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She/Her/Hers

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Student Researcher

Esmée Colbourne

MA Student, Communication and Culture
Toronto Metropolitan University
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She/Her/Hers

Esmée Colbourne is a writer, musician and first year student studying in the Communication and Culture programme at Ryerson University.

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Rebecca Cairns' headshot
Student Researcher

Rebecca Cairns

MA Student
Toronto Metropolitan University
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She/Her/Hers

Rebecca Cairns is an analogue photographer and a first year student studying in the Photography Preservation and Collections Management program at Ryerson University.

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Student Researcher

Harnoor Bhangu

PhD Student, Communication & Culture
Toronto Metropolitan University
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

Noor Bhangu is a curator and scholar, whose practice employs cross-cultural encounters to interrogate issues of diaspora and indigeneity in post- and settler-colonial contexts. Through curatorial intervention, she hopes to involve politics of history, memory and materiality to problematize dominant histories and strategies of presentation. She completed her BA in the History of Art and her MA in Cultural Studies: Curatorial Practices at the University of Winnipeg. Her curatorial practice includes projects: Overlapping Violent Histories: A Curatorial Investigation into Difficult Knowledge (2018), womenofcolour@soagallery (2018), Not the Camera, But the Filing Cabinet: Performative Body Archives in Contemporary Art (2018), Lines of Difference: The Art of Translating Islam (2019) and Digitalia (2019). In 2018, she began her PhD in Communication and Culture at Ryerson and York University in Tkaronto, Toronto.

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Collaborator

Victoria Sigurdson

Media Collections Librarian
York University Libraries
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She/Her/Hers

Sigurdson has dedicated her career to empowering teaching, learning and research communities through the development of responsive university library services and collections. She is a graduate of York University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts Studio) program and holds a master’s degree in Library & Information Studies from Dalhousie University. 
In addition to an established history of collaborative projects with diverse stakeholders, her library experience includes visual materials management, reference and research services, digitization activities, accessibility services, as well as intellectual property and licensing consultation. 
Her research focuses on library accessibility, specifically in relation to media materials. Current interests include the role of arts funding programs and media organizations in providing equitable access to media works, developing media accessibility curriculum, and how legislation shapes library accessibility services in the academic environment. Other topics of interest include the phenomenology of artmaking and creative spaces, analog and instant photographic processes, and olfactory art.

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Amber Berson
Collaborator

Amber Berson

Executive Director
The Visual Arts Centre
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

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.

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Research Associate

Shana MacDonald

Associate Professor
University of Waterloo
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She/Her/Hers

Dr. Shana MacDonald is an Associate Professor in Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her interdisciplinary research examines feminist, queer, and anti-racist media activisms within social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, and contemporary art. Dr. MacDonald runs the online archive Feminists Do Media (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance). She is co-editor of Networked Feminist Activisms: Digital Practices and Activist Assemblies (Lexington Press 2021).

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Partner

Leslie Supnet

Executive Director
Winnipeg Film Group
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

Leslie is a Filipinx moving image artist and educator, who has worked with artist-run centres for over 12 years. She has taught extensively in the community as a facilitator, mentor and academic instructor, with service on artist-run Boards in Winnipeg and Toronto. Leslie has programmed artist-driven screenings at the Winnipeg Cinematheque, Pacific Cinematheque, Pleasure Dome and Plastic Paper: Winnipeg’s Festival of Animated, Illustrated and Puppet Film. Leslie’s artistic practice spans various media – animation, analog film/video, expanded drawing and design, with works screened at TIFF, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Image Forum Festival in Japan, Flaherty NYC and Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen amongst many others. She holds an MFA in Film Production (experimental stream) from York University.

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Partner

Elida Schogt

Director
Media Arts Network of Ontario
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

With over 20 years rooted in the media arts sector as a filmmaker, teacher, administrator and consultant, Elida brings expertise in mentorship, advocacy, and leadership to the position of Executive Director of the Media Arts Network of Ontario (MANO). Elida is best known for “Zyklon Portrait,” her internationally-acclaimed short experimental documentary on matrilineal trauma. The late Peter Goddard, of the Toronto Star, described the 16mm collage piece–made with archival stills, footage and hand-painted imagery–as “elegantly haunting and perhaps the most visually lush film about the Holocaust ever made.” Elida has a PhD in practice-based visual arts from York University and an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research in New York. She has built her understanding of anti-oppression and equity frameworks through her doctoral research grounded in feminism and intersectionality. She is actively working to extend this sensibility and sensitivity beyond her blind spots.

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Partner

Leslie Supnet

Executive Director
Winnipeg Film Group
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

Leslie is a Filipinx moving image artist and educator, who has worked with artist-run centres for over 12 years. She has taught extensively in the community as a facilitator, mentor and academic instructor, with service on artist-run Boards in Winnipeg and Toronto. Leslie has programmed artist-driven screenings at the Winnipeg Cinematheque, Pacific Cinematheque, Pleasure Dome and Plastic Paper: Winnipeg’s Festival of Animated, Illustrated and Puppet Film. Leslie’s artistic practice spans various media – animation, analog film/video, expanded drawing and design, with works screened at TIFF, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Image Forum Festival in Japan, Flaherty NYC and Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen amongst many others. She holds an MFA in Film Production (experimental stream) from York University.

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Postdoctoral Researcher

Julia Polyck-O'Neill

Postdoctoral researcher
York University
Pronouns
She/Her/Hers

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).

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