Category: Artist

UK

Glyn Davies-Marshall is a performance and installation artist whose work has been presented throughout the UK as well as in Germany and Russia. He currently works as a Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Stafford College.

“From the early 1990s my work has dealt with my own symbolic order, colloquialisms, the words of my father, the stigma of a Northern upbringing and a persistent habit of perceiving situations in an overly romantic fashion. There have been developments and issues that have subconsciously infiltrated my practice and train of thought that have now become fundamental facets within my work. These include colonialism, dictatorship, the plight of those who are seeking asylum and a recollection of a place that I once called home.” ~Glyn Davies-Marshall

Artist Andre Stitt describes him this way: “An artist who combines a unique understanding of process combined with the manipulation of objects and materials to create strange and secretive juxtapositions of reality. His work resonates with humour and gut wrenching pathos.”

Canada

http://brianjosephdavis.com/

Brian Joseph Davis is a video artist and writer. His work has recently screened at the Geografias Suaves Video Festival in Mexico and his film Arrival won first place in the DFAIT IN Video Competition. It will open the new Canadian Embassy in Berlin in April 2005. His book Portable Altamont will be published by Coach House Books in Fall 2005. He also writes for Eye Weekly and Broken Pencil. His video work uses documentary to examine social groupings as imaginings and the documenting of them as impossibilities. He’s currently working on a feature length biographical documentary that only utilizes psychics hired from the backs of newspapers. He turns affirmations into negations for breakfast.

Canada

http://www.sophiecastonguay.ca/

Sophie Castonguay studies the subjectivation of gazes and cultural conditioning. She creates devices using the voice of the artist as an outside voice for the piece. Using narrative modes she attempts to create interference in the reception of the work and forces the spectator to question their position. Her work has been shown in Europe (Paris, Cologne, Basel) and in Quebec (L’œil de Poisson, Axe Néo-7, La Centrale, Dare-Dare, Dazibao). She holds a master’s degree in creation from UQÀM’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques (2007).

Canada

Alexandrose Dayment identifies as a human version of an elf. Formerly he worked as a bar supervisor at Signs Restaurant in Toronto. In his spare time, Alexandrose enjoys interacting with nature, cooking, and being involved with creative projects. English is not his first language and since he is culturally Deaf, he uses sign language to communicate – more specifically, American Sign Language (ASL). Alexandrose is kind-hearted, down-to-earth, gentle person with a special fondness for the colour green. He enjoys volunteering his time in the Deaf, Queer, and Disabled communities. He is involved with Supporting Our Youth (SOY) and Ontario Rainbow Alliance of the Deaf (ORAD). He strongly believes in volunteering and giving back to the community. Don’t ever doubt Alexandrose—he can always find creative solutions to your problems that would just make your jaw drop—his brilliance will amaze you!

Brazil / Canada

Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Henri-Louis Chalem has lived in Québec City since 1985. As a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker, he has worked in many media, including video, music, installation and performance. A fervent promoter of art in public space, his work is based on reflections about how others see it and the social function of art. Since 2007 he run in European little town with company UBUS THÉÂTRE, ambulant multidisciplinary puppet theatre His work has been presented in Quebec, Colombia, France, Taiwan, Morocco, Mexico, Croatia, Poland, Romania, Uruguay, Argentina , Cuba, Brazil.

b. 1967, Mexico

www.robertodelatorre.com

Roberto de la Torre lives and works in Mexico City. He studied at Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City, where he is currently a professor in Visual Arts. He has participated in various national and international art festivals throughout North and South America, and in Germany, China, Spain, Finland, Japan, India, England, Poland, Portugal, and Russia.

The monograph of his work, De la mordida al camello, Roberto de la Torre / Selected Work 2000-2005, was published in 2015 and his work appears in various other local and foreign media. He participated as a tutor in the Scholarship Program for Young Artists at the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) in the area of alternative media from 2010-2011, where he is currently part of an on-going program (2012-2015) to support the National System of Art Creators in the area of alternative means.

Hong Kong / Canada

May Chan was born in Hong Kong and she immigrated to Canada in 1963. Chan studied painting and drawing at Concordia University in Montréal, graduating in 1967. She earned a degree in art education from Queen’s University in 1976 and an M.F.A. from York University in 1984. Chan currently is based in Kingston, Ontario, working as a visual artist and writer and performance artist, but is perhaps best known as a performance artist. Her work is characterized by a steadfast, careful observation of everyday details and a keen eye for the expressive elements of personal history, which she uses to bring the audience into her way of perceiving. She has presented work extensively in Canadian artist-run centres over the past 25 years.

b. 1979, Belgium

http://alicedevisscher.wordpress.com

Alice De Visscher lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. She has been working exclusively in performance since 2006 and has presented her work in Belgium, Germany, Austria, Singagpore, Thailand and Canada.

De Visscher is interested in the image of her body, the structure of a space, and the properties of certain materials. In her work she is looking for unusual, quite minimal actions which stimulate the interpretations made by the audience. She uses her body, objects and space intuitively to create images that challenge expectations, and open new meanings. 

b. 1962, Taiwan / Canada / USA

www.milliechen.com

Millie Chen and Evelyn Von Michalofski have collaborated since 1990 while concurrently pursuing individual practices. Their performative interventions—situated in retail stores, an ethnological museum, and sight-seeing meccas—engage olfactory, tactile and gustatory materials in the context of examining notions of history, tourism, the body and cultural difference. Chen has exhibited widely in Canada, the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan and Mexico. She teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo and explores associations between the sensual and symbolic qualities of common yet potent materials such as bread, hair, rice and spices. 

b. 1969, Germany

www.bbbjohannesdeimling.de

BBB Johannes Deimling uses everyday objects to create a living image (agierte Bilder) reflecting a society full of contradictions, sentimentality, stupidity, creativity and cooperation. Finding ideas and suggestions from the banality of daily life, Deimling transforms topics such as patience, will, war, religion and transportation into physical images. The artist’s head is often a focus in the work, as an integral part of a living sculpture or as material in the performance.

Since 1988, BBB Johannes Deimling has worked as an artist in the fields of performance art, video, installation, drawing and music. His work has been presented at events and festivals in Europe, Israel, Canada and Cuba. Since 1998, Deimling has devoted much of his practice to lecturing on performance art at various academic institutions including: F+F (Switzerland) and Academy of Arts (Estonia). In 2006, he co-founded Port Performance – Forum for Performance Art, with artist Angelika Fojtuch. He is the founder and Director of PAS | Performance Art Studies, established in 2008.

USA

www.staceyannchin.net

Staceyann Chin is a spoken-word poet, performance artist, and activist. She is of Chinese-Jamaican and Afro-Jamaican descent and her work often discusses her struggles of growing up as lesbian and multiracial in Jamaica. She uses her work to question the oppression and the limitations of identity, race, class, sexuality and belonging. Her work has been profiled in more than 21 newspapers, journals and magazines such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the Pittsburgh Daily and her poems can be found in numerous publications. She has been interviewed and featured on CNN, 60 Minutes and the Oprah Winfrey Show as well as several other cable network television programmes. She is the author of The Memoir: The Other Side Of Paradise.

Canada

www.shawnadempseyandlorrimillan.net

Collaborators since 1989, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan are among Canada’s best-known performance artists. They were catapulted into the international spotlight in their 20s with the performance and film We’re Talking Vulva. Since then, their live work and videos have been exhibited in diverse venues as far-ranging as women’s centres in Sri Lanka to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This Winnipeg-based duo has created installations (such as Archaeology and You for the Royal Ontario Museum) and books (such as Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World, Arbeiter Ring Press). To most, however, they are known simply as the Lesbian Rangers of Lesbian National Parks and Services. Their humourous, feminist and provocative works have been acclaimed as “one of the high-points of contemporary Canadian artistic production” (Border Crossings Magazine). Performance documentation and artifacts are held in the collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian History Museum, the DIA Centre and numerous university libraries across North America.

Canada

http://nathalieclaude.com/

Nathalie Claude is a Montréal based actor, director, dancer, choreographer, writer, musician, clown, artistic coach, and dramaturg. As an actor she has over 50 professional theatre, dance, film and television credits. Her solo collaborative creations have toured across Canada, USA and Europe and garnered prizes and extensive media attention.

In the last 30 years she has been performing with Omnibus, Le Pool, Carbone 14, Pigeons International, Brouhaha Danse, Théâtre PÀP, Théâtre Il-va-sans-dire, Créations Diving Horse, Montréal Danse, Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental, Sybillines, Imago Theatre, The Other Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and Cirque du Soleil, touring in over 20 countries. She has appeared in several Canadian films, and television series, and for 6 years played a lead character on Quebec’s beloved sitcom, KM/H. In the fall of 2008 Nathalie won Best Actress at the MECCA awards  (Montreal critic circle awards) for her role as  Emily the “Pig” in the Imago Theatre production of The Baroness and the Pig. 

She is a member of Momentum; a Montreal theatre company comprised of 9 artists with distinctive visions. They are united in the shared desire to create contemporary works, and transcend the boundaries of the discipline. Her own creations with the company include, the critically acclaimed Les Filles de Séléné (1999-2001), La Fête des Morts co-created with Céline Bonnier (2002-2004), and Limbes/Limbo (2004) a co-creation with the dancer Lin Snelling.

Nathalie has also created six physical theatre solos including: The Sadness Trilogy (1999-2003); The Madness Trilogy and others. From 2001 to 2006 she wrote, directed, and performed five bilingual vaudevilles, for the sapphic and old-fashioned cabaret created by Miriam Ginestier: Le Boudoir. And between 1995-2001, she was a member of the musical collective: Les Secretaires Percutantes (The Percussive Secretaries) comprised of 7 actress-percussionists playing in kitsch costumes, with caustic humor, feminist joy and wild rhythms. “The secretaries” (Nathalie Claude, Mireille Leblanc, Suzanne Lemoine, Sylvie Moreau, Brigitte Poupart, Dominique Quesnel, et Isabelle Villeneuve) performed in many bars, cabarets, festivals an events of all kinds, including: Les Francofolies, Just For Laughs, Nuit d’Afrique, Black and Blue, and did an hommage at Gala les Olivier in 2001, for one of Quebec’s revolutionnary female artists: Clémence Desrochers.

In 2009 she was invited by the  Montreal  Museum of Fine Arts to co-design  the largest-ever retrospective of works by the celebrated pre-Raphaelite British artist, John William Waterhouse (1849-1917): The Garden of Enchantment. Then in 2010 she directed the opera by Gertrude Stein, Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights for the Theater Department of Concordia University in Montreal.

She is also a very active and in-demand MC for cabarets and festivals of all genres, and was for 4 years (2008-2012) an artistic coach for actors, characters, and clowns for Cirque du Soleil. From 2012-2015, she toured with Cirque du Soleil’s Amaluna, in which she created and played the male clown Jeeves.

Canada

www.danieledennis.com

Danièle Dennis’ experiences as an African-Canadian woman inform her practice and prompt her investigation of racial, cultural and identity issues primarily through performance, material exploration and installation. She actively attempts new ways to disrupt and dismantle social norms and constructs, employing repetition and process-based experimentation to the use of everyday and often abject elements such as hair and food. Her work seeks to trigger within the viewer critical thought, self-reflection, and dialogue around uncomfortable yet relevant subject matters.

Dennis obtained her Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto Scarborough in 2015, with a Specialist in Studio Art and a minor in Art History. She was born and raised in Montréal and currently works in Toronto. Dennis is also a co-founder of Y+ contemporary in Toronto.

UK

www.lenkaclayton.co.uk

Lenka Clayton is a UK born conceptual artist whose work exaggerates and reorganizes the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. In recent projects she has searched for and photographed the 613 people mentioned in a single edition of a German newspaper; collected, hand-numbered and redistributed 7,000 stones; filmed one person of each age from 1-100; and re-edited the 4,100 words of President Bush’s televised “Axis of Evil” speech into alphabetical order. She and writer Michael Crowe are currently writing a hand-written letter to every household in the world. Her son Otto was born in 2011.

Canada / USA

www.nativeartdepartment.org

Native Art Department International (NADI) is a collaborative long-term project created and administered by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan. It focuses on communications platforms and art-world systems of support while at the same time functioning as emancipation from essentialism and identity-based artwork. It seeks multiple strategies of infiltration by comprising a diverse range such as curated exhibitions, video screenings, panel talks, collective art making and documenting, and an online presence, however all activities contain an undercurrent of positive progress through cooperation and non-competition.

Canada

For 8 months in 2010, Kitty Neptune taught a group of 4 students how to pole dance. Her students, an unlikely bunch to be so taken with the pole, were speedy studies. They took on the challenge of learning a craft that is part acrobatics and part exhibitionism with dazzling results. The Pole Club had their first “Class Recital” in front of 150 of their friends. The crowd went wild and an annual event was born. Pole Club now operates as more of a collective. Each student, having found their own style and strength, strives to learn “new tricks” from each other. As well as surfing online for what the champions are doing and spurring each other on to try more difficult moves. Pole Club is Kitty Neptune, Charissa Wilcox, Axle Blows, Shanna Miller, and Shane MacKinnon.

France

www.guillaumedesanges.com

Guillaume Désanges is a free-lance curator and art critic, co-founder of Work Method, a Paris based agency for artistic projects. Member of the editorial board of Trouble, he collaborates with the magazines Exit Express and Exit Book (Madrid). He coordinated the artistic projects of Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2001-2007). In 2007-2008, he was curator at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Tôlerie. From 2009-2011, he is the guest curator at centre d’art le Plateau-Frac Ile de France, Paris. Désanges teaches at Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Clermont-Ferrand.

Canada

http://zerofunction.com/

Daniel Cockburn is a video artist, writer and closed caption editor. He has been making monologue-based film/video works since 1999. His works have been exhibited at various venues Canadian and international, including: Media City; Cinematexas; Images Festival; Cinematheque Ontario; Rendezvous With Madness Film Festival; Video Art Plastique; 25HRS; The Venice International Short Film Festival; Moving Pictures Festival of Dance on Film & Video; Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest; and the Portland Documentary and Experimental Film Festival.

Ireland

www.amandacoogan.com

Amanda Coogan’s practice concentrates on durational performance installation, and group performance made in collaboration. She has performed and exhibited her work extensively in Ireland (The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Gallery) and internationally in Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum), Barcelona (Galeria Safia), New York (PS1) and Paris (Centre Culturel Irlandais) and at The Venice Biennale and the Liverpool Biennial. She was awarded the Allied Irish Bank’s Art prize in 2004.

Most recently she has been working with the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf on a work entitled, I Told You to Wash and Clean Your Ears, which combines live art and community arts to tell the story of the 1972 protest by the Deaf community in Ireland against the shooting of Eamonn McDevitt by the British army. The work primarily uses Irish Sign Language, and highlights the recognition of ISL and the rights of Deaf people.

USA

www.naobustamante.com

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known artist, originally from the San Joaquin Valley of California; cutting her teeth as an artist in the San Francisco “Art Scene” between 1984-2001. She attended San Francisco Art Institute, where she fell under the influence of the notorious New Genres Department. Bustamante’s at times precarious and radically vulnerable work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing.

Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Arts, Sundance 2008, 2010, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. Her movies have been shown at venues and festivals across the globe, including OUTFEST – Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, MIX New York City, MIX Brasil, and the London Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Bustamante is popularly known for her appearance in the Bravo Network television show A Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, where she made her mark as a messy and complex character. 

The Theatre Communications Group in the book, Out of the Fringe, as well as the Theatre Drama Review, published by the MIT Press, has published Bustamante. In 2000 she received the GLBT Historical Society Arts Award. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. In 2008 She received the Chase Legacy award in Film (In conjunction with Kodak and HBO). And was the Artist in Residence of the American Studies Association in 2012. In 2013, Bustamante was awarded the (Short-term) CMAS-Benson Latin American Collection Research Fellowship and also a Makers Muse Award from the Kindle Foundation.  Currently Bustamante is the Queer Artist in Residence at UC Riverside and preparing for an upcoming solo exhibit at Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s video work is in the Kadist Collection.

Bustamante is alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, New Genres program and the Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture as a Video Fellow. Currently she holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

Tamyka Bullen is a POC Deaf feminist based in Toronto who is a social conscious artist and a social activist. She was involved in different organizations to educate about women issues/Deaf issues/Deaf LGBT issues for many years. In 2015 she launching a body care business that sell soaps, lip balms, body creams and other items to honour the Mother Earth. 

Canada / USA
www.cassils.net

Cassils use their hyper muscular body to undermine and interrogate systems of power and control. They view their body as a conceptual sculpture, a critique of the social pressure we feel to make our bodies conform to an aesthetic, gendered and cultural ideal. Their method is multidisciplinary and crosses a spectrum of performance, film, drawing, video, and photography, often employing many of the same strategies used by FLUXUS and guerrilla theatre.

Cassils has exhibited in London, Germany, at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwigin Vienna, Austria, at Center for Performance Research and Art in General in NYC, at the Yurba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, at USC Center for Feminist Research in Los Angeles and at Art Basel Miami Beach in Florida. They are a founding member of the Los Angeles based performance group The Toxic Titties with whom they have been working with for the past ten years. Recently, Cassils embarked on a series of solo physical performances (Hard Times and Tiresias) informed by Los Angeles body building culture, Greek mythology and experimental film. These performances animate the frozen look of a film still creating an effect that is not theatrical, but cinematic. The audience has the experience of being on set, witnessing a “take.” All aspects of production are present, which reveals how the image is constructed: lighting, special effects, choreography, sound, and highly trained and manicured body.

My work responds to the production of images. To inhabit Los Angeles is to live on a film set—to live in any city whose culture is defined by a mass culture of consumption is to find oneself defined by the images one consumes. ~Cassils

Canada

Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Adam Budd is a recent graduate of the BFA Media Production program at the University of Regina, where his film “Avery Jones” won Best Graduating Film and Director awards from the University. His video performances include U/O, Blair and Adam, Moral Relativism, and Dear Rejeanne.

Canada

Christine Carson is a Toronto-based artist who creates event-based aural and physical environments. Born in Peterborough, Ontario, Christine Carson is a Fine Arts graduate of Concordia University. Her work has been exhibited primarily in Québec and Toronto. An earlier version of NUMB / HUM was presented in Edmonton as part of the first VisualEyez festival (2000).

Switzerland

www.claudiabucher.com

Claudia Bucher studied sculpture at the City & Guilds of London Art School and Fine Arts at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. Since 2001 she has been working as a freelance artist in the mediums of Performance Art, Installation, Drawing and Printmaking.

“I perform in order to engage with my thoughts – and my questions, too. I think in images. I focus on the space surrounding me, myself as sculpture within that space, and on how an action can change the relationship between my body and my environment. As I interact intensively with a material in the here and now, a transformation occurs. I‘m interested in the moments of transition—when beauty changes into ugliness, when clean becomes dirty, when gentle turns aggressive—and the opposing associations they evoke.” ~Claudia Bucher

Colombia

Originally from Columbia, Constanza Camelo has lived and worked in Québec City and Montréal since 1994. Her early performances examined the hybrid cultural identity of her native culture. More recently, she has turned her attention to notions of private and public space through street actions that inscribe a temporary, utopian territory over the existing landscape.

Cuba

www.taniabruguera.com

Tania Bruguera produces political artworks through installations and performances. In January 2003 she opened Arte de Conducta, an artistic–pedagogical project in Havana. Her work has been shown at several international exhibitions including Documenta XI, the 49th and 51st editions of the Venice Biennale, the V and VII Havana Biennale, and the 23rd Sao Paolo Biennale, among others. She has had solo shows at the Kunsthalle Wien, Casa de las Americas, and Museo de Bellas Artes. Tania Bruguera was a participant in Documenta 11 (Germany) as well as in several biennales such as Venice (Italy), Sao Paolo (Brazil), Shangai (China), and Site Santa Fe (USA). Her work has also been exhibited at The New Museum of Contemporary Art (USA); The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago (USA); Boijmans van Beuningen Museum (The Netherlands); Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany), among others. In 2000 she received the Prince Claus Prize (The Netherlands).

Her work is part of the collections of the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Germany); Daros Foundation (Switzerland); JP Morgan Chase Bank (United States); Museum of Modern Art, artist book collection (United States); Bronx Museum (United States). Bruguera was featured in Fresh Cream (Phaidon, England); Performance Live Art Since 1060’s (Thames and Hudson, Ltd., England); Art Tomorrow (Terrail, France); Holy terrors: Latin American women perform (Duke University, USA); Corpus Delecti -Performance Art of the Americas (Routledge, England), among others. She has been written about in The New York Times, Le Monde, The Village Voice, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, and reviewed in Art News, Artforum, Flash Art, Art Nexus, The Nordic Art Review, Beaux Arts, Performance Research, Kunstforum among others.

She is the founder / director of Arte de Conducta, the first performance studies program in Latin America, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and she has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.

USA

Jeff Callen is a Chicago artist who creates interactive installations which he performs inside, inviting the audience to examine perception and narrative events. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited in India, Lithuania, Finland and Chicago.

Canada

An artist and writer, Joanne Bristol has presented installations, performances and video work across North America for the past 15 years. Current projects include bentaerial.net, a work for the web about technology, obsolescence and invention; and the Institute for Feline & Human Interaction, a matrix for ongoing projects in inter-species communication and cohabitation. In the fall of 2009, Joanne starts a practice-based PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture (London, UK). Her thesis, titled Performance Spaces for Domestic Animals, combines research in spatial culture with the emergent field of animal studies.

Canada

Michael Caldwell is a Toronto-based choreographer/performer. A graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, he has interpreted roles for many of Canada’s esteemed dance creators, including Peggy Baker, Sylvie Bouchard, Danny Grossman, Guillaume Côté, Maxine Heppner, Sasha Ivanochko, James Kudelka, Louis Laberge-Côté, Laurence Lemieux, Tedd Robinson, William Yong, among others, and has performed across Canada and the United States, in Europe, Asia, and Australia. Michael was an interpreter at Le Groupe Dance Lab, studying with the iconic Peter Boneham.

Michael is quickly emerging as a skilled, and critically acclaimed choreographer. His recent works include: Ash Unravel, an acclaimed solo based on his journey to Vietnam; The Horologium, a whimsical group piece created for Dusk Dances; and Mary, a dynamic new solo for Stéphanie Tremblay Abubo. With a bachelor’s degree in film and art history from Syracuse University, Michael seeks to incorporate cinematic sensibilities in all his work. Upcoming, Michael will begin creation on a new group choreography, based on loneliness and isolation.

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Portugal / Canada

Anselmo DeSousa was born in Azores, Portugal and moved to Canada in 1974. He is a talented Deaf actor and filmmaker now living in Ontario. He is a member of ACTRA. Anselmo’s credits include TV series and commericials, films, magazines, and independent films. His work includes the TV series Sue Thomas: F.B.EYE and Firehouse Dog as an ASL Consultant. In 2010 he wrote, directed, and produced his own short film entitled, Am I Dreaming?

Anselmo is also a talented cook and baker. Anselmo achieved his PME Masters Certificate (Sugar Flowers, Rolled Fondant, and Royal Icing & Piping) from Golda’s Kitchen. His passion for baking has led him to make over 50 different kinds of case for family and friends. He became certified in order to teach others the fine art of cake decorating. He has his own cake business called Cakes by Anselmo.

Currently, he works for Deaf Literacy Initiative as Project Coordinator and H3world.tv as Special Guest Host of DeafWaves in International Sign Language.

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Canada

[ field ] is an ongoing series of performance and installation collaborations between Toronto-based architect-installationist Brian Smith and performance artist Coman Poon.

Canada

Earning her PhD from the Social Justice and Education department at the University of Toronto in 2014, Eliza Chandler was dually appointed as the Artistic Director at Tangled Art + Disability, an organization in Toronto dedicated to the cultivation of disability arts, and the postdoctoral research fellow in Ryerson University’s School of Disability Studies from 2014-2016. During this time she was the also the founding Artistic Director of Tangled Art Gallery, Canada’s first art gallery dedicated to showcasing disability art and advancing accessible curatorial practice. Chandler is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University. She is the co-director of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded partnership project, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. This seven-year, multi-partnered research project considers the close relationship between art, accessibility, and social change as it contributes to the development of activist art, aesthetics, curriculum, and accessible curatorial practices across Canada. Chandler sits on the Board of Directors for the Ontario Arts Council and is a practicing disability artist and curator. She recently co-curated the group exhibitionBodies in Translation: Age and Creativity at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery and recent publications include Disability Arts and Re-Worlding Possibilities, a/b: Auto-Biographic Studies (2018). Chandler regularly give lectures, interviews, and consultations related to disability arts, accessible curatorial practices, and disability politics in Canada.

b. 1970, Israel

Yaron David works in video and performance art. He is also a curator and is active in the performance art scene in Tel Aviv, working with and organizing events with PAP (Performance Art Platform) including a monthly performance event (2004-2007), as well as the ZAZ International Performance Art Festival (2007, 2008). He is a writer and freelance editor, working with museums and cultural institutions. David’s work has been presented at international festivals in Israel, Crotia, UK, Finland, Istanbul, Poland, France and at the National Review of Live Art in Scotland, among other events and exhibitions. This will be David’s first appearance in North America.

Canada

Suzanne Caines received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1993 and a Bachelor of Education in 1999, graduating with distinction. She graduated with her Masters of Arts (Fine Arts) from Chelsea College, the London Institute in 2004. Caines has held several solo exhibits and has participated in group exhibitions and festivals in public galleries in North America and Europe these include Trampoline, Berlin Germany, Reception Space/Meals and SUV’s, London, England,The Projection Gallery, Liverpool, England,The Nunnery Gallery, London, England, Transmediale 2006, Berlin, Germany and VertexList Gallery, Brooklyn, New York. Caines has received several Canada Council Grants, Nova Scotia Arts Grants and has participated in several international residencies including CAMAC Marnay Sur Seine, France, The Future Idea of Art, The Banff Center, Canada, local artist in residence at CFAT, Halifax, Nova Scotia and Binaural, Portugal. She is currently working on issues surrounding locality and what that means to a community. 

Scotland

https://www.rosanacade.co.uk/

Rosana Cade is a Glasgow-based artist who mainly works in live performance. Whilst the form of her work varies and emerges in response to the specific context or inquiry she is engaging with, it is rooted in queer feminist discourse and straddles performance, live art, and activism.

She has been touring her acclaimed participatory performance Walking:Holding internationally for the past eight years, and has recently completed a film about the project. She regularly collaborates with her partner Ivor MacAskill, and they have recently been awarded the inaugural Diane Torr Bursary. She is part of the Take Me Somewhere Constellation of artists.

She is also co-founder of the radical performance collective //BUZZCUT// who support live art and experimental performance in Glasgow with a strong community focused ethic.

Cameroon

Michel Bitimbhe is a Cameroonian artist and performer. He studied at the Université de Yaoundé II in Sao and has collaborated with many artists based in Douala and Yaoundé. Bitimbhe is known for his work producing and co-hosting cultural programs broadcast on various radio stations in Yaoundé. Since 2008, he has been director of the RAVY festival (Rencontre des Arts Visuels de Yaoundé). He was also one of the coordinators of the Bakassi Peninsul’art artistic intervention project held in 2012 in Limbe and again in 2014 in Tiko and Idenau in southwestern Cameroon as well as in Limbe. In 2016, he participated in a performance art training workshop that explored the subject of the environment. He is currently studying art history at the Institut de formation artistique (IFA) in Mbalmayo.

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artist bio

USA

Spoken word rapped with music bringing images to consciousness. Chicago performance poet Marlon Billups won a spot on the Bellwood, IL 1998 National Poetry Slam team. He is the co-founder and host of Third Floor Poets and has been featured at the Chicago Cultural Center. Marlon’s poetry has braced the audiences at the DuSable Museum, Chicago State University, Guild Complex, and Afrika West to name a few. His work has been published in the Eagle and Egg: A Literary Journal. Look for Marlon’s poetry in his forthcoming collection Breathing, in addition to the soon-to-be released Urbanicity Spoken Word CD. He is a member of Chicago Writers Collective: A Community of Writers and Seven Plumpp* Poets (*Blues poet Professor Sterling Plumpp).

Canada

www.rachelechenberg.net

Rachel Echenberg is a visual artist who works in performance, sculpture, photo and video. Since 1992 Echenberg’s work has been exhibited, performed and screened across Canada as well as internationally in Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, England, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Morocco, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States. Her videos have been represented by Vidéographe Distribution since 2002. Rachel Echenberg is vice-president and programming member of the biennale performance art festival VIVA! art action as well as a board member of Optica, centre for contemporary art. She is a teacher in the Fine Arts department of Dawson College in Montréal, Canada.

Canada

Shanker Bhardwaj’s most recently participated in the Annual Alternative Design Event at the Gladstone Hotel where they designed a room in collaboration with Lisa Young Kutsukake, along with Anitra Hamilton, Luis Jacob, Jeremy Laing and Jade Rude.

Canada

Sadie Berlin is a theatre and performance artist who documents how social intolerance and oppression shape ever-mutable and fluctuating aspects of self-definition. In her sometimes racialized work, Berlin uses her many intersections to reflect cis-straight whiteness back to audiences. This telegraphing of oppression as an infection that engraves itself onto and inside marginalized bodies, interrogates notions of free will and freedom to create/conjure/imagine without boundaries. The gifts in the added textures and modalities of marginalization have in them the constraints of oppression, and, how the marginal and marginalized artist navigates this complex path is a major preoccupation of Berlin’s work.

Canada

Originally from the Gaspé area of Quebec, Sylvette Babin lives and works in Montréal, Canada. Sylvette Babin has been the head of Esse arts + opinions magazine since 2002. She has an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. As a performance artist, between 1997 and 2015 she participated in a number of art events in Canada and internationally. As an author, she has published in several magazines, artist catalogues and books and was the curator for events such as Les Convertibles, produced by Culture pour tous (2006), Infraction 08 (Sète, France, 2008) and Il Nostro Gusto (Saint-Hyacinthe, 2009). She has also taught ‘art and urban theatre’ at Collège Shawinigan, and visual and media arts at Cégep de Saint-Hyacinthe.

Canada

Randy & Berenicci are Toronto-based artists who have been collaborating together for 30 years producing a unique body of site-specific art. Their work, which includes various public art commissions as well as an extensive history of recognition in art venues around the world, incorporates performance, video, sculpture and installation. This will be their first major performance event in Toronto in more than a decade.

Tunisia / Canada

www.soufiabensaid.com

At 5 years old I am an artist. At 10 years old I am a detective. At 15 years old I am a searcher. At 20 years old I am a student of mathematics and physics. At 25 years old I am a hydraulic engineer. At 30 years old I am an immigrant in Canada. At 35 years old I am free. At 40 years old I am an artist.

I was lucky enough to cross and live in multiple cultures, societies and professional environments between Tunisia where I was born, France where I studied and Canada where I live now. This path allowed me to live a transformational identity, and question the perception gaps and the foundation of oneness and existence. My art practice is interdisciplinary. It uses what comes to it to achieve a research, face a question, encounter what is here. To receive the present. It is at the intersection of performance art, site specific action, installation, writing, drawing, movement, relational esthetic, participatory projects. Being in relation/in relationship to, attentive to, present with, is at the foundation of my work. The relationship between oneself and one other offers a field of presence, a field of consciousness that facilitates transmissions. As such, I am interested in the way relationships reflect our perception of the world while offering opportunities for transformation. Influenced by a scientific background, my work points links between art, philosophy and science. Through the performance, installation and art pieces I offer experiences that question the subjectivity of each one perception, beliefs and reference systems.

Canada

www.rebeccabelmore.com

A member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), Rebecca Belmore is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist.

Rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, Belmore’s works make evocative connections between bodies, land and language. Solo exhibitions include: Facing the Monumental, Art Gallery of Ontario (2018); Rebecca Belmore: Kwe, Justina M.Barnicke Gallery (2014); The Named and The Unnamed, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, (2002). In 1991, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother was created at the Banff Centre for the Arts with a national tour in 1992 and subsequent gatherings took place across the Canada in 1996, 2008, and 2014.

In 2017, Belmore participated in documenta 14 with Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany. In 2005, at the Venice Biennale, she exhibited Fountain in the Canadian Pavilion. Other group exhibitions include: Landmarks2017 / Reperes2017, Partners in Art (2017); Land Spirit Power, National Gallery of Canada (1992); and the IV Bienal de la Habana (1991).

Belmore received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award (2004), the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award (2009), the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016). She received honourary doctorates from OCAD University (2005), Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2018), and NSCAD University (2019).