Sessional Instructors & Lecturers

Aram Bajakian

Sessional Instructor: Music & Sound

E: aram_bajakian@sfu.ca

The music of guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian music has been called “a masterpiece” (fRoots), “shape-shifting” (FreeJazzCollective), and “sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing” (Chicago Reader). As a guitarist, “the virtuosic jack of all trades” (Village Voice) has toured extensively with Lou Reed, Madeleine Peyroux, John Zorn and Diana Krall. From 2018-2021, Bajakian served as the New Music Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music. Bajakian received his Bachelor of Music degree (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he studied with Dr. Yusef Lateef. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, where his advisor is Dr. Nathan Hesselink. His research focuses on contemporary and historic Armenian communities.

mynameisaram.net

Nicole Bond

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: nbond@sfu.ca

Nicole Rose Bond began her formal training at York University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts-Dance cum laude in 2005. Since that time, Nicole has felt privileged to perform works by many esteemed choreographers including Peggy Baker, Patricia Beatty, Tom Brouillette, Susan Cash, Bill Coleman, David Earle, Danny Grossman, Ryan Graham Hinds, Christopher House, James Kudelka, Learie McNicholl, Andrea Nann, Yvonne Ng, John Oswald, Peter Quanz, Peter Randazzo and Andrea Spaziani. She is currently a company member with Peggy Baker Dance Projects as well as a freelance artist.

As a teacher, Nicole has had the pleasure of working as a course director in Graham Technique and Contemporary Dance at York University, The National Ballet School, Arts Umbrella and Modus Operandi and has taught dance classes and workshops within the Toronto District School Board. As part of outreach initiatives through Toronto Dance Theatre, The National Ballet of Canada’s YOU Dance Program and Peggy Baker Dance Projects, Nicole has taught in Toronto, Dryden, Vancouver, Moncton and Whitehorse. Nicole has also served on the Toronto Arts Council Advisory Panel and as a member of the Dance Collection Danse ‘Encore: Hall of Fame’ Committee.

Nicole’s repertoire with Peggy Baker Dance projects includes: Land|Body|Breath at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in August of 2017; the premiere in Toronto of Who We Are In The Dark and subsequent performances in Montreal, Kingston, Ottawa, Whitehorse and Mexico in 2019 and The Netherlands in 2020, Her Body As Words in September of 2021; and Peggy Baker: A Gala Retrospective in Toronto in 2022.

Through her work as both a performer and a teacher, Nicole’s goal is to empower others to effect conscious change in the world whilst honouring those who have come before us. Nicole is beyond grateful that her vocation encompasses doing what she loves and is humbled by, and indebted to, the unique and beautiful arts community that she calls home.

Alexandra Caprara

Sessional Instructor: Performance Production & Design

E: alexandra_caprara@sfu.ca

Alexandra Caprara is a queer interdisciplinary artist and writer from Toronto, Ontario who has worked internationally as a director, designer, performer, and writer.  She creates work using a design lead methodology within her perfomance making practice, which often centers themes of femininity, autonomy, somatics, and queerness. In particular, she believes in creating works that celebrate queer joy, that push the boundaries of design within perfomance, and lately, that involve many disco balls. Within her practice as a lighting and video designer, her methodology considers the interactivity between design technology and performers, utilizing design as an extension of the body and architectural space.  With movement and physical theatre training in Viewpoints, Riverwork, and Lecoq, her work is highly physical and will often be devised through movement-based creation. 

Alexandra has worked across Canada alongside companies such as Electric Company Theatre, Theatre Replacement, Vancouver City Opera, Canadian Stage, WorkMan Arts, Downstages, and Good Woman Dance.  Internationally, her design work has been featured at The American School in Switzerland, and presented in the Prauge Quadrennial Technologies Symposium with her talk, "Making Strange: Creating Abstract Perceptions of the Body, Space, and Time, Using Light" (2024).  Select credits include being the touring lighting designer for HOT DYKE PARTY; direction and design of "Ultra Violets" (IndieFest); video and lighting design for "Silent Howl" (Dancing on the Edge); the co-creation of "EVREN" (Edinburgh Fringe Festival); writing and perfomance in "A Hunger Artist" (Prague Quadrennial); director and writer of "You've Got To Be Kidney Me" (Edinburgh Fringe Festival); and the creation and curation of "ThreadBare," (2020 Rendezvous with Madness Festival). She holds a BFA from York University where she trained in devised theatre, direction, and design.  Alexandra currently resides in Vancouver where she has recently completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

www.alexandracaprara.com

Joseph Clark

Sessional Instructor: Film

E: jec10@sfu.ca

Joseph Clark is a lecturer in film studies at Simon Fraser University. His research and teaching interests focus on archival and non-theatrical media, including newsreels, home movies, and sponsored film. He is a long-time member of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival Programming Committee and part of the organizing committee of the Vancouver Podcast Festival presented by DOXA. He is the author of News Parade: The American Newsreel and the World as Spectacle.

www.josephclark.me

Lisa Gelley

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: lisa_gelley@sfu.ca

Lisa Mariko Gelley (she/her) is an artist working in dance and performance, often in interdisciplinary and intergenerational collaboration. She is a mixed-race settler of Japanese, French, and Polish descent, living, working, and learning on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Lisa is Artistic Co-Director of Company 605, an arts organization devising, producing and presenting new dance projects, and centering collaborative processes rooted in community. Together with Artistic Co-Director Josh Martin, they have co-created many works including Inheritor Recordings, Future Futures, Vital Few, Anthem, Loop,Lull, After We Glow, Looping, and lossy. Their works have been presented internationally, at venues and festivals including  American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), New York City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, The Cultch, Usine-C and L'Agora de la Danse (Montréal), La Rotonde (Québec City), DanceWorks (Toronto), Live Art Dance (Halifax), The Banff Centre, On The Boards' NWNW and Bumbershoot Festival (Seattle), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Festival PRISMA (Panama), Festival Parentesis (Costa Rica), Tempel Kulturzentrum and Regensburger TanzTage (Germany), and the Sydney Festival (Australia). Through their work, Company 605 has built bridges with artists and audiences across the country and Internationally, reaching outward to connect and situate itself within the context of a global dance dialogue.

Some of Lisa's own recent works are centered around intergenerational intuition and ancestral memory, including MIDORI (EDAM Choreographic Series and The Polygon Gallery) Furusato, a film featuring a duet with her grandmother, Lily Yuriko Tamoto, and Paueru Mashup, a community-engaged work calling on traditional Japanese Folk dance and renowned exercise routines, commissioned by the Powell Street Festival. Lisa is the recipient of the 2015 Vancouver International Dance Festival Choreographic Award, and the co-recipient of the 2024 Lola Award. She is the mother of Loa Mayuri and Noemi Yuka.

Elisa González

Sessional Instructor: Film

E: elisag@sfu.ca

Elisa Gonzalez is a Toronto-based filmmaker rooted in the fine arts. She holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University and a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design. Her work ranges from experimental documentary to video installation that has  exhibited internationally. Elisa is a recipient of funding awards from  Canada Council for the Arts and the National Film Board of Canada among others. Her recent work explores the inherent structures of power between technology, the environment and the individual through  contemporary documentary form.

Kathleen Hepburn

Sessional Instructor: Film

E: khepburn@sfu.ca

Kathleen Hepburn is a writer/director based on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her debut feature, NEVER STEADY, NEVER STILL, which Variety Magazine calls a "stoically broken hearted debut," premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and was awarded Best Canadian Film and Best Director by the Vancouver Film Critics Circle, as well as Special Jury Prize at the Dublin International Film Festival. It went on to be nominated for eight Canadian Screen Academy Awards including Best Picture. Her sophomore feature, THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN (co-written and co-directed by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers) premiered at Berlinale in 2019, was awarded the Grand Prix at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, an honourable mention for Best Canadian Feature at TIFF '19, and the Toronto Film Critics Association Rogers Best Canadian Feature Prize. The film won 3 Canadian Screen Awards, including Achievement in Directing and Original Screenplay, and is currently streaming on NETFLIX in the US. Hepburn is currently in development on a youth-focused crime drama series with co-creator Elizabeth Cairns and Sphere Media Plus, as well as her next feature project THE NARROW EDGE with Experimental Forest Films. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing, and a BFA in Film Production from the Universities of Guelph and Simon Fraser respectively.

experimentalforest.ca

Daisy Thompson

Term Instructor: Dance

E: daisyt@sfu.ca

Daisy Thompson is an English settler living on the unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaɬ and xʷməθkwəy̓əm Nations, also known as Vancovuer. As a dance artist who performs, creates, educates, and writes, she seeks to extend ideas of the dancing body as a key site for the questioning of embodied power relations, and considers how the dancing body interrupts cycles of contemporary logics of control in relation to culture and identity.

After completing her dance training at the Laban Dance Centre in London, Daisy has had the fortune to work as dancer/performer with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (USA), Eva Karczag (Amsterdam), Emmalena Fredriksson (Sweden/Vancouver), Ugo Dehaes (Belgium), Lee, Su-Feh (Vancouver), Mascall Dance (Vancouver), and O’dela Arts (Vancouver), amongst more.

She has presented her own choreographic works internationally and locally, has worked as choreographer/movement coach for theatre including The Frank Theatre Company and Ruby Slippers Theatre, published several articles including the Performance Matters Journal and the Canadian Theatre Review, and regularly teaches in a variety of spaces in Vancouver, including Simon Fraser University, Training Society of Vancouver, WeDance and Polymer Dance. In 2013, she gained an MFA, and is currently a PhD student at Simon Fraser University under the excellent co-supervision of Dr. Peter Dickinson and Dr. Laura U. Marks.

Daisy is the proud mother of Obi and Sola.

www.daisythompsondance.com

Neil Wedman

Sessional Instructor: Visual Art

E: nwedman@sfu.ca

Neil Wedman was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1954. Making paintings stands at the core of thirty years of studio practice, but he has devoted almost equal attention to producing drawings and works on paper including print editions, book-works and photographs. He has also made a number of short films and musical recordings although not many of the latter.

He lives and works in Vancouver and is represented there by the Equinox Gallery.

www.neilwedman.com