Zarah Ackerman is an artist, a blogger, and maker. Ackerman’s practice revolves around performance and sculptural works that relate to the body and the paradox that it presents as both contained and container. You could say that she is orally fixated and deals with themes surrounding the mouth as a source of pleasure and the maker of speech. Experimentation is fundamentally related to her process and research into materials. She received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver (2008).

Website

Participation

2009

James Albers is an emerging artist, curator, writer, organizer, and performer based on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories in Vancouver, BC. Their practise often takes a collaborative and community oriented approach as they see this as a productive way to create new meaning from their lived experiences. James is concerned with exploring the queer potentials of revisionist histories and chooses to believe in the magic of fiction. Recently, James has been thinking through the truth that a perfect lie may hold.

Participation

2021

See ATSA

Participation

2007

Gustavo Álvarez Lugo, also known as "Musgus," was born in Mexico City and now lives in Chihuahua, Mexico. Gustavo studied social anthropology, and calls himself a visual anthropologist performer. He began his exploits in performance art in 2000, making performances in urban areas. He has participated in Performagia, a national festival of performance in Mexico City; International Performance Congress in Valparaiso, Chile; Stavanger in Norway; and 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art in Toronto.

Participation

2009

Golboo Amani is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and educator most known for their performance and social practice based works. In their practice, Amani produces instances of aesthetic intervention by utilizing ready-made and familiar social engagements as a point of entry. Their work often experiments with collective agency and egalitarian epistemology. Examining relationships to learning through pedagogical play, Amani’s work addressed the conditions of knowledge production that render epistemic violence something invisible, insignificant, and benign.

Website

Participation

2011

Born in Minneapolis, USA, Fortner Anderson is a poet, performance artist, and visual artist who has lived in Montréal, QC, since 1976. Anderson is noted for the performance of his poems, his unique artist books, and his formalist work to renew poetic forms.

Participation

2011

Born in Nan province, Thailand, Chumpon Apisuk studied art at Changsilpa School, Silpakorn University (Bangkok) and at the Museum School of Fine Arts (Boston, MA, USA). Since 1986, Apisuk has performed more than 200 times in Germany, England, Canada, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, Hong Kong, Poland, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Australia, USA, and Thailand. In 1993, he founded Concrete House, an art and community space, and the only ongoing performance art venue in Thailand. He is also a founder of Asiatopia (est.1998), an International Performance Art Festival in Thailand. In 1998, his audio installation work, ALIVE – a conversation with a friend living with HIV, was selected for exhibition at the Sydney Biennial. Known for his art practice with activism in the areas of AIDS and Human Rights, Apisuk is also involved with EMPOWER Foundation, an organization that advocates for the rights of sex workers in Thailand. LIVE 2009 was Apisuk’s debut performance in Vancouver.

Participation

2009

Warren Arcand was a performance artist, writer, and filmmaker based on Galiano Island, BC. His family is from the Muskeg Lake and Big River First Nations. Arcand was active in local and national arts scenes through his work with video, theatre, performance art, and education, teaching at both Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the Centre for Indigenous Theatre.

Participation

2015 2011 2005 1999

Archive is a collaboration between artists Anne Walsh and Chris Kubick based out of Oakland, USA. Anne Walsh is a contributing editor of X-Tra Art and Culture Quartery, a blogger for San Francisco MoMA, and an Associate Professor of Art at UC Berkeley. Chris Kubick is the founder and director of Language Removal Services, as well as a sound designer and lecturer in new media and sound art at UC Berkeley. As Archive, Walsh and Kubick have been known to produce a range of works from sound installations, CD’s, and pieces for radio to video works, sculpture, and works on paper. They have exhibited work across the United States, including San Francisco Camerawork, the Rosenbach Museum and Library (Philadelphia), Artists Space (New York City), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002 Biennial exhibition), and internationally, including at the Royal College of Art (London), Lothringer 13 (Munich), and as part of the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program. Archive’s sound work has been included on multiple National Public Radio programs (US), Resonance Radio (UK), Munich Public Radio, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Works for publication have appeared in Cabinet, Leonardo Music Journal, ArtLies, and Camerawork.

Website

Participation

2007

Megan Arnold is a Filipinx-Canadian artist currently based in Guelph, ON. Recently, they have exhibited/performed at Galerie Nicolas Robert (Toronto), Chopped Liver Comedy (Toronto), PINCH Cabaret (Waterloo), Kazoo! Fest (Guelph) and Entertainment Club (Salford, UK). Megan has participated in artist residencies in Ontario, the United Kingdom, Iceland and Newfoundland. They obtained a BFA from the University of Western Ontario in 2015 and an MFA from the University of Guelph in 2023. Megan is a current Board Member at Ed Video Media Arts Centre.

Website

Participation

2023

Marilyn Arsem has been creating live events since 1975. Her more than 200 works have ranged from solo performances to large-scale site-specific works incorporating installation and performance. Based in Boston, USA, Arsem has presented work in 30 countries at festivals, alternative spaces, galleries, museums, universities, and conferences, both in person and virtually. Her works are often durational, centering minimal actions and materials, and frequently have a site-specific element. Arsem is a member and the founder of Mobius, Inc. (1975 – ), a Boston-based collaborative of interdisciplinary artists. She taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for 27 years, establishing one of the most extensive programs internationally in visually-based performance art.

Website

Participation

2007

Jelili Olorunfunmi Atiku is a multimedia performance artist from Lagos, Nigeria, who works with drawing, photography, installation, sculpture, and video. Calling himself a ‘human rights artist’, his sculptures and performances are devoted to the advocacy of human rights, social justice, and egalitarian political practices. He has staged multiple performances which double as political demonstrations against extra judicial killings and campaigns for Nigerian penal and prison reform. Atiku holds degrees in visual art from the Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria and the University of Lagos in Akoka. He is the founder and chief coordinator of the Advocate for Human Rights Through Arts (AHRA), the president of the Movement for Creative Drawing, and the secretary for the Police Community Relations Committee, Ejigbo Chapter (Lagos).

Participation

2013

ATSA, quand l’art passe à l’action (FKA Action Terroriste Socialement Acceptable) is a non-profit organization founded in Montréal in 1997 by artists Annie Roy and the late Pierre Allard. ATSA creates event-based, transdisciplinary, relational works, including installations, performances, and realistic stagings, which bear witness to and challenge the various social and environmental aberrations of our times. Their works investigate and transform the urban landscape to confront citizen’s individual and collective responsibilities by fostering spaces for open discussions on a range of topical socio-political debates. ATSA is committed to feminist, pacifist, and eco-responsible approaches to their community centered work. Over the years, the organization has received numerous awards and recognitions for their work, including the Meritorious Service Medal, Civil Division, by the Governor General of Canada in February 2021.

Website

Participation

2007

Lukas Avendaño is a performer and anthropologist who grew up in a community of indigenous Zapotecs in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work constitutes a queer performative intervention of Mexican nationalistic representations, particularly that of Zapotec Tehuana women. Lukas embodies the complex identity of muxes, or male homosexuals, from the Tehuantepec Isthmus where he was born. His performances frequently involve elements of drag, interweaving ritual dances with autobiographical passages to challenge the widely held view of a gay-friendly indigenous culture and point towards the existence of lives that negotiate pain and loneliness through self-affirming pride.

Participation

2019

See Second Front

Participation

2007

See Les Fermières Obsédées

Participation

2009

Julianna Barabas is an interdisciplinary artist based in Edmonton, AB. Largely centered around performance and video, Barabas’ work explores the embodied experiences of gender, identity, and spirituality, as informed by feminist concerns and theory. In her work, Barabas considers the exchange between performer and audience and the deeper politics of care and attention this dynamic implies. She holds a Bachelor of Political Science from the University of Western Ontario (1991) and Bachelor of Media Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006). Barabas’ work has been performed and screened in festivals and exhibitions throughout Canada. Barabas’ most extensive project, seamline, began in May of 2003, when she invited audiences to witness her process of having a line tattooed around the full lateral circumference of her body. These public witnessing events continued monthly for a full year. Following the tatoo’s completion, Barabas has positioned the ongoing conversations that result from living with a full body tattoo as a lifetime performance. A cataloguing of the interactions was published in an exhibition catalogue/artist book in 2010.

Website

Participation

2007 2003

Zeus Bascon lives and works in Santa Rosa, Philippines, and stresses on translations, transformation and transmutation. He indulges in introspection as part of an exercise of becoming, finding links between the supernatural and the real in forming truths, while exploring representation through image-making, participations and the performative. Since 2006, Zeus has participated in exhibitions and artist residencies, including M:ST’s (Mountain Standard Time) 10 Performative Art Biennial global artist exchange program. In 2018, Bascon became a recipient of the Thirteen Artists Award, granted by the Cultural Centre of the Philippines.

Website

Participation

2023

Jordan Baylon is a second generation PilipinX artist, critic and community worker born and raised in Calgary, AB. In their practice, they are continually imagining justice and abundance for equity-deserving peoples through personal, communal and societal relations. As an artist, Jordan’s works at the intersection of queer identity, race, colonialism, food and ritual. By exploring how these identities foster generative liminal spaces, their work functions within the murky realms of the both and neither; the in-between, across and through; the inside and outside; and the literal and imagined. Jordan also proudly serves as General Director of Chromatic Theatre (Calgary).

Participation

2023

Dave Beech is an artist and writer. He is Reader in Art and Marxism at Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon, The University of the Arts (London). He is the author of Art and Labour (Brill, 2020), Art and Postcapitalism (Pluto, 2019) and Art and Value (Brill, 2015). Beech worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. His solo art practice revisits the critical traditions of photomontage and factography through the Marxist concept of uneven and combined development.

Website

Participation

2021

See Instant Coffee

Participation

2009

Nathalie Mba Bikoro is a visual artist, curator, educator, activist, holistic practitioner, and ancestral healer rooted from their family’s heritage in Woleu-Ntem. Bikoro has exhibited and performed internationally, receiving numerous awards including two international awards for Best Artist in Senegal during the Dak’Art Biennale (2012). Their work and practice uses performance, printmaking, media, installation, and social encounters to address ecology, colonialism, social struggle, and personal emancipation. Somatic and embodied practices are a throughline in their work which continually strives to honour queer and feminist Black Indigenous histories.

Website

Participation

2015

Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker is a curator, writer, and cultural historian. She is the former Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Biennale of Sydney, Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum Villa Stuck (Munich) and Frye Art Museum (Seattle). While in these positions Birnie-Danzker served as curator and co-curator of more than 100 exhibitions including Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945, co-curated with Ken Lum and Zheng Shengtian; Art of Tomorrow, co-curated with Brigitte Salmen and Karole Vail for the Museum Villa Stuck and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); and The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, curated by Okwui Enwezor with Exhibition Direction by Birnie-Danzker, presented at the Museum Villa Stuck (Munich), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), MCA (Chicago) and MoMA PS1 (New York).

Participation

2021

Lori Blondeau is a Cree/Saulteaux/Metis artist originally from Regina, SK. Encompassing visual, installation and performance art, Blondeau’s practice explores the influence that popular media, and both contemporary and historical culture, have on Indigenous self-identity, self-image, and self-definition. Images of the Indian Princess and of the Squaw, and their direct impact upon the social perception of Indigenous women, often serve as inspiration for her work. Blondeau is also the co-founder of TRIBE Inc., an artist-run centre for contemporary Indigenous artists in Saskatoon.

Participation

2013 1999

Born on Kumeyaay territory in La Jolla, California, John G. Boehme’s work spans performance, education and curation. With a multidisciplinary practice that encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, video, installation and photography, Boehme’s work examines the performance of masculinity, the valorization of labour, the pursuit of leisure, and the marshalling of amity through both the spoken and gestural aspects of human communication. He has presented across Canada, Australia, the Americas, the United Kingdom, Europe and China and teaches Visual Art at Camosun College and the University of Victoria.

Website

Participation

2013 2003 2001 1999

Raymond Boisjoly is an Indigenous artist, and citizen of the Haida Nation, whose work is derived from his training in photography. Boisjoly mainly uses screens, scanners, photocopiers, and inkjet printers to capture technological processes together with subject matter centered on cultural propriety, humour, and poetic-prophetic texts of mysterious origins. He received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and a MFA from the University of British Columbia (2008). He was a recipient of the VIVA Award (2016), presented by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts in Vancouver, BC, where he is also currently based.

Participation

2011

Dennis E. Bolen is a novelist, editor, teacher, and journalist who has been publishing work since 1975. Bolen holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria (1977) and an MFA in Writing from the University of British Columbia (1989). He taught introductory Creative Writing at UBC from 1995 to 1997. In 1989, Bolen helped establish the international literary journal sub-TERRAIN, where he served as fiction editor for ten years. He has acted as a community editorial board member of The Vancouver Sun newspaper, and other literacy and theatre collectives. Bolen has written criticism, social commentary, arts advocacy, and editorial opinion for a number of journals and newspapers in Canada, and has published 10 books, from novels to poetry collections, including his most recentAmaranthine Chevrolet (Dundurn Press, 2025).

Website

Participation

2009

Based in Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, France, Christine Bouvier and Rochdy Laribi are the founders of ORNIC’ART (2002 – ), an interdisciplinary collective of urban performers, and RedPlexus (2007 – ), a structure dedicated to the development and dissemination of performance and writing in public spaces. Through their work they aim to create opportunities for collective performance and mentorship for emerging artists focussed on physical training, research, voice presence, identity, and emotion.

Website

Participation

2019

Robin Brass is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Peepeekisis First Nation, based in Regina, SK. She completed her B.A. in Indigenous Fine Arts, First Nations University of Canada. Robin is co-founder of Sakewewak Artists’ Collective, Circle Vision Arts Corp., Red Tattoo Theatre Ensemble, and the Sakewewak Storytellers Festival. In 2006, she was awarded the Lynch-Staunton Award for performance art. Brass has an interest in exploring traditional languages and Indigenous orality through her practice which spans performance, pedagogy, and community organizing.

Participation

2011

Dustin Brons is an artist whose work is concerned with recontextualizing existing material through video, performance, photographs, and text. He lives (always) and works (sometimes). His work has been exhibited in Vancouver and on the internet. Brons received an MFA from the University of California San Diego and a BFA from the University of British Columbia.

Website

Participation

2013