Steven Eastwood is an artist and filmmaker whose practice spans documentary film, installation-based moving image, media arts, and theory. He holds a PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and teaches film practice at Queen Mary University of London. He has held Visiting Lecturer positions at Harvard University, University of Greenwich, and University of Buffalo. His feature-length film, Island, premiered at BFI London Film Festival in 2017 and the sibling multichannel video installation, The Interval and the Instant, was presented at Fabrica (Brighton). His feature film Buried Land was an official selection at the Tribeca, Moscow, Sarajevo, and Mumbai film festivals. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include Fabrica (Brighton), QUT Gallery (Brisbane), Globe Gallery (Newcastle), KK Projects (New Orleans), ICA (London).

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal), in Kanien'kehá:ka territory. Her practice and research explores the politics of contemporary art practice, specifically focusing on experimental and expanded cinema, and contemporary media arts. Her writings have been published in Contemp+rary, C Magazine, Critical Signals, The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, Fuse Magazine, and MICE Magazine, among others.

Sheena Hoszko lives and works in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal), in Kanien’kehá:ka territory. A sculptor, anti-prison organizer, and Polish settler, Sheena Hoszko explores the connections between physical control of the body and mental health. Her work is based on long-term research into the power dynamics of geographical, architectural and psychological sites, and is informed by her own family’s experience of migration and incarceration. Drawing on measurement and surveying practices and transcription of oral information and stories, she interprets and recreates experiential spaces for the viewer, using materials such as light, stained glass, fabric, concrete and metal in conjunction with textual gleanings. Recently she has been focusing on the cartography of sites related to the spatial control of the body—borders, boundary lines, fences—and on possible ways of recontextualizing them as a political tool in a gallery situation.

Carolyn Lazard is an artist working in video, performance, and text. Their work engages collective practice to address the ecology of care, dependency, and visibility. Lazard has presented work in various spaces including Light Industry, Cleopatra’s, Recess, Anthology Film Archives, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Slought Foundation, the New Museum, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. They have published writing in the Brooklyn Rail and Mousse Magazine and are currently writing an accessibility guide for common practice. They are a founding member of Canaries, a healing and arts collective of chronically ill women and gender non-conforming artists. Lazard holds a BA from Bard College and lives in Philadelphia where they are completing an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania.

Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an AB from Harvard and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018) and All that Beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). Moten is also co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016).

Letters & Handshakes is a collaboration of Greig de Peuter (Department of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University) and Christine Shaw (Blackwood Gallery and Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga).
Letters & Handshakes’ past projects include the exhibitions I stood before the source and Precarious: Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge, the forum Fighting Foreclosed Futures: Politics of Student Debt, and the symposium and micropublication Surplus3: Labour and the Digital.

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).

Greig de Peuter collaborates on Cultural Workers Organize, an international research project exploring collective responses to precarity in the cultural and creative industries. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. He is a co-founder of Letters & Handshakes.

Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).