Biographies

Jérôme Havre’s practice concentrates on issues of identity, communities, and territories, investigating the political and sociological processes of contemporary life as they relate to nationalism in France and Canada. Havre adopts a multidisciplinary approach in his exploration of these themes and their attending questions; he uses myriad tools and methods to make tangible the conditions of identity within situations of social transformation. Havre completed his studies at l’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris). Since 2001, he has exhibited in Europe, Africa, and North America. Recent shows include Talking Back, Otherwise, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto; Paradis: La fabrique de l’image, espace d’art contemporain 14°N 61°W, Martinique; Land Marks, Art Gallery of Peterborough, Ontario; Liminal (Necessity and accident), The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, ON; Reiteration, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto;  and Poetry of Geopolitics, Koffler Gallery, Toronto. He is currently based in Toronto.

Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third-world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater, Film, and Television. Smith is currently based in Chicago; she will join the faculty of the studio-art program of California Institute of the Arts in January 2018. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the New Museum, New York; D21, Leipzig; and Decad, Berlin. She has presented solo exhibitions of her films, drawings, and installations at the Center for Contemporary Art and Culture, Portland, Oregon; the Contemporary Arts Center, UC Irvine; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Kitchen, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Threewalls, Chicago. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, a Creative Capital Film/Video grant, a Chicago 3Arts Grant, a the Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, the Artadia Award, and a Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was a 2016 Recipient of a Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts in Film and Video and is the inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award. She was a Whitney Biennial 2017 participant and currently has a solo show at The Art Institute of Chicago. Smith is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and Kate Werble, New York.

Born in Jamaica and based in Toronto, Camille Turner is an explorer of race, space, home, and belonging. She is the founder of Outerregion, an Afrofuturist performance company. Her interventions, installations, and public engagements have been presented throughout Canada and internationally including: Dak’Art African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar Senegal, and the Bamako Biennale in Mali. Miss Canadiana, one of her earliest performance works, challenges perceptions of Canadianness and troubles the unspoken binary of “real Canadian” and “diverse other.” Camille’s most recent works include Wanted, a collaboration with artist Camal Pirbhai transforms newspaper posts by Canadian slave owners into contemporary fashion ads. Freedom Tours, a collaboration with Cree/Métis artist Cheryl L’Hirondelle, is a nationally commissioned project that centered Indigenous and African Diasporic stories omitted from official founding narratives. Camille has taught at the University of Toronto, Algoma University, and Toronto School of Art. She is a graduate of Ontario College of Art and Design and York University’s Masters in Environmental Studies program where she is currently a PhD candidate. Her work has been recently included in More Caught in the Act, edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars, Looking Beyond Borderlines: North America’s Frontier Imagination by Lee Rodney, and Border Cultures by Srimoyee Mitra and Bonnie Devine. camilleturner.com.

Yaniya Lee’s interdisciplinary research draws on the work of Black Studies scholars to question critical reading practices and reconsider Black art histories in Canada. From 2012-2015 she hosted the Art Talks MTL podcast, a series of long-form interviews with art workers in Montreal. In 2016 she programmed Labour, Land and Body: geographies of de/colonialism for Vtape’s Curatorial Incubator. Last fall, with members of the 4:3 Collective, she organized the MICE Symposium on Transformative Justice in the Arts. Lee was previously on the editorial advisory committees for C Magazine and FUSE Magazine. She is a founding collective member of MICE Magazine and a new member of the EMILIA-AMALIA working group. This summer, Lee participated in the Banff Research in Culture: Year 2067 residency. She is the 2017-2018 writer-in-residence at Gallery 44 and currently works as the associate editor at Canadian Art Magazine.