Kai Yee Chan

MA Graduate Student

Kai Yee Chan is a passionate arts administrator, with hands on experience in organizing exhibitions, art programs and projects, and marketing and video production. She is keen to develop innovative initiatives to promote creativity and social diversity and has over ten years of experience in cultural management and museum marketing. Here research interests include the correlation between art and religion, the confluence of Christianity and contemporary arts (especially in visual arts, digital arts, and moving images), the sublime in art, cross-cultural interaction, cultural identities, social diversity, and the manifestation of faith in postmodern times.

Christophe Devos

MA Graduate Student

Christophe Devos is a born-and-raised Vancouverite, francophone, and self-proclaimed cinephile whose passion for cinema began in early childhood while visiting his neighborhood Blockbuster to rent movies. Having earned a BFA in Art History (Concordia University, 2018) and a BA in Film Studies (UBC, 2021), Christophe acquired an affinity for the critical frameworks of intersectionality, queer theory, media and cultural studies. For his MA research, Christophe aims to demonstrate how the music video offers a significant channel for visualizing the latent queerness of children and disrupting the assumed division between child and adult.

Roman Dubrule

MA Graduate Student

Roman Dubrule is a Franco-Albertan MA student finishing his second year at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts. His experiences include performing, composing, and recording as a freelance musician; launching an impromptu career as show-host and head of programming for two French-Canadian radio stations; and slinging wine in the scenic Okanagan Valley. Holding a BMus in Jazz and Contemporary Music with a Major in Performance from MacEwan University, Roman is now engaging more deeply with his alternate passions for philosophy, writing, and film during his Master’s studies, to continue elaborating on the importance of art in the meaningful development of societies and self. Roman’s academic interests lie generally at the intersections of sound, mindfulness, process philosophy, Taoism, affect theory, and cosmology. Above all, he believes that listening deeply to the world around us can transform us into more compassionate, ecological, and musical beings.

Michelle (Ziqi) Fu

MA Graduate Student

Michelle (Ziqi) Fu is originally from Beijing, China. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from UW (Seattle) and is dedicated to interdisciplinary research in Literature, concentrating on theatre and drama. In her academic pursuits, Michelle focuses on contemporary experimental theatre. In her research, she explores the boundaries and transformations of theatre in 21st- century China. Michelle engages the public and street theatre in the creative process. By transcending the confines of space and time within the theatrical realm, she creates a series of immersive and transformative theatre experiences.

Beyond the stage, Michelle finds solace in poetry, cartoons, literature, and philosophy. She is also a part-time comedian, delighting in improvisational comedy and other experimental arts to form deeper connections with audiences. Michelle has transformed her passion for interdisciplinary art forms into several art projects/exhibitions, essays, and literature chapbooks. She embraces a world where passion and curiosity unite, boundless in its artistic possibilities.

Jason Kennedy

MA Graduate Student

Jason is conducting research on the affect of harmonic overtones and frequencies using hand crafted specialized instruments of wood, brass, metal, stone, water, crystal, and organics called the "Sonorium". Designed and created by an ethnomusicologist, sound scientist, and collaborator with indigenous tribes in South America and India, Aurelio C. Hamer is the founder of Svaram – an innovative sound and research center located a few hours south of Chennai in the unique town of Auroville, India.  

Jason is an apprentice to the Yogi and sound practitioner Nora Lim – founder of Think off the Mat – who was trained by Hamer in Auroville, India. Nora and Jason design sound journeys and sound experiences with the Sonorium for individuals and small groups. His research as an apprentice is to inquire into the phenomenological experience and the performative affect that these instruments may or may not have on living tissue and emotional, social, and perceptual states of being.

Jason (M.A. Music Education + B.A. Jazz Performance) has extensive experience teaching general music, Orff, band, orchestra, music technology, and organizing music festivals for children (pre-K - 12) and adults. While living in New York City, Jason helped design the curriculum and pedagogy for the Jazz@Lincoln Center - WeBop! program under the direction of Wynton Marsalis and Dr. Lori Custodero of Teachers College, Columbia University. After a decade in NYC, Jason taught music in Kuala Lumpur – Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Chennai – India.

Having lived and traveled extensively throughout Asia for the past 14 years has afforded Jason multiple perspectives in art, music, and culture and how it relates to education. Jason is a certified music, yoga and mindfulness teacher, and integrates these perspectives into the pedagogy of creative and performance art. Jason's community service includes volunteering at 'Hekima Place' in Nairobi, Kenya, 'Caring for Cambodia' in Siem Reip, Cambodia, and the 'Tree Foundation' in Chennai, India.

Clara Lam

MA Graduate Student

Clara Lam completed her BFA in Fashion Marketing and Management at Savannah College of Art and Design in the United States. Having worked in organizing art exhibitions and museum collections in Hong Kong with the initiative to engage local communities, she became aware of the powerful influence contemporary arts has on transforming societies. For the MA program, Clara is interested in researching the intertwining relationship and connection between Hegemonic Culture, Conflict and Contemporary Arts. Through exploring the dynamic and chemistry of the trio, she hopes to substantiate the idea that contemporary arts is an indispensable gearing force of cultural transformation.  

Juliet Li

MA Graduate Student

Juliet Li hails from the south part of China, and is a theater fanatic and a movie lover. She was bonded with performance since her first ballet lesson at 4. She began her academic inquiry into theater during her undergraduate degree at Queen’s University, Kingston. Most recently, her research interests include film and performance aesthetics, performance theory, film theory, Chinese opera, and literature on performance and film. She is always drawn to the liveness and humanness in performance and films. To her, liveness is being present and humanness means humanity.

Dale MacDonald

MA Graduate Student

Dale MacDonald is a performance director, writer, and educator working in Vancouver. After spending most of his childhood in a theatre, he went on to complete his BA/BEd from the University of Alberta. Since then Dale has been directing and writing short plays in Vancouver; his play, maleficarum, was performed at Pull Festival VI and subsequently published in the festival’s anthology in 2017. Additionally, inspired by the countless hours and late nights of his own adolescence spent in theatres, Dale founded his own youth theatre company in 2018. Dale’s research takes its shape as the unearthing of live-horror aesthetics in response to the lack of both artistic and funding validation granted to the genre. It is an exploration of how ritual, abject, and the uncanny valley weave together in liminal space to churn the stomachs and souls of an audience.

Rachel Maddock

MA Graduate Student

Rachel Maddock (she/her) is an independent dance artist, choreographer and arts writer guided by artistic curiosity. She has a BA in Visual Culture & Performance Studies from SFU and a Diploma of Dance Studies from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music & Dance, London, UK. Rachel has written for local publications including The Dance Current, Dance International, Dance Central, SADMag and BAF. She has presented choreography at Mascall Dance’s Bloom, Chalk it Up, Small Stages, 12 Minutes Max, Open Stage and Co.ERASGA’s Salon Series, and has performed with artists and companies locally and in the UK since 2013.

Rachel’s movement practise has recently been nourished by somatic and improvisational techniques, including the influence and work of local artists Peter Bingham, Helen Walkley, Natalie and James Gnam, Deanna Peters/Mutable Subject and Olivia Shaffer. In her work, she is currently interested in the relationship between oneself, the land and each other.

www.rachelmaddock.com

Mehdi Mehrnia

MA Graduate Student

Mehdi Mehrnia was born in Iran and received his training at the Tehran University of Art and Iran Radio and Television University (IRIB University). He is a member of the Iranian Cinema Editors Guild and has extensive experience in editing feature films, short films, TV dramas, and documentaries, many of which have won national and international awards. As a film editor, he specializes in experimenting with narrative structures in both fiction and documentary films.

https://mehdimehrnia.ir

Abede Mohammadi

MA Graduate Student

Abede Mohammadi holds an MA from the Tehran University of Art in Philosophy of Art and a BA in Social Communication and Media from the University of Tehran. Her working experience in a publishing house and writing a thesis about contemporary art encourage her to pursue a more critical and comprehensive education in Contemporary Art. At SFU, she hopes to combine her passion for art with a practical approach, such as art-writing and curating. Abede is most interested in exploring different visual and cultural narratives in the modern Middle East as well as raising critical discussions around contemporary Iranian art through interdisciplinary academic research.

Parastoo Pirasteh Fard

MA Graduate Student

I hold a BA in Theatre from Art University of Tehran. My main area of research interest lies in the field of Performance Studies, including performance of resistance, performance of identity, protests and performativity, and the connection between sonic experience and body. I am also interested in exploring ideas and questions in practice.

Joshua Segun-Lean

MA Graduate Student

Joshua Segun-Lean is a writer and critic based in Nigeria. His work has appeared in The Republic Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and others.

Dan Watt

MA Graduate Student

Dan Watt is an enthusiast of film, photography, art and new technologies. He was raised on a farm on the prairies. They hold a BA in Political Science with a minor in Applied Ethics. They view the world through an interdisciplinary lens, seeking to understand the intricate connections between diverse fields of study. This unique perspective became a driving force in their academic pursuits, looking for new approaches in examining the intersection of art, culture, and society. As a life-long learner, Dan is drawn to art history, film and contemporary arts. He is also a board member Vancouver Tap Dance Society.

Carina Xu

MA Graduate Student

Carina Xu is a graduating MA candidate that looks at experimental documentary installations for sensorial ways of mapping racial capitalism and contextualizing geopolitical conflicts. The examined works centres on the displaced, censored, diasporic, and exilic by tracing geographies of loss. Adopting the lens of Edward Said’s imaginative geographies and Jacques Derrida’s spectralities, her research explores how "absent" characters resurface as affective indices that haunt the past, present, and future of the land they inhabit. These case studies seek to crystallize a spectral documentation method for installations to encounter otherwise inaccessible knowledge of the mundane and banality in land dispossession and settler-colonial renderings of property ownership.

In addition to her research journey, Carina co-curated the audio-visual installation "Pauline Johnson's Legends" as part of SFU Bennett Library's Special Collections and Rare Books Exhibit in 2020. The work features the Johnson's Legends of Vancouver, employs editing software defects and reversed sound-mixing as it reflects on the curators' changing relationship with land and technology, projecting the reimagined memory of X̱wáýx̱way as reprocessed. Carina has also worked for DOXA Documentary Film Festival and The Cinematheque in communications and education roles while living and learning on the unceded ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples of səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ  (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.