Yehuda Duenyas (he/they) is a transdisciplinary artist creating at the intersections of Intimacy Coordination, Experiential Design, Performance, Film, and Sound. Weaving a rich tapestry of creativity across various mediums, they began their practice of Intimacy work for live arts in 2007 in New York City’s vibrant performance scene. They were a founding member of the NYC collaborative NTUSA, and their work has been experienced at venues such as PS122, NY; The Chocolate Factory, NY; The Kitchen, NY; The Public Theater, NY; ICA Boston; The Walker Art Center, Minnerapolis. Proudly representing the LGBTQIA+ community, Yehuda co-runs CINTIMA.CO, a SAG-AFTRA accredited training program specifically focused on BIPOC and queer individuals entering the field. Intimacy for Performance credits include Faye Driscoll’s Weathering (NY Live Arts; The Blackwood, Toronto), The Beautiful People (Rogue Machine, LA), and Tom Bradshaw’s Fulfillment (The Flea, NYC; ATC, Chicago). Intimacy for Film and TV credits include MONSTER: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (NETFLIX); Westworld S4 (HBO); The Afterparty S2 (APPLE TV); American Gigolo (Paramount+). Yehuda is also a Primetime Emmy award-winning experiential director with a focus on immersive new media, storytelling, and technology. They have created experiences for Spotify, Netflix, Google, HBO, Walt Disney Imagineering, and others.

John Paul Ricco is Professor of Art History, Comparative Literature, and Visual Culture, and Lead Curator of the Sexual Representation Collection, at the University of Toronto. Ricco works at the juncture of queer theory, contemporary art and literature, and continental philosophy—with a focus on sex, aesthetics, and ethics. He is currently developing a collection of essays, Queer Finitude: Intimacy, Anonymity, Solitude, that, along with his previous books, The Logic of the Lure, and The Decision Between Us: art and ethics in the time of scenes (both University of Chicago Press), will complete his trilogy on "the intimacy of the outside."

Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is author of Rag Cosmology (Bookhug, 2017) and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2023), both winners of A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. A poet-researcher at Concordia University, her interests include embodied poetics, hydrofeminism, multisensory performance, queer & feminist ecologies, geopoetics, and relational poetics and practices. Performances include Zone of Exaggerated Dreaming, a solo work about the abyssal ocean, and collaborative works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. Erin grew up in Coast Salish territory, on Cortes Island.

Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).

Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).

Andrew Tay was born in Windsor, Ontario where he attended the Walkerville Centre for the Creative Arts. Since finishing his B.F.A in contemporary dance at Concordia University, Andrew has presented his work at venues and festivals throughout Canada, New York and Europe. His work has appeared in films, installations and multimedia projects for companies such as Moment Factory, Bravo! and Gentilhomme. He has worked with well-known choreographer Doris Ulhich (Vienna) in the creation of More than Naked, which toured extensively throughout Europe.

In 2005 Andrew co-founded (with collaborator Sasha Kleinplatz) the company Wants&Needs Danse. Since then the company has produced the wildly popular dance events Piss in the Pool, Short&Sweet and Involved in Montreal. In June 2012, the duo choreographed the Cirque du Soleil show Les Frontieres de Pixels and were nominated for a Quebec Notables award in the Arts&Culture category.

Residencies have included the Foundation Jean-Pierre Perrault, the summer artist in residency program at studio 303, Usine C (Montreal), Montreal Danse Choreographic Atelier, The Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), the K3 centre for choreographic research (Hamburg), sign 6 (Brussels) and Skånes Konstförening (Malmo, Sweden).

Andrew was awarded the Dance WEB scholarship in May 2012 (Vienna, Impulstanz festival). In 2013 he was chosen to participate in the Rencontres internationales de jeunes créateurs (Montreal, Festival TransAmériques 2013) and 8 Days, an annual intergenerational meeting of dance artists from across Canada organized by the company Public Recordings. He has also participated in The Copycat Academy (as part of the Luminato Festival, Toronto) curated by Hannah Hurtzig (Berlin) for two editions, and created work with dancers at Toronto Dance Theatre through the company’s inaugural Emerging Voices Project in 2015. He has served as a board member of ELAN (the English Language Artists Network in Quebec) and the RQD – le Regroupement québécois de la danse.

In 2016, his work Fame Prayer / EATING was awarded the Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation from the Summerworks Performance Festival Toronto. Fame Prayer was subsequently presented at Fierce UK (Birmingham) 2017 Theatre La Chapelle (Montreal) 2018 and Diver Festival (Tel Aviv) 2019. Make Banana Cry (co-authored with Stephen Thompson) premiered at the M.A.I in 2017, and was later presented La Galerie de l’UQAM in the context of the exhibit Refus Contraire 2018 as well as the Nottdance Festival and Fierce UK in 2019. The work will continue to tour internationally for 2020.

Before relocating to Toronto in August 2020 to begin his leadership at TDT, Andrew was the Artistic Curator of the O Vertigo Centre for Creation in Montreal since January 2017, reimagining the company’s activities in its new mandate as a choreographic centre and artist incubator. He actively thinks about community, irreverence and resistance in both his performance and curatorial practices.