Biographies

k.g. Guttman is a Montreal-based choreographer, artist, educator, mother, and research candidate in the PhDArts program of Leiden University and the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, the Netherlands. Her work, funded through Stichting de Zaaier and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, considers how territoriality and choreography are intertwined in site-situated practices.
Recent performances and exhibitions have been hosted by Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Dazibao and VIVA! Art action, Montreal, Musée d’Art de Joliette, Quebec, Visualeyez International Performance Art Festival, Edmonton, Klupko, Amsterdam, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Her choreographic residencies and commissions include the Canada Dance Festival, Dancemakers, Toronto, LeGroupe Dance Lab, Ottawa, the University of Sonora, Mexico, Buda Kustencentrum, Kortijk and Pointe Ephémère, Paris.
From 2008-2013, Guttman was Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance, Concordia University, Montreal. Guttman’s teaching practice include the dance LOVE-IN, Toronto, and the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague, the Netherlands.

lo bil is a Toronto-based performance artist who creates embodied experiments to correlate research into process, pleasure, vulnerability, risk, memory. In the moment before the performance, she lets go of what she wants to happen. She asks, "How can I be in front of this audience in a receptive way? What is moving to me about the topic at hand right now?" She does this action. This first mark on the canvas is an offer that she follows through to the end of the composition. She uses body memory as a generative source of possible exchange and inquiry.

Dr. Seika Boye is a scholar, writer, educator and artist whose practices revolve around dance and movement. She is a Lecturer in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies and Director of the Institute for Dance Studies, University of Toronto. From 1995-2010, Boye performed and presented her choreography across Canada. More recently she has worked as a movement dramaturg/artistic advisor with many artists/collectives. Invested in movement histories and the archive, Boye curated the archival exhibition It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2018-19). Boye's writing has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and magazines including Canadian Theatre Review, alt:theatre, and Dance Chronicle.

Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Toronto-based artist and writer. His multidisciplinary critical practice spans drawing, performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, Art Gallery of York University, Images Festival, Nuit Blanche (Toronto), Darling Foundry (Montreal), MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie), Queens University (Kingston), Neutral Ground (Regina), Third Space (St. John), Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago), Voices Breaking Boundaries (Houston TX) Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), and Kulturhuset (Stockholm), amongst others. He completed a Masters of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2012. He is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University.

Ahlam Hassan is a performer, director, educator and architect in training. She recently completed a thesis titled "Locating and Naming African-Canadian Performance" for which she analyzed the representation of Blackness in theoretical drama courses in Toronto before creating a new syllabus to teach African-Canadian performance history to students at the post-secondary level. This September you can catch Ahlam expanding her work intersecting art and education at the Toronto Palestine Film Festival.

Johanna Householder works at the intersection of popular and unpopular culture in video, performance art and choreography. Her interest in how ideas move through bodies has led her often collaborative practice, and inform her research and writing on the impact that performance has in contemporary art and new media. She has recently performed at VIVA! in Montréal, Performancear o Morir in Norogachi, Mexico, and the Independent Artists Research Centre (IARC) in Singapore. She is one of the founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, and she co-chairs the Artistic Research Working Group of Performance Studies international. She has taught performance art and new media at OCAD University since the early 90s, where she is a Professor in the Faculty of Art and Graduate Studies, and currently Chair of Cross-Disciplinary Art Practices.

Jessica Karuhanga is an artist based in Toronto, Canada. She has presented her work at Onsite Gallery at OCAD University, Toronto (2018) the Art Museum at University of Toronto (2017) and Goldsmiths, London, UK (2016). She has given lectures for The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Royal Ontario Museum as well as Tisch School of the Arts at NYU’s Black Portraitures Series. Her writing has been published by BlackFlash Magazine and C Magazine. She has been featured in i-D, Dazed, Border Crossings, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, NOW Magazine, Globe and Mail and Canadian Art.

Kelly Keenan is a Montreal-based dance artist and teacher. Her fascination of the perceptive capacity of the body is reflected in both her teaching and artistic work. Kelly’s choreography creatively grapples with the contradiction that dance, as a kinaesthetic practice, is generally performed for the spectator and accessed through the visual sense. Through hybrid forms, she inquires into ways to enfold the felt experience of dance practice into performance. Examples include A Practice (2013), a performance/workshop in collaboration with Adam Kinner; Be Still and Know Me (2017), a performance/lecture; and most recently The Direction of Ease (2018), a performance/massage in collaboration with Jacinte Armstrong, Elise Vanderbourght and Lois Brown. Kelly is currently pursuing an MA in Concordia’s Individualized program at the hinge of Dance Studies, Art Education and Anthropology.

Mikiki is a performance and video artist and queer community health activist of Acadian/Mi’kmaq and Irish descent from Newfoundland. Their work has been shown in Artist-Run Centres, Public Galleries, Performance Festivals and self-produced interventions throughout Canada. Mikiki has worked across the country as a Sexuality Educator in public schools, a Bathhouse Attendant, a Drag Queen Karaoke Hostess, a Gay Men's Health & Wellness Outreach Worker, a Harm Reduction Street Outreach Worker and an HIV tester. Mikiki currently lives in Toronto.

Matthew-Robin Nye is a visual artist and cultural producer, and has exhibited, lectured and held residencies in Canada and abroad. He is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD student at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, in Montreal, and for 2019-2020, a Concordia University Public Scholar. He is a founding member of the Curatorial Research-Creation Collective at the Milieux Institute at Concordia, and a member of the Senselab, as well as the Urban Futures Institute at Concordia University. He uses art-making and artistic experience to think about how to bridge the fields of environmental philosophy and queer theory, harnessing their potentials to constitute a limitless subject, unbounded by the pitfalls of either discourse in its singularity.

Shahir Omar-Qrishnaswamy is a multi-disciplinary artist and wisdom-seeking nomad. In 2017-2018, they worked as an art therapist leading meditation, dance, and singing workshops for newly arrived refugee youth in Montreal. In this life, Shahir is a diasporic, queer trans person of South Asian descent who grew up between Mississauga and Malawi. They have an honours degree in Film and Cultural Studies from McGill University. Their creative philosophies are rooted in the Dhamma (Vipassana meditation), animism, and compassionate eco-social justice.

Bee Pallomina is a dance artist who makes work for stage, installation, film/video and puppets. Her practice includes movement, care, and the everyday. She is an artist, educator, and mom.

Joshua Vettivelu is an artist, programmer, and educator working within sculpture, video, installation and performance. Their works explore how larger frameworks of power manifest within intimate relationships. Recently their practice examines the tensions that emerge when personal experiences are mined for art production, and how this allows institutions to posture and position themselves as self-reflexive. Currently, Vettivelu teaches in the faculty of Art and Continuing Education at OCADU and is the previous Director of Programming of Whippersnapper Gallery.