MFA Students
Coming from a strong background in a single discipline or from a studio practice that fuses two or more disciplines, our MFA students all value and thrive in the stimulation of the unique interdisciplinary environment of the SCA, which also encourages them to develop the theoretical or scholarly contexts of their practice.
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.
Connor Cook
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Connor Cook (he/they) is a multidisciplinary art- and sound-maker. After studying his BFA in electroacoustic studies, Connor worked with the Next Generation Cities Institute at Concordia University in Montreal, before moving to Vancouver to pursue a masters in Interdisciplinary Arts at Simon Fraser University in 2026.
Connor grew up in several cities – London ON, Toronto, and Calgary – where he played and studied in the theatre community. His recent work typically stems from sound art practices, and practice-based research, which inform his approach to composition for stage, video art, and interactive media.
Much of his practice is further fuelled by an interest in acoustic-ecology-informed recording and sustainable sound practices, as well as the urge to work on fun projects with friends old and new.
His pieces have been showcased internationally through concerts or live performances, including across Canada, in Mexico, the United States, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. His most recent video artwork, Taciturned, was exhibited at the Werklund Centre’s Microcinema in July, 2026.
Connor is a member of Trajectories, a sound art and composition collective that has released 2 studio albums, toured Canada and Scandinavia, and recently exhibited their multichannel sound installation, Ecomorphia, at the Werklund Centre’s +15 Soundscape gallery.
Jenn Edwards
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Jenn Edwards is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses dance, figure skating, and music. Originally from Vancouver, she first fell in love with movement through competitive skating before earning a BFA in dance at the School for the Contemporary Arts in 2010. Her career as a performer, choreographer and movement educator has taken her to Berlin, Vienna, Toronto, Montreal, and Labrador, where she has been based for the past seven years.
Since 2018, Jenn has been a company skater with Le Patin Libre, a contemporary skating company based in Montreal. She is a cast member in their full-length ensemble work, Murmuration, which premiered at Théâtre de la Ville in Paris in 2022, has toured across Europe and North America, and was presented by the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Early in her career, Edwards was based in Germany where she worked as a freelance performer and choreographer. Highlights include having her work featured at Fusion Festival, a massive interdisciplinary arts event outside Berlin, and touring as a dancer with Flowmotion Dance Company and Tauschfühlung, both out of Vienna. Within Canada she has danced in work by choreographers such as Jamee Valin, Philippa Myler, Karissa Fyrrar, Patricia Allison, David Wilson, and Jennifer Aoki.
Jenn's choreographic style is influenced by her studies in contact improvisation, release-based contemporary, skating, and modern dance, and is often inspired by film, literature, or psychology. Her pieces use gesture, rhythm, and dynamics to weave cinematic, abstract narratives. Edwards' work has been presented at Dancing on the Edge (Vancouver), The Festival of New Dance (St. John’s, NL), 12 Minutes Max (Vancouver and Seattle), Vines Art Festival (Vancouver), New Blue Dance (Toronto), Your Dance Fest (Toronto) and Dance: Made in Canada (Toronto). Her 2020 film work, Shipwreck, won Best Experimental Film at Toronto’s Experimental Dance & Music Festival. In 2021 she co-directed Re:Place, a full-length, immersive outdoor dance theatre collaboration with Saskatoon’s It’s Not a Box Theatre, and in 2024 she was commissioned by Method Dance Society to present a new version, Re:Semblance, for their Community Moves festival in Prince George, BC. She is also a prolific keyboardist, vocalist, and songwriter. Her Labrador-based band, Ptarmageddon, has been nominated for four MusicNL awards, including Alternative Group of the Year. Crossover projects include featuring contemporary dancers in the band’s music video, Lullaby, and her bandmate Scott Neary composing an instrumental score for Edwards’ 2025 stage work, The Centre of Time.
Jenn is delighted to be resuming her studies at SCA, where she will be further exploring meeting points between dance, ice skating, music, and written text.
Keywords: contemporary dance, contemporary skating, Le Patin Libre, Ptarmageddon
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.
Miranda Firmston
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Miranda Firmston is an interdisciplinary media artist working with sound, performance, and interactive systems. Their practice explores how sound can function as a prosthetic extension of the body, using custom interfaces and responsive systems that shape evolving sonic behaviours from physical data generated through touch, movement, and gesture. Their work emphasizes a tactile, textile, and wearable presence in digital and sonic environments, grounding abstract data in visceral and experiential engagement.
Firmston holds a Bachelor of Media Arts in New Media + Sound Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently based in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples.
Research keywords: sound, performance, media art, interactive art
Emily C. R. Hill
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Emily C. R. Hill is a visual artist and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is multidisciplinary with a base in performance. Formal descriptions of events and objects are an ongoing interest, as an exercise that supports her to slow down thought. She holds a certificate from Helen Lefeaux School of Fashion Design, a diploma in Textile Arts from Capilano University and a BFA in visual art from Emily Carr University. She has worked as an actor, costume designer and artist showing in Canada and the U.S.A. Forthcoming is Pom Pom Strokes at CSA in Vancouver.
Keywords: performance/painting/formal/visual art
Sam Digges Hunter
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Sam Digges Hunter (they/them) is a video and installation artist exploring the intersection of storytelling, material culture, and speculative futures. Their researched-based approach reshapes historical narratives into mythical retellings, weaving together material exploration and community engagement. Through this interplay of video, objects, and collaborative processes, their work investigates the complexities of inheritance and renewal, offering a space for reflection on the histories we carry and the futures we imagine.
Born and raised in the Southern United States, Sam received their BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Art History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Haleema Khan
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Haleema Khan is a Lahori artist working across photography, moving image, and sound. Rooted in her Kashmiri heritage and Punjabi upbringing, her practice is shaped by questions of memory, womanhood, identity, and belonging. She is interested in the ways personal narratives intersect with broader social and political realities, particularly those surrounding mental health, gender, and class. Driven by curiosity, Haleema uses image-making to explore inner worlds and psychological landscapes. Her work moves between research and experimentation, often asking how photographs and moving images can give shape to experiences that are invisible yet readily endured. She studied film at Northwestern University and has worked as a Creative Producer across fashion, hospitality, and broadcast media in Illinois, Pakistan, and Qatar.Outside the studio, Haleema is usually chasing a new rabbit hole, spending time outdoors, or hanging out with her dog, Zulfi, a very polite dog with impeccable emotional availability.
Keywords: Memory, Identity, Psychogeography
Su-Feh Lee
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Su-Feh Lee (she/they) is a choreographer and dancer whose practice sits in the interstices of performance-making, pedagogy, ritual, writing and dialogue facilitation.
They split her time between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where they were born and raised; and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, səlilwətaɬ Territories, a.k.a. Vancouver, Canada, where they make their home. Over the past 40 years, they have created a provocative body of award-winning trans-disciplinary work that interrogates the contemporary body as a site of intersecting and displaced histories and habits. As Artistic Director of battery opera performance, (“fearlessly iconoclastic”, “brainy and bawdy”), they have worked both alone and in collaboration with others. Alongside this trajectory in performance-making, they have pursued a lifelong study and practice of Chinese martial arts, Qigong and Daoism, which informs their approach to dance and movement. Since 2010, Su-Feh has been a student and practitioner of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and is a certified Lead Trainer of the work. A member of the Advisory Group of the Fitzmaurice Institute, they participate actively in the international community of Fitzmaurice Voicework® teachers.
Su-Feh’s current preoccupations involve somatic algorithms and performance-making as collective nervous system attunement.
Isabella Leone
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Isabella Leone (she/her) is a performance maker working at the intersections of dance, puppetry, scenography and video. Her practice examines relationships between the built environment and the natural world, seeking to entangle categorical distinctions between self, land and infrastructure through playful and poetic means. With a focus on site-responsive and material-led creation, her work is characterized by an expansive approach to collaboration, be it with people, places or materials. Leone has trained and interned with companies such as Big Dance Theater (NY), Theater Mitu (NY), Jacob Pillow's Dance Festival (MA), Porte Parole (QC) and Bread and Puppet Theater (VT). She holds a BFA in Theatre from Concordia University.
Keywords: Site-responsive practices, Material performance, Dissonant ecologies, Scale, Infrastructure
Lauren Li
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Lauren Li is an artist-designer with a background in Arts and Technology from Shanghai University of Engineering Science. Her practice explores the intersection of spatial design, interactive systems, and embodied experience. Working across interactive installation, virtual reality, and sensory design, she investigates how designed environments can translate invisible experiences—such as emotions, bodily states, and ecological relationships—into tangible forms. Through the integration of physical space, digital media, and human interaction, her work creates a dialogue between people, technology, and the surrounding world.
Keywords: Interactive Installation, Sensory Experience, Spatial Design, Speculative Design
Jonathan Middleton
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Jonathan Middleton is an artist and curator working between Toronto and Vancouver His practice engages language, comedy, and institutional practices, among other subjects; and has been exhibited, screened, and performed at VIVO, Plaza Projects, Contemporary Art Gallery, Tracey Lawrence Gallery, Vancouver International Film Festival, InsideOut, and Chicago International Film Festival, No Soul For Sale Festival (at Tate Modern), and Slakthusateljéerna (Stockholm). Middleton has worked extensively in curatorial and directorial positions since 1999 at organizations including Western Front, Fillip, Or Gallery, Art Metropole, C Magazine, and Vancouver Art Book Fair.
Keywords: institutional practice, comedy, publishing, artist-run, curating
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.
Kevin Romain
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Kevin Romain is a drummer, improviser, composer, educator, bandleader and curator based in East Vancouver. Since the early 2000s he has performed regularly across North America as well as Europe, West Africa, China and Japan. He studied jazz and contemporary music at Vancouver Community College and has studied the drums with luminaries such as Tomas Fujiwara, Marcus Gilmore, Jeff Ballard, Mark Guiliana, Dan Weiss, and Bernie Arai.
Romain's current focus as a bandleader and composer is his post-bop quartet Salience Network. The debut full length record from this group was released in 2023 on The Infidels Jazz record label. He also leads K. Romain and His Bad Homies, an acoustic jazz trio performing repertoire from the early 20th century, and avant-garde ensemble Free Time Trio. As a sideperson, he can be heard performing regularly with art pop ensemble Only A Visitor (Mint Records), Itamar Erez' quartet, and at least a dozen other groups.
Over the past decade Romain has performed extensively as a soloist on the drum set. 2025 sees the release of his first solo record Autopoietic 1, a collection of improvisations rooted in his highly personal polyrhythmic vocabulary and his research into the neuro-psycho-social links between emotion and rhythmic perception.
As an organizer Romain has opened and operated multiple community music spaces across Canada including Vancouver's General Strike Coffee Workshop and is currently co-curator of the Lost Dog concert series for jazz and improvised music.
Outside of music, Kevin likes cooking, roasting coffee, birds, old Volvo cars, anti-colonialism, and hanging out with buds.
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.
Artyom Urdabayev
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Artyom (Arty) Urdabayev is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, digital and film photography, installations, lighting, sound, and projection design. Originally born and raised in Almaty, Kazakhstan, he relocated to British Columbia in 2019. Arty holds a diploma in Film Production from Vancouver Film School and a bachelor's degree in Media Arts from the University of the Fraser Valley. He has worked as a lighting and projection designer on numerous theatre productions throughout Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley, and his installation works were displayed in different art galleries of the Fraser Valley. Through his interdisciplinary approach, Arty seeks to inspire curiosity about the world around us and explore interconnectedness of people, environments, feelings, technologies and experiences.
Outside of his artistic practice, Arty enjoys hiking, tinkering with physical and digital technologies, and cooking and baking.
Keywords: Curiosity, Technical Approach, Beauty in Chaos
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.
Masha Weisberg
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Masha Weisberg is a Ukrainian artist, working primarily with analog experimental photography and installation. Her practice centers on historical photo processes, alternative printing techniques, and material experimentation, she often reworks images across analog and digital media to shift photography beyond documentation and toward perception. She creates tactile, layered works using film, handmade emulsions, and unconventional surfaces, often at unexpected scales.
Since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the escalation of global conflicts, her work has turned toward questions of national belonging, the psychological impact of war, and the interwoven experience of generational trauma and motherhood.
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.
Aurora Yol
MFA GRADUATE STUDENT
Aurora Yol (she/her) is a Mexican-Filipina visual artist from Valle de Bravo, Mexico. Currently living on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh land, she holds a BFA in Visual Arts with a minor in Curatorial Practices from Emily Carr University. Aurora’s multidisciplinary practice began with ballet and contemporary dance, and currently ranges from drawing and painting to ceramics, sculpture, photography, and installation art.
The two main themes of her practice revolve around labour and heritage. This first is critical of the industries where essential work is underpaid and laced with the systemic issues of racism, classism, and sexism that disproportionately affect migrant workers. The second is a feminist reconciliation of both of her heritages that share nearly parallel colonial histories under Spain and the US. The work pulls from pre-Hispanic values and symbolism, and confronts issues concerning nature, femininity, motherhood, and the contemporary experiences of women and others during the feminicide crisis. The resulting conversation strings together religion, nationalism, art history and the working for a better future.
Aurora’s work has been collected internationally and displayed in multiple group shows across Mexico and in "Vancouver," including the Spring 2026 exhibit Ingat Kayo! at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art.
2026.theshow-ecuad.org/project/tonantzin-encuentra-todo | Instagram
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