MFA Students

Jennifer Anderson

MFA Graduate Student

Areas: Music performance, instrument building, sound design, interactive new media.

Jennifer Anderson is an experimental musician and her passion is designing, creating, and building augmented and original instruments. While instrument design is her main focus, she is also interested in creating interactive experiences using new media. Jennifer has experience in various audio creation software, new media programming languages, and digital fabrication tools. These are her main tools for creating musical experiences and interactions. Jennifer is also a qualified audio engineer and sound designer, having ten plus years of experience in the field. She has worked concerts and theatre productions operating the soundboard, along with backstage experience. If there are saws, nails, and drills around, she will use them to build stuff.

jennifer-anderson.webflow.io

Jean Brazeau

MFA Graduate Student

Jean Brazeau (b. 1992) is an electroacoustic composer and performer based in Vancouver, BC. Selected performances include Sky Island (Vancouver, BC), Dig Your Own Rave (Outer Heaven, Victoria, BC), and Luminocity hosted by the Kamloops Art Gallery. His commercial work has been featured on the record labels: Acting Press (DE), 1080p (CA), Pacific Rhythm (CA), and Isla Records (CA). Past commissions have included This Chime Has a Door (2018) for the Pollyanna 圖書館 Library at 221a, as well as Fraser (2019) for Liquid Landscapes at the Surrey UrbanScreen. As an extension of his artistic practice, Jean is a Director at Deep Blue, an experimental sound studio in Vancouver where he co-curates a program of sound based performances.

Roxanne Charles

MFA Graduate Student

E: rcharles@sfu.ca

Areas: Visual art.

Roxanne Charles is a mixed media artist of Strait Salish and European decent. She is an active and proud member of Semiahmoo First Nation in Surrey, BC where she promotes art, language, and culture.

Roxanne recently completed a double major from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, receiving a BA in general studies with a minor in anthropology and a BFA with a minor in art history. Roxanne also holds a certificate in northwest coast jewelry design from The Native Education College.

Her work often explores a variety of themes such as spirituality, environment, identity, hybridity, and various forms of violence. Roxanne likes to work with a wide range of media and really enjoys combining both traditional and contemporary practices. Roxanne is a historian, artist, and contemporary story teller whose goal is to touch, move, and inspire others through her work. She finds creative ways to engage her audience by employing methods of performance and focusing on providing a multisensory experience.

Karla Desentis Rodríguez

MFA Graduate Student

Karla Desentis is a dancer, choreographer, designer, and musical theater actress. One of her strongest interest is to do art interventions, performances, video-dance, dance theatre, and physical theatre.

She began her career in the performing arts at the age of five and concluded her studies as a dancer after 13 years of training in classical, contemporary, jazz and folklore technique at the Mexico City Ballet Academy. Her increasing interest in performing arts led her to study other disciplines like singing and acting at the CECAAP where she got a Musical Theatre diploma. Also, she studied set and costumes design at UNAM where she graduated from the Bachelor in Industrial Design, 2010, receiving an Academic Merit Diploma. Furthermore, she graduated from the Bachelor in Choreography at INBA, 2015, with an Honorable Mention in Excellence.

Within artistic residency programs, she has been benefited from the INBA Foundation for the summer program at the School of Toronto Dance Theater in 2012 and by The Banff Center for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, for the Indigenous Dance Residency program in 2016.

In the professional field, Karla has been in numerous dance productions as a dancer, as well as a director of her choreographic work. As a teacher she has worked for over ten years, being in charge of groups of all ages; being responsible for the choreographic assembly. Recently she has been teaching an interdisciplinary (dance and design) workshop for the Faculty of Arts and Design at UNAM.

Tin Gamboa

MFA Graduate Student

tgamboa@sfu.ca

Tin Gamboa is a dance artist who was born and raised on traditional land of Austronesian people, in a place commonly known as Manila, Philippines. She is currently living in the traditional land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-waututh first nations, now known as Vancouver, Canada. With her Filipino blood rumbling through her tapping toes and dancing body, Tin explore patterns, cycles, and stories within micro and macro levels, as “to enquire into the world of changing patterns and forces at play, is to enquire into the choreography of life” (Klien 2008). Through dance improvisation and composition, she creates safe spaces for focused reflection on ideas and patterns imprinted on the body, in relation to larger frameworks, whethe political, geographic, historical, cultural, or societal.  

tingamboa.com | Vimeo

Aakansha Ghosh

MFA Graduate Student

Aakansha Ghosh is a visual artist, whose research has been developing to deconstruct, decode and depict the role of architecture in context to the notion of memory and individuality, in and of places. She has lived in more than twenty houses across seven cities in India and now in Canada, this constant shift has shaped the context of her research surrounding spaces we call home and the individuality that resides within these places. Her practice incorporates painting, sculpture and installation making, using found objects and everyday material.

She has completed her Bachelors in Visual Arts (2018) with a major in painting and a minor in ceramics from Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S University of Baroda, India. Her works have been part of shows across Vadodara, Goa and Delhi. They have also been published on artist-run websites.

www.through-mywindow.com

Deborah Harman

MFA Graduate Student

dharman@sfu.ca

I am an Artist exploring experimental Documentary forms and their capacity to search for deeper more embodied human experiences. I am interested in Pyschogeography, Dance and embodiment of media used to explore land, the ocean and its stories.  My projects consider Space and Place theory, Art and Wellbeing and Transcendentalism.

debbieharman.com | docu-raw-deb.tumblr.com

Homa Khosravi

MFA Graduate Student

hka146@sfu.ca

Painter from Iran, Tehran. Studied painting at Tehran University. My paintings are mostly about nature, plants, animals and human bodies, specifically the female body and human organs. I do photography and collages as well, about the same subjects.

Casper Leerink

MFA Graduate Student

Casper Leerink (b. 1995) originally had two great affections: Music and Technology. Torn between the two, he chose to pursue a career in music. From 2013 until 2017, he studied Piano performance at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Zwolle, resulting in his graduation in July 2017. Because Casper’s interests grew bigger then the piano, he started a second major in music composition.

In his compositions, Casper is seizing the opportunity to integrate his two affections. Technology in his compositions has an important role: it is used to connect a variety of features with his Music, like Dance, Theater, Film, and even the Audience. With help of the new possibilities technology creates, these features aren’t a separate entity from the music, but are part of an interactive experience (they react to each other).

Using these technologies in his music, Casper tries to create an opportunity for technology to connect both people and technology.

Xinyue Liu

MFA Graduate Student

Xinyue Liu works primarily with video, photography, text, and fabrics. By incorporating fragmented narratives and outdated visuals, Liu’s practice probes the manifestations of displacement, intimacy, and unfinished stories. She is fascinated by the renegotiations of past and present that unfold when she searches for and handles found objects, lost images and readymade knickknacks. Liu received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Television and Radio Production from Jilin University, China, before moving to Vancouver. The culmination of her upbringing and her new-found experiences has led her to a more filmic approach, which unravels through the study of expanded cinema and the politics of nostalgia.

Silas Ng

MFA Graduate Student

smn10@sfu.ca

Silas Ng is an emerging artist based on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. His photography and multi-disciplinary works explore his life experience and identities as Deaf Canadian-born Chinese to discover how his life was weaved by the three different worlds.  

instagram.com/silas5.ng

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

Jennifer Tham

MFA Graduate Student

E: jennifer_tham@sfu.ca

Areas: Music, music for voice(s)

I love the human voice; deeply personal, unique, subjective. I love words; suggestive and significant, precise yet imprecise. I am driven by the countless possibilities a theatre of voices offers; a mobile troupe with the potential to surprise, engage and provoke in unexpected ways and places.  In Singapore, I conduct the SYC Ensemble Singers, new music adventure junkies for whom more than 40 works have been written, several of these involving elements of theatre and choreographed movement.

I’m fascinated by the dialogue  between sight and sound – experimental music tends to need “visual aids” – and am interested in new music for vocal ensemble that can be staged, with movement, in unconventional spaces or as site-specific installation. I guess this love of how all our senses can work together (or not) to create something meaningful (or not) was begotten in the BFA program up on the mountain, at SFU, between 1992 and 1995.

C. Olivia Valenza

MFA Graduate Student

C. Olivia Valenza is a composer, clarinetist/performer, and interdisciplinary collaborator from Milwaukee, WI. Her work includes live performance, installation, sound design for dance, and the development of electroacoustic and acoustic concert music. Her research and process is concerned with eliciting personal and intimate performances and investigating the development of scores that elicit those points of relationality. She often looks to methods of remediation, using found objects and imagery in her compositions and performances to parse familiar threads of association and weave new worlds. Her hope is that sound and meaning made through participatory practices can help to realize a pluralistic vision of our artistic communities and of society as a whole.

Valenza has developed scored and improvised performances for clarinet, turntable, electronics and various materials, including recently, leaf blowers, maps, and walkie-talkies. She has also developed site specific works for electric guitar, clarinet, cello, metal sculpture, and electronics. 

She holds a BFA in Composition and Technology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is currently expanding her research/practice as an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at Simon Fraser University. Currently, she is also an editor for the Comparative Media Arts Journal there.

Valenza has developed work for and performed with Present Music, Wild Space Dance Company, Hyperlocal MKE, FTAM Noise Knowledge Consortium, Sensoria: Experiments in Sound and Performance, and the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO).

www.colivia-valenza.com

Ghinwa Yassine

MFA Graduate Student

[Lebanese, b. 1984, based in Vancouver, Canada]

Ghinwa Yassine views herself in constant negotiation having lived in transition between Beirut, Dubai, Jeddah, Utrecht, and Vancouver. Her work uses a variety of mediums including film, installation, performance, drawing and writing. Starting from autobiographical narratives her work expands to cultural and human concerns. For example, in her Inside the Coffee Cup she questions superstitions and rituals in the make-up of the Lebanese/Arabic society. Her Home Suspended installation deals with themes of displacement, having felt forced to leave her country fearing war and instability, and duality, living at the edge of two worlds, that of her religious family and kinship-driven country and that of her atheist nomadic life. 

She often uses familiar domestic objects as a starting point to a story. “I’m fascinated by how much we can project on the objects that we as humans have created, or how these objects become memory capsules. For example, I can imagine myself saying I feel like a chair with a broken leg.” In one of her short films she creates a metaphor between her yogamat and her mother’s Muslim prayer rug. The resulting work is often a juxtaposition of film and objects that at first glance seem unrelated, but after experiencing them as a whole, one feels he/she entered someone’s private world.

Katayoon Yousefbigloo

MFA Graduate Student

Through video, music, writing and visual art I examine how media shapes our mythologies. Reverse engineering narratives, I use speculative fiction as a framework through which to imagine alternate realities and their commercial potentials. Unrelatedly, I am pursuing franchise opportunities for my musical project Puzzlehead.

katayoonyousefbigloo.com