MFA Students

Mohammadreza (Momo) Akrami

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Mohammadreza (Momo) Akrami (he/him) is an Iranian-Canadian dance and interdisciplinary artist whose work spans Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, San Francisco, and Brussels. With a multifaceted background in mathematics, physics, and theater, Momo brings a unique perspective as a creator, dancer, and teacher. His diverse dance lineage encompasses Flying Low/Passing Through/Improvisation with David Zambrano, Butoh/Noguchi Taiso with Atsushi Takenouchi and Imre Thorman, and Grotowski/post-Grotowski theater. His physical practice is enriched by martial arts such as Wing Chun, Escrima, and Chi Kung.

Currently on the faculty at Dance Arts Institute (formerly Toronto Dance Theatre) in Toronto, Momo has taught at various institutions including Simon Fraser University, UC Berkeley, Studio 303 (Montreal), ODC (San Francisco), and BOE (San Francisco). His teaching philosophy integrates his dance lineage, personal practice, and life experiences, fostering an inclusive and exploratory learning environment.

Momo is mentoring PhD candidate Ane Iselin Brogeland at the University of Stavanger on a project exploring dance improvisation and grief. He was invited by David Zambrano to participate in research at TicTac art center and to perform at its anniversary alongside world-renowned artists like Sasha Waltz, Ivo Dimchev, Thomas Hauert, and Yoshiko Chuma.

Momo’s artistic practice explores the intersection of dance, image, and sound to shift perceptions of time and self. Grounded in his lived reality in Iran, his projects examine bodily autonomy and collective agency. Committed to questioning artistic norms, Momo creates environments that foster exploration, driven by his fascination with epistemology, playfulness, and cultural appropriation.

Wyldie Bracewell

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Wyldie Bracewell is an artist working primarily in sound, whose work explores listening, its limits, and is led by a desire to explore sound through a myriad of lenses and senses. 

Her current practice encompasses field recording, magnetic tape, and a fascination with memory and the way it inhabits material things.

Much of her practice has also centred around a creative of use of hearing aids as sound making devices, and as such they often feature as musical instruments in her work. 

Alex Calcagno

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Alex Calcagno is an experimental artist focusing on sound, clay and words. Currently, their work explores re-animating “dead” and discarded technology, the souls of individual instruments, and the ghosts wandering by. Their practice is based in interpretation and translation, listening and recording processes as instruments, as well as harnessing the invisible worlds of harmonics, vibrations, RF/EMF waves and inaudible sounds.  

They are forever inspired by time, nervous systems, this organismic Earth, and encountering the divine on the trash-stratum. Their work is an attempt at believing in the revolutionary potential of contemplation, grey areas and unreason (even if only as a dream). 

vibraphenomenology.bandcamp.com | contraphantom.bandcamp.com

Keywords: Noise, waves, vibes. 

Elizabeth Ellis

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Elizabeth Ellis is an artist, graphic designer, and arts organizer whose work includes moving-image and soundscape composition, text, printed matter, and listening-based participatory activities. Her practice engages with language, sound, and surrounding ecologies to explore expansive modes of communication. Recently, she has been interested in developing multi-sensory reading and writing processes along with plant-life in gardens and on a farm where she volunteers. She is currently living on the unceded Stó:lō territory of the Semá:th and Mathxwí First Nations.

elizabeth-ellis.com

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

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.

Marcela Oñate-Trules

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Marcela Oñate-Trules is a lens-based artist, dreamer, daughter/sister/friend, organizer, and storyteller dedicated to filling the gaps in archives by creating (audio)visual records that tell the stories of people and territories close to her heart. She sees her practice as one of ‘embodied archiving’, where she practices deep listening and bears witness with her body/mind/heart/spirit and camera.

Her work is experimental, blending analog and digital formats in an attempt to time travel. She explores how the past permeates the present, manifesting as both scars and open wounds. She is inspired by the natural world, everyday life or cotidianidad, her beloveds, the way light shimmers on water, and grassroots movements around the globe. Her work has combined aspects of the essay film, archival research, oral history, field recordings, and low chemical photographic development.

Marcela is based between Southern Chile and the Bay Area in Northern California. Her work has been showcased at Film Diary NYC (USA), Coyaiqhue Cultural Center (Chile), and FECISO – Festival de Cine Social y Antisocial (Chile).

Christopher Outten

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Christopher Outten is a Bahamian artist located in Vancouver, Canada. Outten’s art expresses his current reality by manifesting physical representations of unconscious processes, and translating his consciousness onto material. He seeks to create work that delves into issues pertaining to identity within the diaspora. He credits his current journey to Vancouver as the catalyst for his compassionate exploration of differences in world views. With that compassion he has also gained a profound care for the materials he employs. He credits writers such as Frantz Fanon and their views on African Phenomenology as one of the key points of reference in his current research. 

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

Taha Saraei

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Taha Saraei is an interdisciplinary artist with a diverse background in stage direction, photography, installation, performance making, and music. His works utilize the communicative fundamental principles of these disciplines to create individualized experiences. He primarily explores human behavior and instincts by constructing interactive environments for audiences to encounter. Each of his creations is based on its own algorithm/system, shaping the random wholeness of the piece. This simply makes his works a unique and unintentional practice for viewers to experiment with and discover, just as they are for him.

Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba

MFA Graduate Student

Alexis Chivir-ter Tsegba 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.

Jaeden Walton

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Jaeden Walton is a performing arts designer originally from the land of the Syilx Okanagan people (colonially known as Kelowna, BC).  Jaeden holds a BFA in Theatre Design from the University of Victoria, awarded with distinction.

Jaeden’s main artistic disciplines lie within scenography, primarily scenic and sound design. They grew up infatuated with music and studied percussive theory and performance from a very young age, taking many private lessons in piano theory, percussive jazz studies, and percussive heavy metal. Jaeden’s background in music is what eventually led them to pursue sound design in the realm of scenography. The exposer to the world of theatre through the lens of sound design opened a whole new world of artistic possibility for Jaeden, now being drawn to all elements of scenography. Drawing heavy inspiration for their work in questioning the nature of how things operate, and how they can mold that into something new, Jaeden strives to lure the spectator into a piece that seems ‘normal’ at first, to then expose them to something more radical and abstracted.

https://jaedenwalton.com/

Boyu Xu 

MFA GRADUATE STUDENT

Boyu Xu (They/Them) is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in photography, video art, animation, and projection installation. Born and raised in Tianjin, China—a city near Beijing—Boyu relocated to Canada in 2020 and currently resides in Vancouver, BC. They completed their Bachelor of Fine Arts honors degree at the University of Victoria and have since advanced their studies at Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts.

Boyu's work has been prominently featured between 2022 and 2024, focusing on projection installations and photography. Their art often explores themes of displacement, grief, and the experience of navigating minority status within unfamiliar cultural landscapes, reflecting their journey from China to Canada.