Simranpreet Anand is an artist, curator, and cultural worker creating and working on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver). She holds a BFA Honours in Visual Arts along with a second major in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. As the daughter of immigrant parents, raised in a diasporic Punjabi community, Simranpreet’s childhood was filled with cross-cultural tension that cultivated an interest in the relationships between culture, familial history, and subjective experience. She considers it urgent to confront systemic racism and parallel settler colonial structures in her work. Approaching these realities through their relationships to misunderstanding, failure, humour, boundaries, and language as a way of bringing to the surface conversations that can be uncomfortable or remain buried. Her work is informed by her familial and community histories, often working with materials and concepts drawn from the histories of Punjabis and the Punjabi diaspora. Alongside her studio practice, she is currently the Exhibitions Assistant at Western Front. She works on writing projects for Rungh and is an active part of their Archive Creation Group. She is committed to a socially-engaged practice, having worked on community engagement and education projects with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Burrard Arts Foundation, documenta 14, the Hatch Art Gallery, Arts Umbrella, the Surrey Art Gallery, and SFU Galleries.
Gillian Siddall is President and Vice-Chancellor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Prior to taking on this role, she served for three years as Vice-President, Academic and Provost at OCAD University, and for six years as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Lakehead University. Her research area is Canadian literature, with a focus on musical improvisation, both within and outside literary contexts. Publications include Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity (co-edited with Dr. Ellen Waterman, Duke University Press 2016); “A Musical Interface for People with Severe Physical Disabilities (co- authored with Pauline Oliveros, Leaf Miller, Jaclyn Heyen, and Sergio Hazard). Music and Medicine (2011); “‘I want to live in that music’: Blues, Bessie Smith and Improvised Identities in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees.” Critical Studies in Improvisation (2005); and “Nice Work if You Can Get It: Women in Jazz” (co-authored with Ajay Heble), Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice (Routledge 2000). Siddall is also a jazz vocalist, choral singer, and co-founder of the Guelph Jazz Festival. She holds an Honours BA and MA in English from the University of Guelph and a PhD in English from the University of Western Ontario.
Baharak Yousefi grew up in Iran, immigrated to Canada as a refugee, and lives as a settler on unceded Coast Salish territory. Baharak is a librarian at Simon Fraser University and a PhD student in the Department of Geography at SFU. She is co-editor of the book Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership, which won the 2018 Association of College and Research Libraries Award for Significant Achievement in Women and Gender Studies Librarianship. Baharak is interested in libraries as sites of power, powerlessness, belonging, and exclusion.
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