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As well as providing an enriched interdisciplinary context for study, the MA in Comparative Media Arts prepares students for work as curators, cultural programmers, arts administrators, arts writers, and other careers in the arts. It also prepares students for a range of PhDs that study the fine and performing arts.

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.

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.

Photo by Yvonne Chew.

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.

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