current research examines community engagement in small, local museums from the community’s perspective, focusing on how the histories, internal power dynamics, and local relationships of community museums challenge and change the engagement process and moments of transition in the institution. Geneva draws on years of professional experience in the GLAM sector and community-based research practices to inform the future of museum practices from local community perspectives.