EMMA Talks: Melanie Matining and Carmen Aguirre

Speaker Bios

Melanie Matining is a queer pinay activist, community organizer, and settler on the ancestral, traditional, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Her work focuses on the importance of social spaces in movement building and the necessary intersections of community-determined access, placemaking, and solidarity building. She convenes communities to create platforms for celebration, healing, and just dancing it all out. Melanie makes up one half of the duo that brings us Denim Vest, a queer sweaty dance party for the people. In the recent past, she also worked as the Community Development Manager at Heartwood, a social space that was centred on community and movement building. Amidst the towering cranes, she continues her work in advocating for accessible and inclusive spaces in the city.
Melanie walks everyday in love and liberation along side her communities working towards queer rights, Indigenous solidarity, and migrant justice.

Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-­based, award­-winning theatre artist and author who has written and co­-written twenty-five plays, including The Trigger, The Refugee Hotel, and Blue Box. Her first book, the critically acclaimed Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, won CBC Canada Reads in 2012 and is a #1 national bestseller. Her second book, Mexican Hooker #1 and My Other Roles Since the Revolution, was published in April 2016 to outstanding reviews and landed on The Globe and Mail’s bestseller list a week after publication.
She is currently working on a new one­ woman show entitled Broken Tailbone and a novel called Three Virgins. Carmen has eighty film, tv, and stage acting credits. She is a graduate of Studio 58.

Co-Presented by

SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement and EMMA Talks