Areas:

My interests include exploring new approaches to interactive musical performance and the use of generative systems within composition. Much of my recent work has involved the use of audio/visual technology for performance and installation interaction.  I am also a research assistant working with the Generative Electronica Research Project (GERP) within SCA and SIAT’s Metacreation Agent & Multi-agent Systems (MAMAS) Research group.

Bio:

I am originally from Pitt Meadows BC and live in Vancouver. I studied music at Capilano University majoring in jazz studies and trombone.  I am a composer and performer with a background in both traditional and electroacoustic music. 

Areas:

She is interested in examining the discursive constitutions of public spaces and in subverting everyday interaction with these spaces through the embodied interactions. She is currently researching the potential of interstitiality as an instance of non-definition, which, as such, remains non-identified because it is situated in between what has been delimitated. 

Bio:

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is a recent graduate of Concordia University’s Studio Arts Program and has moved from Montreal to Vancouver to pursue an MFA degree at Simon Fraser University. She is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who accomplishes interventionist performances in public spaces and plays with the documentation of these actions to create visual installations. 

She is the co-founder of MAAM, a Montreal-based art dissemination company, that published the artists’ book Lettres/Letters in October 2010. Recently, she co-curated the exhibition Furtive Conundrum at the 1612 Gallery, Vancouver, with Ryan Mathieson.

Areas:

Theatre, Music.

Bio:

James is Executive Director of Theatre Terrific.

He graduated from SFU Contemporary Arts with two BFAs, one in music and one in theatre. Outside of SFU, he collaborates in the theatre and music community.

Areas:

I am a multidisciplinary artist working mostly in video, installation and sculpture. I make art with the intention of stimulating a thought-process in the spectator through constructed artificial atmospheres, situations, and confrontations with seemingly dumb or absurd objects.  I have researched concepts and subjects such as ‘sensory deprivation’, ‘nothingness’, ‘systems’, ‘chaos’, ‘memory’ and ‘information theory’. In my studio I have been exploring simple ways of acknowledging and conveying the fundamental natural laws that govern and shape us. This exploration has resulted in a series of simple, poetic, borderline naive sculptures.

Bio:

I grew up in the countryside outside Oslo, Norway. I have a diploma in music and sound engineering from Sunnhordland Folkehøgskule, Norway (2002), Examen Philosophicum from the University of Bergen, Norway (2003), and a BFA with a major in Intermedia from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (2008).

Areas:

Bearing the imprint of previous study in English literature and history, his work in painting, sculpture, drawing, and video takes cues from the process of writing, in the sense that it develops like an obsessed-over sentence, full of negation and modified by clauses, and with a great deal of effort.  It is logical, partly mystical, and perforated by alternating bouts of the simple and the complex. It is often absurdly expansionistic and lacking in apparent clarity due to its chronic and programmatic mistaking of one idea for another.  There is
also the notion between all the works of an apparently unified plot playing out as a tension between “out there” and “in here”—a psychic dimension which sets a limit on the question of form in painting and invites a consideration of subject matter as emergent from a series of inevitable complications arising from the theatrics of expression.

Bio:

Steven Hubert was born in Kelowna, BC, and has spent the past ten years in Vancouver as a student, working at jobs, and playing music.  He graduated from Emily Carr in 2007 and has exhibited at CSA Space, Or Gallery, Helen Pitt Gallery, Shudder Gallery, LES, Emergency Room Strathcona, Eyelevel Gallery (Halifax), Jeffrey Boone Gallery, Cafca, and the Ministry of Casual Living (Victoria).  His work has appeared in Pyramid Power and The Fillip Review.  At SFU, he was the recipient of the C.D. Nelson Scholarship.

Areas:

Through choreography, Iris wants to show the existence of human being. She loves “time”, because that is the gift from God. She is currently choreographing a series of dance performances about time. Iris’s research interests are the interplay between different theatrical elements and applying Chinese philosophy and physics theories into her choreographies.

Bio:

Iris Lau is a dancer, choreographer and dancer instructor. She was born in Hong Kong and received her BFA in the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. During her study in the HKAPA, Iris was awarded several scholarships, including The Ohel Leah Synagogue Charity, Jackie Chan Charitable Foundation Scholarship and Carl Wolz Scholarship.

Iris has been a member of DanceArt Hong Kong since 2007, as performer and choreographer. She also performed in the different professional dance communities in Hong Kong, China, Canada and Paris. Since 2009, Iris has started her graduated study in SFU

Links:

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BR2SSpufL0

Areas:

Administrative support and general assistance for Graduate Students and the Graduate Program Committee.

Bio:

Milton is thrilled to be working with the administration team at SFU. Beyond the office, he is a collaborative performance artist, actor, and director with a physical devising background informed by contemporary psychology. Milton graduated from SFU Contemporary Arts in 2012 with a major in psychology and an honours in theatre performance; he is a Co-Artistic Director of the interdisciplinary arts company, Hong Kong Exile.

Website: WWW.HONGKONGEXILE.COM

Areas:

I am interested in critical theory that collides with predicaments of communication of experience. Themes of tropes and reproduction will continue to play a part in my projects as I explore the implications of repetition and visual art.

Bio:

I studied photography and design at the Alberta College of Art + Design before moving to Vancouver to pursue graduate studies. Being at the School of Contemporary Arts has sparked a significant change with the depth of investment I apply to my research and practice.

Much of my recent work has engaged with photography as a means to explore a display and translation of information. I’m interested in developing research that permits me to be critical about consumption and contribution of visual information to a given environment. My interests lie in the challenges associated with exploring this environment under arches of narrow and broad contexts. 

Areas:

I have been focusing on theatre and film as my two major disciplines.  My work is very versatile ranging from comedy to drama and naturalistic to surrealistic. However, my work often revolves around the notion of “sensory”, “identity” and “transcilturalism”. With the use of great theorist such as Artaad, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Bakhtin as well as contemporary writers and theorists such as Brian Massumi, and Jacques Rancière I work to research the notion of  “sensory” and  “affect” in the context of theatre.

Bio:

My background leading up to graduate studies comprises extensive theatre directing experience and a longstanding history of film studies, theatre history, art history, philosophy, gender studies and creative writing.  In the past five years I have been an active member in Vancouver theatre community as a freelance director, dramaturge and producer.  I have worked with various theatre companies such as: presentation house, Firehall art center, Itsazoo and 20something theatre in the past few years.  In 2009 I established my theatre company: theatre Phantasie and have been an artistic director of the company for the past couple of years.

Areas:

My practice is painting language and my overall project is to determine what is at stake when paint and language are invested in the same surface. So far in the MFA I’ve made paintings using word play and constrained writing, such as anagrams. Also, I am interested in writing short poetry, like two word poems, for painting. My plan is to figure out what material solutions are the best ones for representing language, especially poetic language and even poetry.

Bio:

In 2004 I moved from Prince George to Vancouver to be an artist. While I was in PG I took a degree in English Literature at UNBC. I still love Lit and suspect it will always inform my art practice. 

Areas:

Interests include acting, directing, and playmaking.

Bio:

Natalie Schneck is an SFU Contemporary Arts Graduate and a Vancouver based Theatre Artist.

Areas:

I am researching, both in theory and practice, the “processes” during creation of a performance and its value in compare to the “final product”.  
Such a process cannot be addressed by traditional concept of theatrical art and requires an innovative approach. Through researching on “Devising Theater”, I’ve worked on the value of the process and problematising it.  In the first year of my study I worked on a performance, “ White Dreams Never Come True!!”  as the writer and director, to apply all the theoretical issues of my research. This project was performed at SFU Woodward as part of the MFA Informal Show, Dark Arts. 

I’m interested in Experimental Theater and Contemporary Dance. I directed and choreographed two performances, “Charisma” and “ Yerma” that last year “Charisma” had been
performed in “Dancing on the Edge Festival” in Holland. When I started directing, I realized that I need to use various mediums of arts in order to create a performance. I, as a performer artist, consciously or unconsciously, am under the direct influence of visual arts. I believe that there are limited boundaries between various arts. They borrow from themselves and interact, influence and impress each other. I’m enjoying being in between.

Bio:

I’m an Iranian theater practitioner that got my BA in Stage Directing from the Art University in Tehran. I also studied Contemporary Dance and Choreography in Paris, through working in individually with French choreographer Rejane Douarre and attending in the Conservatoire de la Danse. 

Links:

Monitoring [A Doll's House] Trailer https://vimeo.com/50331122
Weblog about this project: http://synchingnora.wordpress.com/
My Website: http://www.pegahtabassinejad.com/#!cv

Areas:

Casey Wei is an interdisciplinary artist working through a multi-genre approach of video, text, collage, and installation to explore the methods in which identity unfolds as a process of consuming other identities.  She often places herself in the work as a performer and/or through diaristic means, weaving together a multiplicity of truths to destabilize any univocal understanding (and therefore complacency) of the art object.

Bio:

Casey Wei is currently completing her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Simon Fraser University, working on her thesis project tentatively titled, Murky Colors, a feature length experimental video/film. 

Recent exhibitions include The Dark Arts: SFU MFA Spring Review at 611 Alexander Studios, in which she showed: Equivalent Compositions of what you don’t want of everything you do; Murky Colors: Chapter 1; Jungle Print (in collaboration with Anna-Marie Repstock); Ride the White (in collaboration with Olivia Dunbar as the duo BBall + Realteensluts); and It is easy to create certain relationships amongst things that all have to do with you (in collaboration with Ryan Matheison), and I Could Be Wrong at the Audain Gallery, where All I Need is $23 000 (L &L, My Generation, Madonna’s Pap Smear) was shown.  Other recent works include a performance of a collage-monologue at Emily Carr’s Student Symposium: Liminal Positions in 2011, and White Light, a short story published in inter/tidal.iv, a literary journal.