Irfan Brkovic

MFA Graduate Student

Irfan Brkovic is a video artist who works with audiovisual synthesis and immersive environments. He is interested in creating interactive spaces using sound, visuals and lights. He is a member and head video artist at The Wooster Group in New York, where he design real time interactive video systems for live performances. He is also a founding member of  Phase Space NYC, an artist collective and makerspace dedicated to the exploration of media, performance, creative coding and interdisciplinary art practices.

irfanbrkovic.com

Torien Cafferata

MFA Graduate Student

Torien Cafferata (he/they) is an immersive theatre producer, director, playwright, dramaturge, actor, and educator based in Treaty 6 territory, Saskatoon, Canada. He holds a BFA in Drama from the University of Saskatchewan, which has shaped his practice to consistently centre the relationship between performer and audience -- or technology and user. As co-Artistic Director of It’s Not A Box Theatre he plays at the intersections between performance, interactive digital design, immersive scenography, sound design, found spaces, and lo-fi augmented reality. He thrives on collaborating across disciplines and inviting audiences to become players and storytellers, as seen most broadly in Overhear, It's Not A Box Theatre's one-on-one immersive documentary podplay and Situationist psychogeographical experiment. Overhear is an on-going international project, having been produced at both Toronto's SummerWorks and Prague Quadrennial, and received the SATAward for Innovation. His latest work has drifted further into digital immersive game design, such as in the home interactive mobile game series ISOLATA and the first-person lo-fi livestream RPG, Play Fail Win. Reflected in these are his recent research muses which lurk in the realm of anti-capitalist hauntology; from Vaporwave to Hopepunk to Fisherian "Weird and Eerie" liminality and lost futures. As an active community member Torien has served as Board Chair of Live Five Independent Theatre Inc, as President and Dramaturgical Chair of the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre (2018-2019), and as Head Dramaturge of the Sask Writers Workshop, a free workshop collective for young or emerging writers. He has written Fringe plays and sketch comedy since 2013 and his short plays have twice been selected for the Hardly Arts Short Cuts Festival.

To stay up to date on Torien's digital immersive work, see @itsnotaboxtheatre

To stay up to date on Torien's Internet Dumpster Marxist Shitposting, see @kyles_roommate

Alexandra Caprara

MFA Graduate Student

Alexandra Caprara is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work focuses on lighting and video design, devised processes, installation, poetry, and physical theatre. Born in Toronto, she holds a degree from York University in Theatre and Creative Writing, and has produced and performed her work internationally. Her research interests include examining the ways emergent technologies can become a harmonious part of a creation process, and how the digital can embrace the organic in both form and content.

www.alexandracaprara.com

Justine A. Chambers

MFA Graduate Student

Justine A. Chambers is a choreographer, dancer and teacher living and working on the traditional, ancestral and  unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, 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 work has been hosted by theatres and galleries locally, nationally and internationally. She is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

justineachambers.com

Kittie Cooper

MFA Graduate Student

Kittie Cooper is a composer, performer, and educator based in Vancouver, BC. She makes intermedia art that frequently incorporates feminism and explores the spectrum between silliness and seriousness. Her work has been called "highly original and wonderfully fun." She is interested in text and graphic scores, improvisation, and DIY electronic instruments. She also performs locally as a guitarist, electronic musician, and improviser. Kittie is currently working toward an MFA in interdisciplinary arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. She also serves as Director of Composers Forums and Faculty for The Walden School Young Musicians Program. She holds a BM from Northwestern University in music education and guitar performance, and an MEd in special education from George Mason University. In her spare time, she enjoys taking care of the stray cats in her neighborhood.

kittiecooper.com

Lauren Crazybull

MFA Graduate Student

Lauren Crazybull is a Niitsítapi, Dené painter living and working on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh and Musqueam people. In her work, Crazybull interrogates how Indigenous identities have been historically represented and understood through visual culture. Working primarily in portraiture, a long-standing genre that is often embedded with an imbalance of power between the artist/viewer and sitter, Crazybull seeks to examine the relationship between herself as an artist and the individuals she paints. Through this ongoing work, Lauren uses her work as a way to assert her own humanity, and advocate, in diverse and subtle ways, for the innate intellectual, spiritual, creative and political fortitude of Indigenous peoples.

Mena El Shazly

MFA Graduate Student

Mena El Shazly's (b. Cairo) work is grounded in video but encompasses embroidery and sculpture. Her practice is concerned with entropy, bodies and (light)-sensitive surfaces that carry knowledge and memory. She studied performing and visual arts at the American University in Cairo and is a former fellow of the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. El Shazly also has a well-established curatorial practice and has organized several video art events and workshops. She is the current Artistic Director of Cairo Video Festival for video art and experimental film organized by Medrar for Contemporary Art.

vimeo.com/melsh | menatelshazly.wordpress.com | www.medrar.org | www.cvf.medrar.org

Sarah Finn

MFA Graduate Student

Sarah Finn (she/they) is a multimedia artist working in performance and film. Her work explores mythic narratives set in post-industrial wastelands, to investigate humanity’s spiritual and ethical unknowns. Using surreal storytelling, physical performance, video and puppetry, they co- create worlds where queer and beyond-human futures emerge from modern ruins. Her multimedia performances and films have been presented at festivals internationally and various venues in New York. She trained at Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France and got her BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

www.sarahkfinn.com

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg

MFA Graduate Student

Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg is an award-winning creator, performer, choreographer, director, writer, and artistic director of Tara Cheyenne Performance, working across disciplines in film, dance, theatre, and experimental performance. She is renowned as a trailblazer in interdisciplinary performance and as a mighty performer "who defies categorization on any level." Along with her own creations, Tara has collaborated with many theatre companies and artists, including: Zee Zee Theatre, Bard on the Beach, ItsaZoo Theatre, The Arts Club, Boca Del Lupo, Ruby Slippers, The Firehall Arts Centre, and Vertigo Theatre (Calgary).

With a string of celebrated solo shows to her credit (including bANGER, Goggles, Porno Death Cult, I can’t remember the word for I can’t remember, Body Parts, and Pants), multidisciplinary collaborations, commissions and boundary bending ensemble creations, Tara's work is celebrated both nationally and internationally. Tara is known for her unique and dynamic hybrid of dance, comedy, and theatre. She is sought after for creating innovative movement for theatre and has performed her full-length solos and ensemble works around the world (highlights: DanceBase/Edinburgh, South Bank Centre/London, On the Boards/Seattle USA, High Performance Rodeo/Calgary, etc.). Her most recent solo, Body Parts, premiered at The Cultch in May and is currently on tour. Current research focuses include gender, the attention economy and neuroscience, and aging. Tara lives on the unceded Coast Salish territories with her partner, composer Marc Stewart, and their child Jasper.

www.taracheyenne.com

Key words: Dance, Comedy, Theatre, Gender

Elissa Hanson

MFA Graduate Student

Elissa Hanson is an interdisciplinary performance artist and somatic practitioner. Through movement, text, film, and multimedia installations, her work explores the affordances of somatic awareness as a subversive political gesture, with a particular emphasis on the affects and aesthetics of neurodiversity. As a dancer, Elissa has toured internationally and collaborated extensively with local companies, including EDAM Dance, Fight With a Stick, and The Biting School. With Lexi Vajda, she co-founded Ace Co Pro, a performance project that investigates ideologies of dance and philosophies of care. Most recently, Elissa was a 2022 Artist in Residence at the Lobe Spatial Sound Studio in Vancouver, where she undertook movement research on the process of co-regulation. This work is informed by her teaching practice as a certified facilitator in TRE®, a trauma-informed somatic method that supports the integration of physical, mental, and emotional experiences through bodily tremoring for fascial release. Elissa lives on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the qʼwa:n̓ƛʼən̓ (Kwantlen), q̓icə̓ y̓ (Katzie), SEMYOME (Semiahmoo), and scə̓ waθən məsteyəx (Tsawwassen) Nations.

elissahanson.com

Kevin Jesuino

MFA Graduate Student

Kevin Jesuino is a first-generation settler multi-disciplinary performer, performing arts educator, movement coach, arts facilitator, LGBTQ+ activist, and community organizer of Portuguese heritage. His work is oftentimes collaborative, site-specific, participatory, and process-oriented. His practice explores relationality, the stories within our bodies, and the queer joy of uncertainty. He draws from research in queer performance, queer ecology, body memory, improvisation, community & participatory art practices, placemaking, and site adaptive/responsive performance.  His community-embedded projects engage participants in performative actions, discussions, creative interventions, activations, and other forms of organizing. He is the Co-Artistic Director of TRAction and is currently completing his MFA in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University. Kevin is currently living on the unceded traditional territories of the  xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (Vancouver, BC), however, in the recent past has also called Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta) and Mohkinstis (Calgary, Alberta) his home.

www.kevinjesuino.com

Tung Pang Lam

MFA Graduate Student

Hong Kong born, and working between Hong Kong, London and Beijing in the early stages of his career, Tung Pang Lam experienced the coming-of-age that coincides with drastic social changes, a result of his homeland’s decolonisation from a constitutional monarchy and new allegiance to China in a short span of time. Traversing between the media of painting, site-specific installation, sound and video, Lam’s playful practice arises from a curious imagination that recombines traditional iconography and vernacular elements, innovating with a myriad of found objects and images to form new practices that are often experimental in nature. Lam’s works engage the themes of collective memories and fleeting nostalgia, which articulate an ongoing negotiation of the overlapping city-state’s reality. In his allegorical landscapes, journeys and sceneries become essential passages connecting time and distance, longing and loss.

Lam’s work is collected by LACMA (Los Angeles), Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), Burger Collection, the Deutsche Bank, Hong Kong Museum of Art (Hong Kong), Kadist Art Foundation (France and USA), White Rabbit Contemporary Chinese Art Collection (Australia) and M+ (Hong Kong), among others.

lamtungpang.com

Caroline Liffmann

MFA Graduate Student

Caroline Liffmann is a performance maker, choreographer and educator with a home base in contemporary dance. Her work is influenced by over 20 years of dance practice and performance, as well as training in facilitation, conflict transformation and trauma-informed practice. Guided by relationships and a sense of play, Caroline is interested in absurdity, magical realism, humour and delight. Her approach is collaborative, grounded in improvisation, and often embraces a DIY ethos, creating for the stage, the screen, outdoors and neighborhood spaces. Caroline bridges her creation and facilitation practices through community-engaged dance, and has worked extensively as a dance, arts and museum educator with children, youth and families. She is a collaborating performer with Myriad Dance Projects and Foolish Operations. Originally from the prairies, Caroline lives and works on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

Chelsea MacKay

MFA Graduate Student

Chelsea MacKay is an interdisciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and European descent who works and lives in the unceded and ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil- Waututh Nations. Drawn to the convergence of industrial design, painting and sculpture. A passion for movement and dance emerged early on from studying ballet and contemporary dance. Through dance she discovered the profound beauty of expression through gestures, and this fascination later evolved into an exploration of underground dance culture. In these spaces

she observed how music scenes fostered community and empowered personal expression. Recently she has been focusing on painting as a means to convey the freedom and euphoria that dance can evoke. Her works embrace gestural brush strokes, vibrant colour fields, and abstract undulating forms. Her sculptural pieces draw inspiration from realms of fantasy, psychedelia, pop culture, and surrealism, showcasing a diverse range of artistic expression. Whether in paintings or sculptural works she invites the viewer to immerse themselves in the expressive journey, where colours, forms, and materials intertwine to convey the complexities of human connectivity.

Ghazal Majidi

MFA Graduate Student

Ghazal Majidi (b. 1995, Tehran) is an experimental filmmaker, new media artist, and animator. Her body of work ranges between 3D animated shorts, music videos, generative audiovisuals, and photography. With a bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Shahid Beheshti University, she has dived deep into the dynamics between Space and Story- a reciprocating relationship that drives most of her work. As so, she seeks new qualities of surrounding space that lure in outlandish tales, while exploring familiar concepts like identity and its subcategories, i.e. memory, illusion, loss and attachment, as well as humans’ interaction with their environment. Her works have been presented in film festivals and galleries in Iran, Germany, Austria, Belgium, United States, Japan, Spain, Slovakia, etc., including Vienna Shorts, Brussels International Film Festival, and Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin. Throughout her career, she has maintained a cross-disciplinary dialogue with sound and music while collaborating with respected international musicians to interpret sound into moving image. In her animated sequences, she exploits the intersections of Film and New Media with an experimental approach towards storytelling and genre. In her recent experiences she has expanded her practice to virtual reality productions, immersive storytelling, and data driven installations.

ghazalmajidi.com

Lauraine Mak

MFA Graduate Student

Lauraine Mak is a Canadian artist living and working between Düsseldorf, Germany and Vancouver. She graduated from Emily Carr University in 2013 and has since been enrolled at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, Germany studying under Rita McBride. Her work is informed by philosophical investigations of language and phenomenology, and she works chiefly with video and painting. 

cargocollective.com/MAKLAURAINE | vimeo.com/574885905/2e5899a8cb

Liz Oakley

MFA Graduate Student

Liz Oakley is a puppeteer, deviser, designer, and teaching artist. She creates collaborative and solo multidisciplinary object-based performances, installations, and processions. She also works as a freelance puppet designer and puppeteer. Her interests include site-engaged and participatory performance events, scale play, paper mache, animated scenography, medieval iconography, queer embodiment, and exposing/challenging normalized understandings of place and utility.

lizlizliz.com

Avideh Saadatpajouh

MFA Graduate Student

Avideh Saadatpajouh is a multimedia artist and design activist exploring techno-art's endless possibilities. Her motto: Explore, Experience, Enhance. Born in the west side of Asia, based in the east side, and studying in the west side of Canada, she is a citizen of nature. Her explorations are at the intersection of performance art and technology, focusing on the impact of the Human-Centric worldview on surrounding environments and other habitats. Drawing on her collective knowledge of new media art, architecture, and industrial design, she explores design in digital spaces, internet art practices, performance art, and interactive installations. She would like to dive deeper into how to make invisible frequencies visible, which is the continuation of her recent interactive installation, “pulse-fiction,” and how we could create eco- techno art in this human-centric world, which is the next stage of her thesis, “Henosis,” at OCADU. She works internationally and has had shows and exhibitions in Canada, the USA, Iran, and Turkey. She values multidisciplinary collaboration and experimentation and believes that people with different backgrounds and mindsets can give distinctive perspectives to each other while working on the same topic.

Instagram | https://www.avideh.cc

#interactive_art #techno_vs_eco #visible_frequencies #eco-centric-life

Niloufar Samadi

MFA Graduate Student

Niloufar Samadi is a director, performer, singer and puppeteer based in Tehran, Iran. She studied bachelor of Puppet Theatre in the Tehran University of Art, Iran. She is interested in the intersections of puppets with visual arts and science. Her works seek to examine the relation between the body of performer and the body of puppet, new experience in digital media, the use of game and ritual in social practice performance.

Amy Daisy Sawyer

MFA Graduate Student

Amy Daisy Sawyer is a multidisciplinary artist from Edinburgh, Scotland whose work explores notions of womanhood and female identity. She makes work that combines “serious”, male- dominated mediums like new technologies, painting and sculpture with “silly” female-relegated tropes and elements like pink, dolls, romance novels, and other non-canon media. By challenging ideals of classicism and “The Male Gaze” Amy attempts to take the object/muse and reposition her as autonomous. Her desire is to build a surreal, unnerving, femme-visible world which is both beautiful and grotesque and utterly unapologetic.

Amy is currently working towards an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art Practices at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C. She also holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland and a BA with honours in Film and Media from Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh, Scotland.

In her spare time Amy enjoys pouring paint onto canvas/paper/floor with her son, creating unexpected masterpieces together!

KEY WORDS: Feminism, Representation, Objectification

https://amydsawyer.com

Cody Tolmie

MFA Graduate Student

Cody Tolmie is an emerging interdisciplinary Stó:lō artist from their traditional territory of S’ólh téméxw. Cody’s current practice is primarily focused on photography, painting and digital media. Within these mediums he seeks to contextualize and challenge notions of history, tense and power dynamics within narrative and lens.

Alexis Chivir-ter Tsgeba

MFA Graduate Student

Alexis Chivir-ter Tsgeba is a Nigerian visual artist who experiments with digital collage-making. As a person with multiple interests including drawing, photography, graphic design and architecture, collage making has proven the ultimate medium for her to express herself without limitations. Her work directly engages subjects such as Afro-futurism, queerness and gender expression, religion, spirituality and the exploration of the inner self. Alexis is drawn to art forms that are characterised by experimentation and synthesis wary of borders limits and fixed genres. While also being interested in challenging mainstream notions of queerness, masculinity and femininity in the context of post-colonial Africa by dreaming up futures where there is no divide but room for fluidity and acceptance. She holds degrees in Law as well as Creative and Media Enterprise. Her works have been shown in galleries in the U.S., U.K, Nigeria, South Africa, Germany etc.

Taryn Walker

MFA Graduate Student

Taryn Walker is a queer, interdisciplinary Indigenous artist of Nlka'pamux, Syilx, and mixed European ancestry whose work explores concepts of identity, tenderness, healing, cycles of life and death, and the supernatural through drawing, printmaking, installation, and video. In 2018 Walker graduated from the University of Victoria's BFA program with a Major in Visual Arts and a Minor in Art History & Visual Studies.Taryn was awarded the Diane Mary Hallam Achievement Award by the University of Victoria for academic excellence and commitment to the arts in 2018 and in 2017 they were also longlisted for the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize, presented by the Presentation House Gallery for demonstrating excellence as an emerging video artist and photographer. Most recently, in 2022 they were shortlisted for the ohpinamake prize presented by the University of Saskatchewan. Walker’s work has been presented in spaces, residencies, and events across Western Canada and beyond. Their artistic research has also been granted support from the Edmonton Arts Council, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, and the First Peoples Cultural Council.

tarynwalkermedia.com

Douglas Watt

MFA Graduate Student

Douglas Watt is an artist who synthesizes elements of model making, set design, handcraft, installation, photography, and ready-made practices to reflect on sexuality, lived environments, virtuality and selfhood. Specific areas of research include localized histories of Vancouver’s Davie Village and the perforations between literature, popular media and fine art more broadly.

www.unit17.org/douglaswatt

Shervin Zarkalam

MFA Graduate Student

Shervin Zarkalam is a dramaturge, performance maker, set designer and director from Tehran, Iran. He graduated from the University of Tehran majoring in set design but his area of interest include dramaturgy, choreography, object theatre, composition and problem-solving and art counselling. As a dramaturge, Shervin seeks fundamental questions like who is a dramaturge? And how to do dramaturgy or What is the media of performance and what is to perform? With this approach to dramaturgy, he took different positions in various artistic groups and participated in well-known theatre festivals such as Tajrobeh Theatre Festival, Iran International University Theatre Festival, Fajr International Theatre Festival.

www.linkedin.com/in/shervinzarkalam