Tara Najd Ahmadi is an Iranian artist who holds an MA in Motion Picture Directing from the University of Tehran and an MFA in Time-Based Media from the University of Oklahoma. She is currently pursuing her PhD in the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. She works with photo and video installations, and is the recipient of many awards including the Norman Art Council’s Individual Artist Award (2011), the Madeline Collaborate Fellowship (2009 to 2012), and the OVAC Momentum Spotlight Honorarium (2009). She has exhibited internationally in places including Tehran, Split, Paris, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles.

Hannah Darabi is an Iranian artist who studied photography in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, and the Université Paris VIII in Saint-Denis. Her work deals with urban landscapes and has been exhibited in Tehran, Tokyo, and throughout Europe. She has self-published artist books that are part of numerous collections including Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Ala Dehghan was born in 1982 in Tehran, Iran. She received a BA in Persian Miniature Painting from Alzahra University, an MA in Painting from the University of Tehran, and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art. In 2010, Dehghan was a resident artist at the Delfina Foundation in London. She has participated in exhibitions at Kalfayan Galleries, Athens; Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; Other Gallery, Shanghai; Brigitte Schenk Gallery, Cologne; Il Gabbiano Gallery, Rome; Asar Gallery, Tehran; and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris. Her work has been reviewed in frieze magazine and Time Out New York.

Maryam Jafri is an artist working in video, performance, and photography, with a specific interest in questioning the cultural and visual representation of history, politics, and economy. Over the last years, she notably investigated the connections between the production of goods and the production of desire (Avalon, 2011); the elaboration of historical narratives through a post-colonial perspective (Siege of Khartoum, 1884, 2006); the effects of globalization on working conditions (Global Slum, 2012) or the political stakes of food networks (Mouthfeel, 2014). Informed by a research based, interdisciplinary process, her artworks are often marked by a visual language posed between film and theatre and a series of narrative experiments oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. The Day After is her first solo exhibition in Canada.

Previous solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel, Bétonsalon (Paris), Gasworks (London), Bielefelder Kunstverein (Bielefeld), Galerie Nova (Zagreb), Beirut (Cairo), the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), and Malmö Konst Museum (Malmö). Her work has also been featured extensively in international group exhibitions, including at Beirut Art Center, 21er Haus (Vienna), Institute for African Studies (Moscow) and Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo) in 2015; Camera Austria (Graz), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), CAFAM Biennial (Beijing), Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (Miami) in 2014; Museum of Contemporary Art (Detroit), Mukha (Antwerp), and Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga) in 2013; Manifesta 9 (Genk), Shangai Biennial, and Taipei Biennial (Taipei) in 2012, among others. She was an artist-in-residence at the Delfina Foundation in London in 2014, as part of the program The Politics of Food. In 2015, she was a part of the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial and the Götenburg Biennial. She lives and works between New York and Copenhaghen.

Jumana Manna is an artist working primarily with film and sculpture. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on body and materiality in relation to narratives of state building and histories of place.

Nahed Mansour is a Toronto-based artist who works in performance, installation, and video. She draws from personal and historic archives to address representations of gender and racial relationships. She graduated from Concordia University’s MFA program, and is currently the Director of Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts in Toronto. She is also a member of the Pleasure Dome Experimental Film & Video Programming Collective.

The Otolith Group is an award-winning artist-led organization founded in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun and is based in London. The Otolith Group produces films, installations, and exhibitions that combine narrative, archival material, and documentary footage. Centered on close readings of the image in contemporary society, their work explores the legacies and potentialities of the document, the essay film, and the archive, as well as speculative futures and science fictions. Recent exhibitions have been presented at museums including MAXXI, Rome; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Boston; MACBA, Barcelona; Bétonsalon, Paris; and The Showroom, London. Their work has been included in such international exhibitions as dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel; the 29th São Paulo Biennial; and Manifesta 8, Murcia. In 2010, The Otolith Group was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Tejal Shah was born in 1979 in Bhilai, India. Shah is a visual artist who works with video, photography, sound, installation, and performance. Their interests lie in the areas of sexuality, gender, ecology, and the interrelation between humans and nature. Shah holds a BA in Commercial and Illustrative Photography from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and was a visiting scholar at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1999 to 2000. They have exhibited widely in museums, galleries, and film festivals including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Gallery of Modern Art, Bombay; and Documenta 13, Kassel.

Leila Pourtavaf is a Toronto-based writer, independent curator and doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She was a founding member and coordinator of the projet Mobilivre–Bookmobile project and is the co-editor of a 2015 publication which chronicles the project’s five year history. She is also the editor of Féminismes Électriques (2012), a bilingual collection of essays which reflect on the last decade of feminist art production. In summer 2014, she curated Incident Light for the Blackwood Gallery, an exhibition featuring Middle Eastern and South Asian artists whose works focus on traces of gender and sexuality within various archives from the region.

Azar Mahmoudian (born 1981, lives in Tehran) is an independent curator and researcher. She received her MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2009. Her research focuses on issues of archival and historical modes of cultural representations. She has curated exhibitions and screenings for the Cultuurcentrum, Bruges; Contemporary Art Brussels; and School of Oriental and African Studies, London. She collaborates with Tehran-based project spaces, and was a 2014 Fellow of Global Art Forum 8, Dubai.