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

Kevin Jesuino

MFA Graduate Student

Kevin Jesuino is a Portuguese-Canadian queer multi-disciplinary performer, facilitator, activist, somatic practioner, movement arts coach and arts educator. His work is oftentimes collaborative, site-specific, participatory, and process-oriented. His practice explores relationality, the stories within our bodies and the magical-realism that manifests itself in LGBTQ+ communities and the natural world. He draws from research in queer performance, ecology/biology, somatics and site adaptive/responsive performance. His community-embedded projects engage participants in performative actions, discussions, creative interventions, activations and other forms of organizing. Kevin is the Co-Artistic Director of TRAction, a dynamic collective of interdisciplinary artists who engage communities in art-making to address issues of climate justice. He is passionate about facilitating social action through performance and visual art around climate justice and the ecological crisis. His current research centres around issues of food security and building eco-somatic empathy. Kevin completed his Theatre Arts diploma at MacEwan University (with honours) and his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan (Governor General's Award). He is a founding Fellow of the Trico Changemaker Studio Artist-as-Changemaker program. He also is a certified Tamalpa Life/Art Process® Teaching Graduate, and Yoga Instructor and completed his Permaculture Design Certificate with Verge Permaculture. Kevin splits his time between Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton, Alberta), Mohkinstis (Calgary, Alberta), Aksaysim (Lethbridge, AB) along with the unceded traditional territories of the  xʷməθkʷəy̓əm(Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (Vancouver, BC)

kevinjesuino.com | tractionart.wixsite.com/home | caw-wac.com | tricochangemakersstudio.ca/artistaschangemaker

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

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

Salome Nieto

MFA Graduate Student

Salome Nieto is an accomplished contemporary dance artist renowned for her emotionally charged performances. Highly influenced by Butoh and Mexico’s surrealism, her transformative works explore themes of ritual and ceremony. Crucial to her artistic vision, she welcomes artists’ contributions from other disciplines through local and international collaborations to explore new possibilities for innovation. These collaborations encompass installations, traditional stage, site-specific and improvisational performance. Nieto is an award-winning dancer and choreographer who has taught and performed internationally. As an interpreter, she has worked predominantly with Canada’s leading post-butoh company, Kokoro Dance, with Donna Redlick Dance and most recently with Raven Spirit Dance. She currently holds the position of Fine and Performing Arts Programmer for Dance at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts.

Salome Nieto’s work is created on the traditional, ancestral and unceded land of the Coast Salish peoples – Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səlílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam) Nations.

www.salomenieto.com

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

Jami Reimer

MFA Graduate Student

jamir@sfu.ca

My practice explores musical sound, particularly as it relates to movement and the exploration of spaces. I am interested in composing with field recordings, electronic sounds, and voice. I hope to draw on a cross-disciplinary interest in dance and somatic studies in the creation of new musical work for stage and/or other place-based environments. 

jamireimer.weebly.com

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.

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.

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