Dorothy Barenscott

Sessional Instructor: Art, Performance & Cinema Studies

E: dorothy_barenscott@sfu.ca

I am an art historian, professor, and writer whose interdisciplinary research relates to the interplay between urban space and emerging technology and media forms in the articulation of a range of modern and postmodern identities and exhibition practices. My publication record reflects these interests with examinations of painted panoramas, experimental and mainstream cinema, modern architecture, conceptual photography, radical place-making, theories of the avant-garde, cosmopolitanism, and the business of art and art collecting. My work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications such as Postmodern Culture Journal, Invisible Culture, History and Memory, Slavic Review, Mediascape, Slovo, Left History, and Victorian Review. I have also presented my research internationally at academic conferences and invited talks and lectured on the history of modern and contemporary art, photography, architecture, and film at the University of British Columbia, University of Lethbridge, and Simon Fraser University.

www.dorothybarenscott.com

Justine A. Chambers

Term Lecturer: Dance + Theatre Performance

E: jachambe@sfu.ca

Justine A. Chambers is an artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances ‘that are already there’ – the social choreographies present in the everyday. Her choreographic projects have been presented at Nanaimo Art Gallery, Artspeak, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Art Museum at University of Toronto, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, Agora de la Danse, Festival of New Dance, Mile Zero Dance Society, Dancing on the Edge, Canada Dance Festival, Dance in Vancouver, The Western Front and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

justineachambers.com

Shannon Cuykendall

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: shannon_cuykendall@sfu.ca

Shannon Cuykendall (PhD) is a transdisciplinary artist and scholar working across the fields of dance, interaction design, and cognitive science. She lives in Vancouver, Canada on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples and is an instructor at SFU (School of Interactive Arts + Technology and the School for the Contemporary Arts). Shannon studies dance cognition or how dancers learn movement. She is interested in how kinesthetic knowledge can be  transmitted online to both reach broader audiences and extend one’s knowledge of the body. In 2017 she launched A Performer’s Perspective, an online interactive documentary that translates three dancers’ experiences. She previously worked as a research assistant at UC San Diego’s Interactive Cognition Lab analyzing the cognitive practices of dancers in Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company. Her research in dance cognition has received international recognition and is published in the journal of Psychological Science and the Cognitive Science Society.

Shannon’s interactive artwork explores how the use of lo-fi, accessible mobile technologies can create fewer barriers between the performer and the technology. She seeks to design opportunities for audiences to engage kinesthetically in the joy of movement. In 2015 she co-created POEME: A Poetry Engine, an interactive, theatrical movement installation that interprets acceleration data from participants’ mobile devices into whimsical poetry while referencing issues of surveillance in the choreographed routines of mass transit. Shannon’s choreography and interactive installations have been exhibited and performed in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She has recently started making dance film and exploring the possibilities of what she calls “quarantine technique.” Her film, Floating Departures (2021) has been screened at festivals and conferences in Chicago, Santa Barabara, Brazil, and will be coming to Vancouver in October 2022.

Research Interests: Interactive and Hybrid Dance Performance, Dance Cognition, Kinesthetic Empathy, Enaction, Kinesthetic Design, Dance Expertise and Movement Perceptionshannoncuykendall.wordpress.com

Janet Danielson

Sessional Instructor: Music

E: jrd@sfu.ca

Janet Danielson is a composer whose works have been performed in England, the U.S., and Canada by ensembles ranging from the Vancouver Chinese Instrument Ensemble to the Vancouver Symphony and CBC Radio Orchestras. Her recent commissioned works include an opera, The Marvelous History of Mariken of Nimmigen, commissioned by Music in the Morning; The Occupation, a song collaboration with poet Robert Bringhurst, for baritone, marimba and viol da gamba; and In the Very Highest Place, a setting Wu Li’s poetry for chorus and the Orchid Ensemble (marimba, zheng, erhu) premiered November 2007. Her realization of Verbum Caro, a 17th-century Canadian Ursuline carol, was premiered in Rome at Christmas 2007, and a string quartet for the Royal Society of Canada Symposium on War and Peace in November 2008. She has taught courses related to music theory, analysis, music and culture, and composition at Simon Fraser University and at Regent College, and has authored a text, Basic Organization of Music. Her articles have been published in Musicworks and in the Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Composers’ League. Danielson is former Associate Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music and ChairAssociation of Canadian Women Composers, and has served on the Executive Council of the Canadian League of Composers. Current commissions include a work for string orchestra and erhu for Vancouver Pro Musica, for whom she is 2010 Composer-in-Residence, and a cello sonata for the 2010 Vancouver Music/Grail conference. She is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre.

Karla Desentis Rodriguez

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: karla_desentis_rodriguez@sfu.ca

Karla Desentis is a dancer, choreographer, designer, and musical theater actress. One of her strongest interest is to do art interventions, performances, video-dance, dance theatre, and physical theatre.

She began her career in the performing arts at the age of five and concluded her studies as a dancer after 13 years of training in classical, contemporary, jazz and folklore technique at the Mexico City Ballet Academy. Her increasing interest in performing arts led her to study other disciplines like singing and acting at the CECAAP where she got a Musical Theatre diploma. Also, she studied set and costumes design at UNAM where she graduated from the Bachelor in Industrial Design, 2010, receiving an Academic Merit Diploma. Furthermore, she graduated from the Bachelor in Choreography at INBA, 2015, with an Honorable Mention in Excellence.

Within artistic residency programs, she has been benefited from the INBA Foundation for the summer program at the School of Toronto Dance Theater in 2012 and by The Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, for the Indigenous Dance Residency program in 2016.

In the professional field, Karla has been in numerous dance productions as a dancer, as well as a director of her choreographic work. As a teacher she has worked for over ten years, being in charge of groups of all ages; being responsible for the choreographic assembly. Recently she has been teaching an interdisciplinary (dance and design) workshop for the Faculty of Arts and Design at UNAM.

Emmalena Fredriksson

Term Lecturer: Dance

E: emmalena_fredriksson@sfu.ca

Emmalena Fredriksson is a contemporary dance artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada, as a guest on the ancestral unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples. 

Her practice is defined by choreography as a relational practice in the expanded fields of dance, often collaborating with artists of other disciplines, creating choreographic experiences and dance for social events, film, galleries and performance.  

Born in Sweden, she received her training at Balettakademien in Umeå and at SEAD in Austria. Emmalena has presented choreographic work, performed and taught internationally with Daghdha Dance Company (IE), Canaldanse (FR), Malta University (MT), Pact Zollverein (DE), and Falmouth University (UK) among others.

Based in Vancouver since 2013 her work has been presented in Dancing on the Edge, The Dance Centre's Discover Dance Series, Dance in Vancouver's Choreography Walk (curated by Justine A. Chambers), Dance Days (Victoria) and at the Audain Gallery. Commissioned by the National Film Board, she co-created Tidal Traces – a VR 360 dance film together with Nancy Lee in 2017. The film has to date had over 35 international screenings.

Emmalena holds an MFA degree from Simon Fraser University and she regularly teaches at Modus Operandi, Training Society of Vancouver, Harbour Dance Centre and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

www.emmalenafredriksson.com

Alana Gerecke

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: alana_gerecke@sfu.ca

Alana Gerecke (PhD, Simon Fraser University, 2016) is a settler scholar and dance artist based in Vancouver, on the unceded traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh nations. Her academic and artistic research practices cohere around embodied assembly. Gerecke holds a PhD from Simon Fraser University, where she pursued dissertation research on the urban spatial politics of site-based dance. She has taught at Simon Fraser University, the University of the Fraser Valley, and other institutions, and she recently completed a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at York University (2016-19).

Gerecke continues to create, perform and publish widely – most recently in Performance Matters Journal, Canadian Theatre Research and The Futures of Dance Studies. She is the mama of two objectively adorable small humans.

www.alanagerecke.com

Elisa González

Term Lecturer: 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.

Martin Gotfrit

Course Supervisor: Music

E: gotfrit@sfu.ca

Areas: Music (improvisation, performance, electro-acoustics), Film (soundtrack related), Theatre (sound design, music), New Media (Interactive systems, installations, theatre).

Often collaborates with other musicians as well as artists from other disciplines such as dance, theatre, film/video, new media and installation art. His work has been presented both locally and internationally. An avid improviser and multi-instrumentalist, he is active in several local music ensembles.

Born Montreal, Quebec. Resident of Vancouver since 1977. Married with two children.

BA Music and Film Joint Major, Concordia University 1974
MA Communications, McGill University 1977

sfu.ca/~gotfrit

Lief Hall

Session Instructor: Music & Sound

E: lief_hall@sfu.ca

Lief Hall is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and composer living in Vancouver, BC on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Hall’s practice as an interdisciplinary artist incorporates sound, installation, video, multimedia performance and choreography. Her interdisciplinary installation and performance works explore themes of nature, technology and the body as they relate to mythology, mysticism and the posthuman voice. Hall’s music and compositions often incorporate extended vocal techniques, vocal processing and experimental electronics.

Hall completed her MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and a BMA in Animation from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005. Hall’s research includes a focus in sound studies, performance, popular music and posthumanism. Hall has shared her research in her lecture series Mythology, Gender and Cyber-Virtual Identity in Popular Music Performance and Un/Seen: Performing the Invisible.

Hall was previously one half of the dark electronic pop music and performance duo MYTHS who toured with Grimes in 2012 and created their own electronic opera. Hall began releasing solo music while living in Berlin in 2014. Hall often incorporates visuals she created within her live music performance as well as collaborating with other musicians, especially including drummer Kevin Romain and harpist Elisa Thorn.

www.liefhall.ca

Sustrisno Hartana

Term Lecturer: Music & Sound

E: sutrisno_hartana@sfu.ca

Sutrisno Hartana, master of Javanese gamelan music, and shadow puppets, performs internationally throughout Asia, Europe, and North America in both traditional and contemporary works. Mr. Hartana attended the Indonesian Dance Conservatory in Java and received his BA in 1992 from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) in Yogyakarta. In 2004, the King of Paku Alaman garnered him the title Mas Lurah Lebda Swara making him a court musician at the Royal Palace in Java. Mr. Hartana holds his MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia and completed a PhD at the University of Victoria in the interdisciplinary program. He also directs and teaches gamelan with Victoria’s Busy Island Gamelan

Josh Hite

Sessional Instructor: Theatre Performance

E: jhiteecu@sfu.ca

Josh Hite works with video, animation, sound, and photography, often creating reorganized archives of particular spaces or behaviours, either through his own recordings or by appropriating content through sites like YouTube. Leaning more on an ethnography that acknowledges content as a driving force, his practice considers tactics for documentation as a determinant of eventual form, rather than using art historical or cultural references as structural assistants. Projects tend to query relationships between an experience and its location, the power dynamics at play, and the ways in which transitions and sequencing propel us through time.

Farshid Kazemi

Sessional Instructor: Film

E: farshid_kazemi@sfu.ca

Farshid Kazemi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. His research interests combine an interdisciplinary and theoretical approach to Film and Media Studies/Film Theory, Iranian Studies, and Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on Iranian cinema and second wave psychoanalytic film theory titled: The Interpreter of Desires: Iranian Cinema and Psychoanalysis. He has published several articles and book chapters on Iranian cinema, psychoanalytic film theory/feminist film theory in journals such as Camera Obscura. His book on the film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night will be published by Auteur/Columbia University Press in 2020.

Sophia Laurio

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: slaurio@sfu.ca

Sophia “SOSA” Laurio is a Filipina born and raised, interdisciplinary artist and a first-generation immigrant. Sophia embarked on her journey of becoming a full pledged performance artist by training for over a decade under the guidance of educators like Jeri Chien, Victor Tran, Kenny Mugisha (Now or Never Crew), Deni Kang (Black Mamba Crew), Mikhail Venom Moris (Dancehall Donz), Elite Force Crew (NYC), Mr. YouTube (NYC), PyroTechs (NYC) and University professor and Streetdance educator, Moncell Durden (NYC).

Sophia is well versed in freestyle dance, choreography and has won and judged battles across the lower mainland. In 2016, Sophia became a cast member of Vancouver’s first authentic Dancehall theatre production under the direction of Ketch di’ Vybz’ Mikhail Moris and Judy Madaraz. During this production, she was invited to become a member of Vancouver’s leading art and fashion collective ‘Immigrant Lessons’. Since then, Sophia has traveled and performed on international stages like RAW Artist Emerge Fashion Show in Los Angeles, California, the Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance in New York City and the Manila Fringe Festival in the Philippines.

Sophia currently trains in a plethora of styles outside of Street Dance such as contemporary, movement exploration, GAGA, theatre, acting and creative writing. Through her most recent work, Sophia explores her identity and the complexities of coexisting and being featured in prestige theatre and dance platforms like Dancing on the Edge, Vancouver Fringe Festival, Manila Fringe Festival, Daloy Dance Company, Co. ERASGA and Emily Carr University. This has ignited her to unravel her purpose as an artist, student, director and leader and to give back to her own community by founding a non-for-profit organization called “Barangay Project Society.” Focused on providing mentorship in art & dance education, free to BIPOC youth and emerging artists to inspire and help realizing their dreams.

In her classes, Sophia shares her experiences of navigating through the arts as a visible minority and specifically as a woman of colour. She pushes the Hip Hop mantra “Love, Peace, Unity and Having Fun”. With this, she aims to guide the next generation of young artists to grow and mould their voices to be the leaders of their communities.

Lee Su-­Feh

Sessional Instructor: Theatre Performance

E: su-feh_lee@sfu.ca

Lee Su-Feh is Artistic Director of battery opera. How this happened involved: Childrens’ Theatre with Janet Pillai, traditional Malay and contemporary dance with Marion D’Cruz in Malaysia, contemporary dance with Lari Leong in Paris, contact improvisation with Peter BIngham in Vancouver; and many years of Chinese martial arts with infuriatingly exacting teachers. Before coming to Vancouver in 1988, she lived in Paris, London, Indonesia and Malaysia.  She speaks 6 languages badly. In 1998, she won the Prix de Jeune Auteur of the Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationales de Seine-St. Denis for her work Gecko Eats Fly. In theatre, Su-Feh has worked as a choreographer with directors such as Marc Diamond, Donna Spencer and most recently DD Kugler and Steven Hill. She has been nominated twice for a Jessie Award. In 2012, her solo work The Whole Beast won the BOH Cameronian Award for Outstanding Choreography in Malaysia. In 2013 and 2014, she was awarded the Isadora Award and the Lola Award respectively, by the Dance Centre in Vancouver, in recognition of her contribution to the dance milieu through her work as choreographer, dancer, teacher, dramaturge and all-around shit disturber. In 1995, she co-founded battery opera with David McIntosh with whom she has been collaborating ever since she saw him lying, bleeding, in Kota Baru in 1985.

Margarida Macieira

Sessional Instructor: Dance + Theatre Performance

E: mca277@sfu.ca

Margarida is a freelance dance artist, Gaga teacher, and event producer working primarily in London (UK), Tel Aviv (Israel), Lisbon (Portugal) and Canada.

As a dance artist, Margarida has performed with companies such as Gil Kerer Dance, Jean Abreu Dance, James Cousins Company and Company Chameleon. Since March 2018, in partnership with Nicolas Ventura, Margarida is co-director and production manager of Addo Platform, developing dance workshops and regular classes in Vancouver, Toronto and Lisbon. Meanwhile, she is also creating her own work as a choreographer and collaborator and enjoys delving into multidisciplinary projects. Born in Lisbon, Portugal,  she studied ballet, Graham technique, choreography and general Arts at Academia de Dança Contemporânea de Setúbal. In her last year of studies, she joined Quorum Ballet Company as an apprentice. In 2013, she moved to London to study at London Contemporary Dance School, graduating with a 1st BA (honors) in dance.

During 2018/2019, she undertook the Gaga Teacher Training program in Tel Aviv, Israel, supported by GDA Foundation in Portugal. The individualized program is under the artistic direction of Bosmat Nossan, Saar Harari, and Ohad Naharin.

www.addoplatform.com/margarida-macieira

Billy Marchenski

Sessional Instructor: Theatre Performance

E: william_marchenski@sfu.ca

Billy graduated from the School for the Contemporary Arts at SFU. He has been performing in Vancouver for over 20 years in Indie Theatre and Contemporary dance. Billy was the recipient of the Sydney J Risk prize for his show, slowpoke, inspired by a visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion zone in 2011. He is a member of the Butoh group “gigamal.”

Daniela Perez Montelongo

Sessional Instructor: Art, Performance & Cinema Studies

E: mperezmo@sfu.ca

Daniela holds a BA in Political Science from the Institut de Sciences Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), an MA in Art History from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her doctoral research continues with the work undertaken for her Masters thesis: “Symbolic Big Houses: a Performative Indigenization of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the Royal British Columbia Museum”. She is interested in contemporary and historical indigenous Northwest Coast Art, and more specifically, the politics around the entanglement of embodied enactments of culture and material culture. Her interest in performance is informed by postcolonial theory and institutional critique, as well as a contemporary indigenous politics and critique of colonialism.

Roxanne Nesbitt

Sessional Instructor: Music & Sound

E:

Trained as an architect and orchestral contrabassist, I am a multidisciplinary artist, exploring the interaction between sound and design. My research includes experimental instrument design, composition, improvisation, sound installation, and performance.

I have premiered compositions across Europe and Canada. Recent highlights include the premier of Death and the Rest by Ensemble Modelo 62 at Gadeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht, and Wild Bells no. 3 at Bauchhund in Berlin. I make instruments from wood and clay.

I am mixed-race Indo-Caribbean and European ancestry and currently living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, CA).

Brendan Prost

Sessional Instructor: Film

E: brendan_prost@sfu.ca

In the last decade, Brendan Prost has been quietly emerging as one of the most prolific young filmmakers in Canada, with an impassioned and eclectic body of work that includes four features and a dozen shorts. His character-driven work is characterized by powerful performances, a uniquely earnest spirit, and a thematic interest in alienation, longing, and vulnerability.

Brendan’s films have screened at major international and Oscar-qualifying film festivals like the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Nashville Film Festival, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Vancouver International Film Festival, Ashland Independent Film Festival, Indie Memphis, Inside Out - Toronto LGBT Film Festival, and Telefilm Canada’s Not Short on Talent Program at Cannes. And, been broadcast on networks like CBC and Hulu.

Brendan graduated with distinction from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts, is an alumni of the Directors’ Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, recently completed his Master of Fine Arts in Film and Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

When not creating his own work, Brendan teaches and mentors young directors at several film schools and colleges.

www.brendanprost.com

Stefan Smulovitz

Sessional Instructor: Music & Sound

From Vancouver to Los Angeles, New York to Quebec City, award-winning composer, collaborator, violist and laptop artist Stefan Smulovitz has created more than 50 live scores for films and performed with many of today's leading improvisors including Fred Frith, Evan Parker and Uri Caine.  Stefan has been commissioned by the Vancouver Symphony, the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and numerous instrumental and vocal ensembles.  His collaborative creations have been developed for theatre, dance, art installations, and DVD-ROMs, and his game-changing software -- Kenaxis -- is used by musicians around the world.

MFA - Simon Fraser University

stefansmulovitz.ca

Damla Tamer

Sessional Instructor: Visual Art

E: damla_tamer@sfu.ca

Damla Tamer is a visual artist born in Istanbul, Turkey and currently practicing in Vancouver, Canada. Her material practice is based on experimental mark-making at the intersections of drawing and textile processes. She has a performative practice that accompanies her works, in which she uses spoken anecdote as a performative tool, and negotiates the artistic-political stakes of a process of encountering singular events, forgetting them, and letting them re-emerge in contingent circumstances. Her work is heavily invested in searching for a new ethics of temporality through the relationships between aesthetics and politics. This involves researching the notion of agency in a variety of solidarity acts; exploring intimacy, hospitality, forgiveness, and risk as those pertain to practices of relating to one another (and relating to one’s labour); exploring the notions of futurity that are embedded in encounters with images and forms; challenging the etiological demands of strictly Western aesthetic-interpretive devices.

Damla Tamer is a founding member of Vancouver-based artist mothers collective A.M. (Art Mamas) and a past member of the now in hiatus artist-run Dynamo Arts Association. She has taught at various academic institutions including the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia (UBC), The Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan and the Continuing Studies Department at Emily Carr University of Art+Design.

damlatamer.com

Alex Tedlie-Stursberg

Sessional Instructor: Visual Art

E: alex_stursberg@sfu.ca

Alex Tedlie-Stursberg is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working across various mediums with a key focus on sculpture and installation. His work has been exhibited in galleries across North America and Europe; recent exhibitions include, Mass Residue, with Field Contemporary, Vancouver, BC, (2019) and Utopos, with Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, BC (2020). This year he was awarded a Digital Originals grant by the Canada Council for the Arts and presented Atmospheric Supply; an online exhibition of activated sculptures (2020). In the past Stursberg has been employed as a Sessional Instructor with SFU Contemporary Arts and the Langara College Visual Arts Program.

In 2021, he will be unveiling public artworks for Ballard Fine Art and will be presenting work at Keep in Touch Gallery, Seoul, Korea, TRAPP Projects, Vancouver, BC, and Plumb Gallery, Toronto, ON.

alextedliestursberg.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