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The SCA's faculty are internationally recognized for research excellence. The majority of the faculty are established working artists, artist-scholars, and scholars. In general, the artists are creators — choreographers, composers, filmmakers, lighting designers, visual artists — as well as performers, directors, and dramaturges. Scholarly research centres on cinema and media theory, art history, and visual culture.

Academic Governance

Elspeth Pratt

Associate Professor & Director

Visual Art

E: epratt@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-3766

Areas: Elspeth Pratt teaches visual art core courses, sculptural practices, drawing and undergraduate art theory seminars. 

The sculptural practice of Elspeth Pratt interrogates the relation between how everyday space is constructed and how that same space is defined through architecture and lived space. This line of questioning is considered in relation to the conceptualization of abstract space, a place where definition is nascent and possibility is inherent. It is in this tension, between definition and possibility that provides the core of her research. Recently, she has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including a collaboration on a major commission for the Richmond Olympic Oval, and was invited by the Vancouver Art Gallery to be the fourth artist to participate in Offsite, their outdoor public art space. In 2011, a monograph was published that considers her work through the presentation of six scholarly essays and images.

diazcontemporary.ca/Artists_Pratt

Claudette Lauzon

Associate Professor & Associate Director

Art, Performance & Cinema Studies (APCS)

E: claudette_lauzon@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-5982 (ext 6)

Areas: Contemporary art; Visual culture; Critical theory; Conflict studies.

Claudette Lauzon is a contemporary art historian specializing in installation, sculpture, and new media art practices. She is the author of The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art (University of Toronto Press, 2017), which looks at the ways in which artists use the space of home (both literally and figuratively) to reframe human responses to trauma. She is co-editor of Through Post-Atomic Eyes (McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming) and Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave, forthcoming). Her current book project, Eyes in the Sky, examines cultures of surveillance and militarization through the lens of critical posthumanism. Before joining the School for the Contemporary Arts, Lauzon was assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at OCAD University in Toronto, where she also served as Associate Dean in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and School for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Degrees:
PhD, McGill University, 2009
MA, Carleton University, 2003
BA, University of Toronto, 1994

claudettelauzon.com

Faculty

Sabine Bitter

Professor

Visual Art

E: sabine_bitter@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-5982

Areas: Visual Art

Vancouver-based artist Sabine Bitter collaborates with Vienna-based artist Helmut Weber on projects addressing cities, architecture, and the politics of representation and of space since 1993. Mainly working in the media of photography and spatial installations their research-oriented practice engages with specific moments and logics of the global-urban change as they take shape in neighborhoods, architecture, and everyday life.  Dealing with architecture as a frame for spatial meaning, their ongoing research includes projects like “Educational Modernism” and “Housing the Social”.

Recent projects and exhibitions include 2016: “Fleeting Territories”, urbanize!-festival, Vienna; “What’s Left?”, MuseumsQuartier Vienna; “Trophäen ihrer Excellenz”, Schauraum der Angewandten, MQ21, Vienna; "Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade", Gallery GPLcontemporary, Vienna; ”How We Want to Live”, Façade art project for BUWOG headquarters, Vienna. In 2015 Bitter/Weber were artists in residence from The Arts and Culture Division of the Federal Chancellery of Austria at the Studio Grand Chelsea, New York City.

In 2004, Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen and Helmut Weber have formed the urban research collective Urban Subjects. Recently Urban Subjects curated the exhibition “The Militant Image - Picturing What Is Already Going On” with Camera Austria, Graz, participated in Western Front’s “Urgent Imagination” and in Jayce Salloum’s project ThirstDays. Urban Subjects were artists in residence at the Leuphana Arts Program at the University Lüneburg in 2012/2013 and were artists in residence at the EXPO Milan, 2015.

From 2009 – 2013 Sabine Bitter was the coordinator of the Audain Visual Artist in Residence program and the curator of the Audain Gallery SFU Woodward's, realizing projects with Marjetica Potrč, Raqs Media Collective, Elke Krasny with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, Ricardo Basbaum, Claire Fontaine, Muntadas, amongst others.

Publications include:

  • The Militant Image. Reader, Ed. Urban Subjects and Camera Austria, Graz, Austria 2015.
  • Sabine Bitter | Helmut Weber, Front, Field, Line, Plane. Researching The Militant Image, Kunstraum Lüneburg, Leuphana Arts Program at the University Lüneburg. 2016.
  • About Academia (Case Study: Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC) Co-editor with Antoni Muntadas, co-published by Line Magazine and The Audain Gallery. 2014.
  • “Sabine Bitter / Helmut Weber: Right, to the City”, Fotohof Edition, Salzburg 2009.
  • “Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber: Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade”, Eds. Urban Subjects, Sternberg Press, Berlin & Fillip, Vancouver, 2009.

Since 2015 Bitter/Weber are represented by GPLcontemporary Vienna.

lot.at / urbansubjects.org

Raymond Boisjoly

Assistant Professor

Visual Art

E: cboisjol@sfu.ca

Pronouns: he/him
Areas: Visual Art, Photography

Raymond Boisjoly is an Indigenous artist and citizen of the Haida Nation, based in Vancouver. His work is derived from his training in photography. He uses screens, scanners, photocopiers, and inkjet printers to capture technological processes together with subject matter centered on cultural propriety, humour, and poetic-prophetic texts of mysterious origins.

Boisjoly received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and a MFA from the University of British Columbia (2008). He was a recipient of the VIVA Award (2016), presented by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts, Vancouver. He has had solo exhibitions at VOX, Montreal (2016); Carleton University (2015); Platform Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts, Winnipeg (2014); Simon Fraser University Gallery (2013). He has been featured internationally in exhibitions including SITElines Santa Fe (2014); and in exhibitions at Triangle France, Marseille; Camera Austria, Vienna (2014) as well as L’avenir (looking forward), Biennale de Montréal (2014); The Power Plant, Toronto (2012); and the Vancouver Art Gallery (2016 and 2012-14).

Raymond Boisjoly | Catriona Jeffries Gallery

Chris Chong Chan Fui

Assistant Professor

Film

E: christopher_chong@sfu.ca

Chris Chong Chan Fui is a filmmaker and artist who works between Southeast Asia and Canada. From digital and analog moving images to fabricated and organic objects, Chong works to reveal unfamiliar narratives. His work layers the social and natural sciences with transnational circuits of globalization and manufactured cultures and landscapes. With a rigorous research methodology and a formalist aesthetic, he uses structure and constraints as a creative path toward expressive innovation. Chong has exhibited at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Palais de Tokyo, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and the Gwangju Biennale, while premiering films at the Cannes Film Festival's Directors’ Fortnight, BFI London, and TIFF’s Wavelengths, where he won back-to-back awards for Best Canadian Short Film. Chong holds an MFA (film) from York University, and is a Smithsonian Institute fellow (National Museum of Natural History), a Ford Foundation fellow, and a Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Arts Fellow.

www.chongchanfui.com

Joseph Clark

Term Assistant Professor: APCS

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

Peter Dickinson

Professor

Art, Performance & Cinema Studies (APCS)

E: peter_dickinson@sfu.ca

Areas: Performance Studies.

A performance studies scholar and the Director of SFU’s Institute for Performance Studies, Peter’s research investigates the time- and place-based relationships between audience and event across a range of aesthetic practices (including dance, theatre, film, and performance art) and social formations (from same-sex marriage to civic branding to urban mega-events). He is the author, editor, or co-editor of thirteen books and special journal issues, including: World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics (2010); Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (2014); Mega-Event Cities: Art/Audiences/Aftermaths (2016); and Q2Q: Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada (2018). His most recent book is My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community (2020), a performance ethnography of his collaborations (as a writer, researcher, facilitator, outside eye, co-creator, and occasional mover) with several Vancouver-based dance artists and companies. Peter’s essays have appeared in Dance Research JournalModern DramaScreenTDR: The Drama ReviewText and Performance QuarterlyTheatre JournalTheatre Research in CanadaCanadian Theatre ReviewTheatre SurveyCinéActionCanadian Journal of Film Studies, as well as numerous other journals and edited collections. Also a playwright, productions of Peter’s work include The Objecthood of Chairs (SFU Woodward’s, 2010), Positive ID (Berkeley Theatre, Toronto, 2012), Long Division [Part 1 / Part 2] (Pi Theatre, 2016/17), The Bathers (excerpt, Zee Zee Theatre, 2017), and At the Speed of Light (Pi Theatre, 2022). Between 2008 and 2018 Peter regularly documented Vancouver performance practice at performanceplacepolitics.blogspot.ca.

Degrees and Studies:
B.A., University of Toronto
M.A. and Ph.D., University of British Columbia

www.sfu.ca/~ped

www.sfu.ca/ips

NiNi Dongnier

Assistant Professor

Dance

E: NINI_DONGNIER@SFU.CA

Areas: Choreography, Choreographic Intervention by Technology and Visual Arts, Contemporary Dance, Chinese Ethnic and Folk Dance, Cross-border Mongolian Dance, Nomadic Ethnography, Body-based Interaction

NiNi Dongnier is a choreographer and artist, born in Inner Mongolia, works in Vancouver and New York.

Dongnier works through dance, performance, moving image, soft sculpture, and artistic uses of technology. Rooted in the northern trans-border nomadic philosophies and art, her art is continuous exploration of the metaphysics of body, motion, and its dynamic relation to the compound spatiotemporal, ecological, and technological contexts that shaping the moments. The process conveys her sincere perception in embodied memory, migration, ritual, landscape, and the structure and cultural entanglement behind them. She immerses herself in traditional art on one hand, and on the other hand, embraces the dissonance from various forms and philosophies, which is internalized into an independent perspective of art making. She is particularly good at finding connections and shared nature among seemingly opposite things, challenging dualistic thinking.

Her recent works have been presented by The Watermill Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, La MaMa|CultureHub, New York Live Arts, Mana Contemporary, International Conference on Movement and Computing, The Center for Ballet and the Arts, Made in NY Media Center, IAC Chelsea, Gibney, China National Theatre for the Performing Arts, A4 Art Museum, OCAT Shenzhen, Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Chengdu Art Museum, Gaotai Gallery, Aranya Art Center, Estonian Academy of Arts Vent Space, and NYU Jack Crystal Theater among others.

Dongnier is a current residential artist at La MaMa|CultureHub and was an artist-in-residency at Media Art Xploration Lab - MAXmachina, The Movement Lab of Barnard College - Columbia University, Robert Wilson’s The Watermill Center, and American Dance Festival. Recent projects include commissions from Shanghai International Dance Center, Media Art Xploration Festival, Beijing Dance Academy and others.

She holds an MFA focus on Choreography and Media Art from New York University, having previously graduated Summa Cum Laude from Beijing Dance Academy with a bachelor’s and a master’s degrees in Chinese Ethnic and Folk Dance & Ethnography, also studied Contemporary Dance at SUNY Purchase College.

She is the founder of Field Motion, and co-founder of New York based interdisciplinary artist collective NUUM.

nini-dongnier.com

Arne Eigenfeldt

Professor | FCAT Associate Dean, Academic

Music & Sound

E: arne_e@sfu.ca

Areas: Live Electroacoustic Performance, Interactive Systems, Algorithmic Composition, Metacreation, Digital Art.

Composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, and researcher in intelligent software tools.

Recipient of major research grants into Computational Creativity and Generative Art.

Creator of a variety of music programs for Mac OSX.

Research presentations and performances at International Computer Music Conferences (ICMC), International Symposium for Electronic Art (ISEA), New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), ArtTech, EvoMusArt, Generative Art, International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), Sound and Music Computing (SMC) and Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO).

Degree and Studies:
M.A., Simon Fraser University
D.M., Northwestern University

aeigenfeldt.wordpress.com / metacreation.net  / MrMusebot on Spotify / raemus on Spotify / loadbang on SoundCloud / GESMI (featuring Awkward Stranger)

Marla Eist

Associate Professor

Dance

E: eist@sfu.ca

Areas: Ballet; contemporary dance techniques; movement fundamentals (science & somatics); dance history; composition; repertory.

Choreographer, dance educator and performing artist. Performed with DC Contemporary Dance Theatre (Washington, DC), The Green Room (New York City), Sybil Dance Company (Philadelphia) and numerous independent artists. Awarded a full fellowship, she received her MFA in dance from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Her choreography has been presented nationally and internationally. She has been teaching dance for over 25 years. Her teaching is heavily influenced by somatic practices, functional anatomy and injury prevention. Teaches ballet, contemporary technique, somatic approaches and applied anatomy, dance history, composition, and repertory. She has also directed the Off-Centre Performance Company and Apprentice Program in the School for the Contemporary Arts, SFU.

BA in Dance, American University, Wash. DC.; MFA in Dance, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, NY.

Kyla Gardiner

Assistant Professor

Production & Design

E: kylag@sfu.ca

Areas: Design and production of visual and tactile environments for live performance; my media includes light, scenery, and costume.  Creation, collaboration, and new work development. Technical direction & production management.

I am a designer and performance creator based in Vancouver, BC. My artistic research investigates non-human agency, design-based approaches to devised creation, and the ways deep collaboration might challenge ideas of artistic authorship.  I hold a BA in Theatre and Philosophy from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

kylagardiner.com

Am Johal

Associate Member

Director, SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement
Co-Director, SFU's Community-Engaged Research Initiative

E: am_johal@sfu.ca

Am Johal is Director of SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and Co-director of SFU’s Community-Engaged Research Initiative. He is the author of Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocene (Atropos Press, 2015) and is co-author with Matt Hern (with contributions from Joe Sacco), of Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (MIT, 2018).

He is the co-founder of UBC's Humanities 101 program and has been a Visiting Professor with SFU's Centre for Dialogue and an associate with SFU's Institute for the Humanities. He previously served as chair of the Impact on Communities Coalition, as a board member with the Vancity Community Foundation, the Or Gallery, 221A Gallery, the Vancouver City Planning Commission, the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House and many other organizations. He has graduate degrees in international economic relations and media philosophy.

Rob Kitsos

Professor

Dance

E: rkitsos@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-9829

Areas: Contemporary Composition, Aesthetics, Technique, Collaboration.

Rob Kitsos is an acclaimed dancer, dance instructor, performing artist, musician, and choreographer who has performed across North America, Europe and Asia.  He has been a member of many performing companies and collaborated with many artists which cover a broad range of styles from mime to hip hop, improvisation to ballet. As a choreographer, Rob has created over 100 original works, many of which include collaborations with artists from a range of disciplines.  He has studied Mime at Ecole Jacques Lacoq in Paris and played drums in a rock band in popular clubs like CBGB's in New York City.  He was a Guest Artist at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1998, a full time faculty member at the University of Washington from 1998-2002. He then began a two-year Senior Lecturer position at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. In 2004, Rob joined the faculty of Simon Fraser University as an Assistant Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts. He teaches contemporary dance, composition, repertory, dance aesthetics, improvisation in performance and interdisciplinary collaboration.  Rob received his BA in Theatre/Dance from Bard College and his MFA in Dance from the University of Washington in 1997.

robkitsos.com

Image: Jean Claude Dhien

Erika Latta

Assistant Professor

Theatre & Performance

E: erika_latta@sfu.ca

Areas: Acting, Directing, Interdisciplinary Performance, Devised Theater, Movement for Performers, Viewpoints, Suzuki Method of Acting, and site-responsive work.

Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Erika Latta is the artistic co-director and co-founder of WaxFactory in New York City. WaxFactory continues to nurture a hybrid approach, based on unconventional narrative styles, originally dramaturgy, visual and physical rigor, technological experimentation and site-responsive work. With the company, she works as a director, writer, actor, sound designer and educator. As an actor and director she has presented work in international venues and festivals throughout Europe and Latin America creating long lasting partnerships with artists and designers. She holds a BFA in Theater from the University of Washington, and an MFA in Acting from Columbia University. 

Erika is also an associate director of the French trans-media company Begat Theater. For Begat, she co-conceived, directed, designed sound and co-wrote several of Begat productions. Begat Theater’s productions have been awarded numerous grants, co-productions and partnerships, as well as the generous support from FACE (French American Fund for Contemporary Theater). Erika is a member of the Society of Authors (SACD) in France, and she continues to author and co-author many of the original productions for both WaxFactory and Begat Theater.

Outside her company, she has worked with Felix Barret and Maxine Doyle of Punchdrunk (SLEEP NO MORE), Robert Wilson at the Watermill Center, Anne Bogart (SITI Company), Robert Woodruff, Victor Gautier Martin, Tina Landau, and Chuck Mee , among others.

Erika has been awarded a number of European performing arts grants and residencies, most notably the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany and the Bogliasco Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy.

She continues to work in cinema both as an actor, director and photographer in feature length films, hybrid performance and new media.

She has studied and trained in modern dance; Viewpoints with Anne Bogart  (SITI Company), the Suzuki Method of acting in Toga-Mura, Japan with  Robyn Hunt, and at Columbia University with Ellen Lauren.

Erika was recently a visiting assistant professor at Colgate University, and at the University of North Carolina, School of the Arts, where she taught Viewpoints, the Suzuki Method of Acting, and composition in devised theater.

Most recently she has performed in WaxFactory’s one-woman show LULU XX directed by Ivan Talijancic at the Connelly Theater in New York, PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER! at the Rubenstein Atrium in Lincoln Center, Punchdrunk's SLEEP NO MORE at the McKittrick Hotel (NYC) and TIME, A FAIR HUSTLER at the Artist Repertory in Portland, Oregon. Her direction of HOPE by Hope Salas, a one woman show was last seen at the Wild Project in New York. Upcoming projects include: HOME a WaxFactory / Begat Theater / Hand2Mouth collaboration, the LULU XX international tour, the direction of STRANGE JOY, ARTIFICIAL EDEN, and the continued tours of HIDDEN STORIES and LA DISPARITION.

waxfactory.org | begat.org | contemporaryperformancepractices.org | IMDB | Desire Line Sessions

Young Joo Lee

Assistant Professor

Theatre & Performance

E: young_joo_lee@sfu.ca

Young Joo Lee is a multimedia artist from South Korea. Young holds an MFA in Sculpture at Yale University (2017) and an MFA in Film at the Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule Frankfurt (2013). She was a Visiting Lecturer in Animation and Immersive Media Art at the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. She was a College Fellow in Media Practice at Harvard University (2018-20), a Fulbright Scholar in Film & Digital Media (2015-18) and a recipient of DAAD artist scholarship (2010-12). Her work has been exhibited in national and international institutions and film/video festivals.

https://youngjoolee.net

James Long

Assistant Professor

Theatre & Performance

E: james_long@sfu.ca

James Long is a director, actor, writer and teacher whose creative practice occurs in a wide variety of interdisciplinary and collaborative contexts, including as a founding Artistic Director (2003-2022) of Theatre Replacement and as an independent artist working in live performance, community engaged practice, screenwriting and public art.

James’s work has been presented across North America, Europe and Asia including: Festival TransAmériques and Usine C (Montréal); The Theatre Centre, Canadian Stage, Factory Theatre and the Luminato Festival (Toronto); The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival (Vancouver); On the Boards (Seattle); Fusebox Festival (Austin); Noorderzon Festival (Groningen); Lókal and Everybody festivals (Iceland); Dublin International Theatre Festival (Dublin); Foreign Affairs Festival (Berlin); Soho Rep (New York); Woolly Mammoth (Washington, DC); TBA Festival and Portland Rep (Portland); Tmuna Theatre (Tel Aviv) and Khan Theatre (Jerusalem); Battersea Arts Center (London); Hong Kong Arts Festival (Hong Kong); BASTARDFESTIVALEN (Trondheim); and BIT Teatergarasjen’s Meteor Festival (Bergen).

In 2016, James and co-writer Marcus Youssef were nominated for the Governor General’s Award for playwriting for Winners and Losers. In 2019, he and Theatre Replacement co-artistic director Maiko Yamamoto were awarded the Siminovitch prize for their work at Theatre Replacement and as freelance artists.

Long graduated from Simon Fraser University’s Theatre Program in 2000 and received a Master’s in Urban Studies, also from SFU, in 2018. He currently sits on The City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Council and serves as the president of the organization that stewards Vancouver’s Russian Hall, a multi-purpose performance and gathering space. He has and continues to receive funding from a variety of private foundations, The City of Vancouver, The Province of British Columbia, BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for his creative research and performance work blending interdisciplinary collaborative processes and urban concerns.

www.theatrereplacement.org

Stefan Maier

Assistant Professor

Music & Sound + Production & Design

E: stefan_maier@sfu.ca

Pronouns: he/him

Areas: Sound Installation, Experimental Composition, Electronics, Sound Studies

Stefan Maier is a Vancouver-based artist and composer. Through composition, performance, and multi-media installation, his practice explores the chaotic flows of sonic matter through instruments, buildings, sound systems, software, and bodies. Highlighting material instability and seeking out unruliness, his work aims to uncover alternate modes of authorship and listenings through historical and contemporary sound technology. His work has been presented by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Germany), Unsound Festival (Poland), Ultima Festival (Norway), SPOR festival (Denmark), Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Netherlands), Liquid Architecture (Australia), and the National Music Centre (Canada) among many others. Recent projects for dance and film have been presented at Sterischer Herbst (Austria), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands), and V-A-C foundation (Russia). Stefan's writing appears in Circuit and Indexical Publications, and in 2018 he curated and edited an edition of Haus der Kulturen der Welt's Technosphere Magazine on Machine Listening. He was a 2019 Macdowell Colony Fellow, and has held residencies at NOTAM (Norway), Lobe Studios (Canada), and IAC Malmö (Sweden) among others. In 2017 he received a Mayor’s Art Award as an emerging musician from the City of Vancouver. Stefan holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Bard College, and an MA in Digital Music from Dartmouth College.

stefanmaier.studio

Laura U. Marks

Grant Strate University Professor

Art, Performance & Cinema Studies (APCS)

E: lmarks@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-5982

Areas: Cinema and media studies; visual culture.

Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus. Her most recent books are Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010). Marks programs experimental media art for venues around the world. With Dr. Azadeh Emadi (University of Glasgow) she is a founding member of the Substantial Motion Research Network.

Degree and Studies:
Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, 1996
M.A. in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester, 1994
B.A. in Art History and Sociology/Anthropology, Swarthmore College, 1987

sfu.ca/~lmarks

Image: Mathieu Young

Miwa Matreyek

Assistant Professor

Production & Design

Miwa Matreyek is an animator, designer, and performer. Coming from a background in animation, Matreyek creates live, interdisciplinary performances that integrate projected animations at the intersection of cinematic and theatrical, fantastical and physical, and the hand-made and digital. Her work exists in a dreamlike visual space that makes invisible worlds visible, often weaving surreal and poetic narratives of conflict between humanity and nature as embodied performed experiences. She has presented her work internationally, including animation/film festivals, theater/performance festivals, art museums, science museums, tech conferences, and universities. A few past presenters include TED, MOMA, SFMOMA, New Frontier at Sundance Film Festival, PUSH festival, Lincoln Center, Walker Art Center, and many more. Her newest solo piece, Infinitely Yours, was awarded the grand prize for Prix Arts Electronica’s Computer Animation category. She is a 2013 Creative Capital award recipient. She is the co-founder and core collaborator of Cloud Eye Control. 

 

Denise Oleksijczuk

Associate Professor

Art, Performance & Cinema Studies (APCS)

E: oleksijczuk@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-5349

Areas: Art History, Visual Culture.

Before taking her current position at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Oleksijczuk worked as Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She earned her BFA and MA at the University of Toronto and her PhD the University of British Columbia and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. Her artworks have been exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Or Gallery, the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Solo Exhibition (Toronto), and the Ann Arbour Film Festival. Her book, The First Panoramas: Visions of British Imperialism won the Historians of British Art Book Prize. Her research and teaching overlap, and pay close attention to the various types of viewer experience made possible by different visual and material forms. Oleksijczuk’s current research explores art and activism, the history and aesthetics of landscape/sensescape/gardens, the ‘vegetal turn’ in contemporary art, sensory studies, and Indigenous ecological philosophy. She is the curator of The Cabinet, a tiny gallery at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University.

Denise Oleksijczuk is on Study Leave from September 2023 – August 2024.

Mauricio Pauly

Associate Professor

Music & Sound

E: mauricio_pauly@sfu.ca

Mauricio Pauly's practice combines composition for hybrid instrumental/electronic ensembles, sound design, and live performance. As an active cross-disciplinary collaborator, his work includes numerous projects with writers, designers, programmers and theatre-makers.

His music has been featured by festivals that include Ultima Festival (Norway, 2011), Warsaw Autumn (Poland, 2013), Darmstadt International Summer Courses (Germany, 2010/12/14/16), Images Sonores Festival (Belgium, 2015), Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik (Austria, 2016) and Open Ears Festival (Canada 2018). 

Recent collaborations include live-performed music and sound design for Athina Rachel Tsangari’s production of Wedekind's LULU in a sold-out 10-show run at the 2017 Salzburg Festival. FREAM AD WALL, written in collaboration with programmer and 3D animator, Gabriel Montagné, was performed by Line Upon Line Percussion as a 3-show premiere in Austin, TX and will tour Europe and the UK in Fall 2019. A collection of music, print-works and texts created with American experimental novelist Renee Gladman and Argentinian composer Santiago Díez-Fischer will be released on New Focus Recordings (New York, 2020)

Pauly spent the summer of 2018 as an awarded Artist Fellow at Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, Italy). In 2017 he was Composer-in-Residence at Villa Romana (Florence, Italy) undertaking a two-part creation and performance residency. He spent 2014-2015 as a full-year Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Boston, USA).

Pauly is a founding member of UK-based ensemble, Distractfold, awarded the Kranichstein Musik Prize in performance by the Darmstadt International Music Institute (2016) and with whom he produced and curated BBC3's Cut & Splice Festival (2017). The group has been ensemble-in-residence at Stanford, Harvard, McGill and Huddersfield Universities and will be in residence at Columbia University in 2020.

mauriciopauly.com

Christopher Pavsek

Associate Professor

Art, Performance & Cinema Studies (APCS)

E: cpavsek@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-4672

Areas: Critical Theory; Marxism; Political and Avant-Garde Film; Documentary Studies and Filmmaking; Environmental Humanities; Ecology.

Christopher Pavsek holds a Ph.D. from the Program in Literature at Duke University and a Masters in Resource and Environmental Management and Planning from Simon Fraser University. His book, The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik, was published by Columbia University Press on 2013.

He has published essays on Jean-Luc Godard, Alexander Kluge, Raoul Peck, Walter Benjamin, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Harun Farocki, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, amongst others. His humanities scholarship focusses on the relationship between the arts and humanities and environmental science. His work in environmental science focuses on the use of Indigenous Knowledge in conservation projects and critiques of neo-liberal conservation methods and policy.

His most recent publications include "Philipp Ekardt's Toward Fewer Images: The Work of Alexander Kluge," (Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch, No. 5, 2019; "Leviathan and the Experience of Sensory Ethnography" (Visual Anthropology Review, Spring 2015); and "The Utopia of Reading" (Alexander Kluge Jahrbuch, No. 2, 2016), about the concept of time in Alexander Kluge's philosophy of reading.

Pavsek is also an experimental documentary filmmaker. His films "The One and All" (2002) and "To Those Born After" (2005) have shown widely at major international festivals. They form the first two parts of an anticipated trilogy of films about the transformation of the US in the wake of the September 11 attacks. He is currently, and patiently, working on two films. "What Remains to be Seen" will be the third installment in that trilogy, and will focus on the structural and discursive underpinnings of the current rightward/autocratic shift in American society. A second film, currently untitled, is an examination of the landscape of the state of Utah in the US and the legacy of landscape photography and experimental cinema about the desert Southwest.

Degree and Studies: 
BA, German Literature, Cornell University; Ph.D., Literature, Duke University; Masters in Resource and Environmental Management--Planning, Simon Fraser University.

Kimberly Phillips

Associate Member

E: kimberly_phillips@sfu.ca

With a Ph.D. in Art History, Visual Art & Theory from the University of British Columbia, Kimberly Phillips is a committed arts leader, educator and writer of Welsh-Irish settler ancestry, based on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Skwxwú7mesh and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ/Selilwitulh peoples. For the past 15 years, in her roles as gallery director, curator and teacher, she has worked to amplify the voices of under-acknowledged artists and practitioners, to ethically vision and build organizational capacity, and to create meaningful and unexpected ways for contemporary artists and their publics to find one another. Formerly the Director/Curator at Access Gallery (2013-2017) and the Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery (2017-2020), she is the Director of SFU Galleries.  

Eldritch Priest

Associate Professor

Music & Sound + Art, Performance & Cinema Studies (APCS)

E: epriest@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-9829 (ext 5)

Areas: Sound studies/art, Philosophy of experience (specifically libidinal philosophies, affect theory, pragmatism); Media theory (dealing with aurally, embodiment, simulation); Composition; Experimental music; Postmodernism; ‘Pataphysics; Hyperstition. 

Eldritch Priest writes on sonic culture, experimental aesthetics and the philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective. His essays have appeared in various journals and he is the author of Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics of Failure (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is also a co-author (with fellow members of the experimental theory group ‘The Occulture’) of Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture (Bloomsbury, 2017). Eldritch is also active as a composer and improviser and is currently working on a new book about earworms, daydreams, and other lived abstractions.

BMus – Jazz studies, St. Francis Xavier University; MMus – Composition, University of Victoria; PhD – Cultural Theory, Carleton University.

strangemonk.com

Judy Radul

Professor

Visual Art

E: jaradul@sfu.ca

Areas: Visual Art.

Judy Radul’s interdisciplinary practice has recently focused on video installation but also includes sculpture, photography, performance and mixed media works. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and her creative writing and essays have appeared in a variety of publications since 1991. Her large scale-media installation World Rehearsal Court was first exhibited as a solo exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery at U.B.C. in 2009. This work draws on Radul’s research into the role of theatricality and new technologies in the court of law and it questions the distinctions between experience, testimony, truth, and fiction that the law attempts to make distinct. The work has traveled to the Generali Foundation, Vienna, Media City Seoul, Korea and Henie Onstad Art Center in Oslo, Norway, 2011. Related to this project in 2011 she co edited a book of collected essays and images A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics, with Marit Paasche, published by Sternberg Press, Berlin. The same publication features a new essay from Radul, “Video Chamber”, concerning the relation of video, the trial, and aspects of contemporary art. Working with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and Ariane Beyn, she also wrote for and co-edited the 2018 book This is Television, also published by Sternberg Press, which includes texts by Diedrich Diederichsen, Honor Gavin, and Ana Teixeira Pinto. An exhibition of new object based work, including the series “Object, Analysis, Spectator, Poem” was shown at Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver, in 2012. Radul’s latest works, employ custom designed computer control systems for live and prerecorded video. In 2012/2013 Radul is participating in a year long residency in Berlin hosted by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) program. Judy Radul was born in Lillooet, B.C., grew up in Haney, B.C., received her B.A in Fine and Performing Arts from S.F.U. In 2000 she received a Master of Visual and Media Arts from Bard College, New York.

Interested in continuously critically rethinking contemporary art, and using contemporary art to “rethink” criticality. Core research interests include: contemporary art; questions of the image and representation; video; video as a present time medium; multi screen video; projection; performance; image sound relations; performativity; behavior; power relations; the social space of the gallery; the relation of props, art objects and everyday objects; the role of sound in the construction of "the real"; issues of address and performance in everyday situations including radio broadcasts, music and sport. Like a stage or other built environment the camera lens demarcates a space; recent work could therefore be said to investigate the "architecture of the lens". Continued interest: in law and aesthetics; the trial; law and media; legal theatre; photographs in testimony; the court as a site of performance.

judyradul.com/courses / worldrehearsalcourt.com / catrionajeffries.com

Simone Rapisarda

Associate Professor

Film

E: srapisar@sfu.ca

Hailed by the MoMA as “one of the most adventurous new filmmakers from Italy,” Simone is an experimental cinema practitioner whose feature films have garnered accolades at most major film festivals worldwide, and are part of the permanent collections of the foremost Western artwashing museums, galleries, and national archives. The colonial press of record has characterized his works as “powerful and delicate” (The New York Times), “simply stunning” (Variety), “surreal” and “mesmerizing” (IndieWire), “ravishing” and “impressive” (The Hollywood Reporter), “bold and daring” (Filmmaker Magazine), “majestic” (The Village Voice), as well as “utterly tantric” (The Miami New Times). More complex characterizations include “poetic and philosophical” along with “subtle and hilarious” (Anthropologica), “extend[ing], complicat[ing], and enrich[ing] the definition of documentary” (Artforum), “redefining the very category of the ethnographic film” (The Academic Hack), as well as “hard to capture in words” (Cinema Scope). On the academic side, before joining the SCA, Simone was a full-time faculty member of the tuition-free Ciné Institute in Haiti. At SFU, he is also an Associate Member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology as well as a Co-Curator of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. Other trivia can be found on his CV or online.

Noé Rodríguez

Assistant Professor

Film

E: noe_rodriguez@sfu.ca
P: 778-782-5982

Areas: Auteur Cinema, Experimental Ethnography, Process Cinema, Expanded Cinema, Field Recordings

Using analog film, digital imaging, field recordings and prepared instruments, Noé Rodriguez’s work ponders upon the lyrical qualities of the real and responds to the material and temporal traces of collective life in the terraformed landscape.

His film Ceiba received the Pasajes Award to the Best Spanish Film in Filmadrid International Film Festival and was screened at the TIFF lightbox in the program The Roots That Thirst, as part of the Wavelengths year-round screening series.

Aadat, codirected with Xisela Franco, won several awards, including the Premio Ciudad de Madrid to the best Spanish documentary in DocumentaMadrid, 2006 and was screened in festivals such as the 47th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film – Leipzig, Germany; the Ludwigsburg European Shortfilm Biennale – Stuttgart, Germany, Images Festival – Toronto, Canada or FISAHARA, Sahara international Film Festival – Tindouf, Algeria

As a cinematographer, Rodriguez has collaborated in Luo Li’s I Went to the Zoo the Other Day (2009), Eva Kolcke’s All that is Solid (2014) and Andrea Bussman’s & Nicolás Pereda´s Tales of Two Who Dreamt (premiered at Berlinale 2016).

MFA, York University, 2009
BA, Universidad Europea de Madrid, 2004
BFA, Universidad Europea de Madrid, 2001

Sabrina Schroeder

Associate Professor

Music & Sound

E: sabrina_schroeder@sfu.ca

Areas: Composition, music performance, electronics

Composer-performer Sabrina Schroeder integrates tactile transducers, live processing, and self-built mechanics into performances that dig into heavy sound spaces that are as much about body-feel as they are about audible sound. Her recent series build around malleable qualities of fibrillation and pulsation, using these as live connective tissue within a body of instruments. 

Her work is widely performed, including recent collaborations with Distractfold (UK), Rebekah Heller (USA), Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Séverine Ballon (France), Ensemble Tzara (Switzerland), Hand Werk (Germany), Ensemble Argento, Ensemble Container (Switzerland), Vertixe Sonora (Spain), MusikFabrik (Germany), Dal Niente (USA), Ensemble Vortex (Switzerland), Stephane Ginsburg (Belgium), Michelle Lou and Scott Worthington (USA), and Quatuor Bozzini (Canada).

Recent projects include commissions for ICE Ensemble (New York/Chicago), the Americas Society (New York), JACK Quartet (New York), Architek Percussion (Toronto), No Hay Banda (Montreal), and a collaborative project with theatre creator Jenna Harris and Thin Edge Collective (Toronto).

Awarded residences include Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, Italy), Experimentalstudio des SWR (Freiburg, Germany), Banff Leighton Studios (Banff, Canada), and Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France).

Schroeder has been on the faculty of iEAR (Integrated Electronic Arts) department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, New York), the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester, UK), and the Banff Summer Music Programs (Banff, Canada). 

She is the 2019-2021 Composer in Residence at Vancouver’s Music on Main.

PhD, Harvard University (2016)
MA, Wesleyan University (2006)
BMus, University of Victoria (2001)

sabrinaschroeder.com / Bone Games – for amplified ensemble / Bone Games – DARKHORSE

Nadia Shihab

Assistant Professor

Film

E: nadia_shihab@sfu.ca

Nadia Shihab is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores the personal, the relational, and the diasporic. Her studio practice includes film, collage and sound. She is the director of several short films and the feature-length film JADDOLAND, which was awarded five festival jury awards, including the Independent Spirit "Truer than Fiction" Award, and went on to broadcast for two seasons on US public television.                                

Her work has shown in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, Dubai International Film Festival, DOXA, CAAMFest, and New Orleans Film Festival. She is the recipient of fellowships and support from the Sundance Institute, Center for Asian American Media, Firelight Media, and Tribeca Film Institute, and has been an artist-in-residency at the MacDowell Colony and Djerassi Residency.

Her creative practice is bolstered by over a decade of experience as a community practitioner. She holds an MFA in Art Practice (UC Berkeley, 2021), as well as a Master in City & Regional Planning (UC Berkeley, 2009) – a degree which grounds her art practice within critical understandings of urban space and practical training in ethnography. Her community-based work includes Fulbright research in southeastern Turkey, and facilitating projects spanning affordable housing preservation, refugee youth mentorship, and community-guided philanthropy. She was raised in west Texas by immigrant parents from Iraq & Yemen.

www.nadiashihab.com

Kathy Slade

Term Assistant Professor: Visual Art

E: kslade@sfu.ca

Kathy Slade works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade has upcoming solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (2020), The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2022), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge (2022). Her recent solo exhibitions include: A Dream and a Drive (with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2019); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); I WANT IT ALL I WANT IT NOW, Walter C. Koerner Library, Vancouver (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London, UK (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: It’s Never Too Late to Speculate; Fluc, Vienna, AU (2019); Uses of History, studio e, Seattle, WA (2019); The Ashtray Show West, Belmacz Gallery, London, UK (2018); and Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver, BC (2018). Slade teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School.

www.kathyslade.com

Image: from Doggie Hamlet (2015) by Ann Carlson

Ryan Tacata

Assistant Professor

Theatre & Performance

E: ryan_tacata@sfu.ca

Areas: Performance Making, Performance Studies, Devised Theater, and Social Practice.  

Ryan Tacata is a performance maker and scholar. His creative practice is deeply collaborative and engages in place making, ordinary acts, and gift-giving. His recent work includes a minor repair. (2019), an archive-based response commissioned by the City of Chicago for the exhibition goat island archive—we have discovered the performance by making it; Lolas (2017), a performance installation in honor of Filipino grandmothers (Asian Art Museum, SF); For You, (2016–), a series of dedicated performances for specific audiences; and dancing in Doggie Hamlet (2015–) by Ann Carlson, a site-specific dance with four human performers, sheep herding dogs, and 30+ sheep. His academic research plays critical intimacy in the key of everyday life, and focuses on alternative methods of archival research and performance art historiography. He is currently writing on the occasion of art with an emphasis on social ceremony, art history, and occasional literature. His work has appeared in Performa, TDR, Performance Research and SFMoMA's OpenSpace. Prior to joining the School for the Contemporary Arts, he taught courses in performance at the San Francisco Art Institute, and in the MFA Theater and Performance Making Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (SF) and University of Chichester (UK). In 2018, he was Visiting Lecturer for the Abandoned Practices Institute with Erin Manning, and was Lecturer in the Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture (ITALIC) program at Stanford University from 2018-2020.  

BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007.

PhD, Performance Studies, Stanford University, 2015.

www.ryan-tacata.com

www.foryou.productions

Wladimiro A. Woyno Rodriguez

Assistant Professor

Production & Design

E: wwoynoro@sfu.ca

Areas: Projection Design and Technology, Lighting Design and Technology, Design for Live Performance, Technical Production, Time-Based Installation, Digital Media, Interactivity, Programming, Animation, Expanded Cinema, Devised Processes, Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Wladimiro A. Woyno R. is a designer and technologist passionate about live performance. Originally from Bogota, Colombia, he holds a M.F.A. in Design from Yale School of Drama and a B.F.A. in Theatre Design and production from The University of British Columbia. A devoted collaborator with the creative teams of several companies, he is often prototyping tools, processes, images, and environments that engage the sensory imagination. With a technical background in lighting, video, and staging, his work explores the adaptation of new technologies into the theatrical tradition. He is Interested in the development of rapid prototyping tools, scenography, theatrical spaces, media servers, documentation systems, and show control systems. He is an avid learner, constantly creating, inventing, and exploring.

His credits include: Since I Can Remember (The Wooster Group, USA); Kiss (Yale Repertory Theatre, USA); Parade (Nederlands Dans Theater, Netherlands); The Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (Ghost River Theatre, Canada);  This American Wife (Next Door @ NYTW, USA); Salome (M3 Productions, USA); If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, Bulgaria! Revolt!, The Merchant of Venice (Yale School of Drama, USA); RE:UNION (Yale Cabaret, USA); Gallery+Lumia (Yale Art Gallery, USA);  Ziriguidum (Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Canada); and Sometime Between Now and When the Sun Goes Supernova (Theatre Junction, Canada).

He is currently an Associate Member of The Wooster Group.

www.wawr.ca

Jin-me Yoon

Professor

Visual Art

E: jyoon@sfu.ca

Areas: Photo and video installation, contemporary art theory.

Jin-me Yoon’s early photographic work challenges dominant discourses and stereotypical assumptions about citizenship, nationhood, culture, gender, and race. Expanding her practice to include video and installation, Yoon's ongoing work utilizes a transnational lens to witness and consider local histories, environments, identities and bodies in the context of entangled and interdependent global relations. She has exhibited extensively across Canada as well as internationally and is represented in numerous public collections. Teaches visual art core undergraduate studio courses, multidisciplinary graduate studio courses as well as contemporary art theory seminars at the graduate and undergraduate levels.

Note: Jin-me Yoon is on an extended leave and is not currently teaching or supervising students.

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