Christi Belcourt is Michif originally from Manitou Sakahigan (Lac Ste. Anne, AB). With deep respect for the traditions and knowledge of her people, her work explores the beauty of the natural world and is grounded within her relationships with land, water, animals, and Anishinaabek Peoples of the North Shore of Lake Superior. She initiated Walking With Our Sisters, a project that honours the lives of missing and murdered native women. Together with Isaac Murdoch and Erin Konsmo, Belcourt founded the Onaman Collective.
Cherish Violet Blood is a professionally trained, seasoned performer with active followings in the national Native and Toronto theatre community. She is an actor, storyteller, comedian, activist, and Blackfoot woman from the Blood Reserve, AB, with extensive traditional hand drumming and contemporary singing skills. A graduate of the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto, Blood has performed all over North America and is a member of New York’s Spider Woman Theater company.
Isaac Murdoch Bombgiizhik is fish clan and Anishinaabe from Serpent River First Nation, Ontario. Isaac is a well-respected storyteller, visual artist, and traditional knowledge holder, widely recognized for his research and expertise in traditional pictographs, symbolism, harvesting, cultural camps, oral history and storytelling, birchbark canoe making, and knowledge of birchbark scrolls. He has committed his life to the preservation of Anishinaabe cultural practices and has spent years learning from Elders of the North Shore, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.
Jill Carter (Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi) is a Toronto-based theatre practitioner and Assistant Professor with the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies; the Aboriginal Studies Program; and the Transitional Year Programme at the University of Toronto. Her research and praxis base themselves in the mechanics of story creation (devising and dramaturgy), the processes of delivery (performance on the stage and on the page), and the mechanics of affect.
IV Castellanos is a sculptor and performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. They are the founder of the IV Soldiers Gallery in 2014 and co-founder of Feminist Art Group. IV has created work with No Wave Performance Task Force and Social Health Performance Club, and is in ongoing performance collaboration with Amanda Hunt.
Dr. Marcia Crosby’s lived experiences with her Tsimshian and Haida (British Columbia) maternal and paternal grandparents, parents, and communities inform her work as a writer of Indigenous histories. Crosby has examined the diverse ways that First Nations groups have incorporated external politico-economic forces into their existing patterns of cultural life. She is the author of the influential 1991 essay “Construction of the Imaginary Indian.”
Beatrice Deer is a singer, seamstress, and advocate for good health. Originally from Quaqtaq, a tiny village in Nunavik on the northeast coast of Quebec, Deer is now based in Montreal with her two children. Her music features both lyrical and throat singing in Inuktitut and English. Deer has released four albums, and received the award for Best Inuit Cultural Album in 2005 at the Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards.
Maggie Groat is an artist, mother, birthworker, and gardener whose current research surrounds states of becoming, decolonial ways-of-being, how plants and gardens can be portals, slowness, the utility of images, and the transformative potentials of salvaged materials during times of living through climate emergency. Her methodologies are informed by states of being in-between, acts of care, site-specific responsiveness, strategies of collage, and hopeful speculation.
Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Métis and Dutch Canadian ancestry. She is the inaugural Senior Curatorial Fellow, Indigenous Art, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and was the 2016 Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Hogue was curator in residence with grunt gallery between 2014–2017, and has curated exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Or Gallery, and SFU Gallery.
Maria Hupfield (she/her) is a transdisciplinary maker working at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture. She is the 2022 ArtworxTO Artist in Residence with solo projects at Patel Brown, Toronto, and Nuit Blanche fall 2022. Hupfield is an Assistant Professor and Canadian Research Chair, cross-appointed to the Departments of Visual Studies and English and Drama at UTM, with a graduate appointment in the Daniels Faculty. Hupfield is lead artist at the Indigenous Creation Studio. She is Marten Clan and an off-rez member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation.
Ursula Johnson is the winner of the 2017 Sobey Art Award. She is an interdisciplinary artist and an enrolled member of the Eskasoni First Nation Mi’kmaq Community on Cape Breton Island, currently based in Dartmouth, NS. She is active in Mi’kmaw language revitalization and descendent from a long line of esteemed basket makers. Her nationally touring solo show Mi'kwite'tmn (Do You Remember) considers the consumption of traditional knowledge within colonial institutions. Johnson was awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation’s 2017 Reveal Indigenous Art Award.
Nicole Laliberte is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Her research is located at the intersection of geography, feminist theory, and critical development studies. She studies systems of violence, including settler colonialism, as well as feminist and anti-oppression pedagogies in the undergraduate classroom. Professor Laliberte serves on the Board of Director’s of UTM’s Women and Gender Studies Program, and on UTM’s Indigenous Initiative Task Force.
Michelle LaVallee is a curator, artist, and educator of Ojibway ancestry and a member of the Nawash Band in Cape Croker, Ontario. She worked as a curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, SK from 2007-2017, and has recently been appointed as the new director at the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada Art Centre in Gatineau, Quebec. LaVallee won the award for Excellence in Arts Related Service at the Mayor’s Arts and Business Awards in Regina in 2013 and has been a chosen participant for a number of International Canadian Curator Delegations in Australia, New Zealand, and Italy.
Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Cree/Halfbreed; German/Polish) is an interdisciplinary artist, singer/songwriter and critical thinker whose family roots are from Papaschase First Nation, amiskwaciy wâskahikan (Edmonton, AB) and Kikino Metis Settlement, AB. Her work investigates and articulates a dynamism of nêhiyawin (Cree worldview) in contemporary time-place, incorporating Indigenous language(s), audio, video, VR, olfactory, sewn objects, music, and audience/user participation to create immersive environments towards “radical inclusion.” As a songwriter, L’Hirondelle’s focus is on both sharing nêhiyawêwin (Cree language) and Indigenous and contemporary song-forms, and personal narrative songwriting as methodologies toward survivance.
She is the recent recipient the 2021 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art. In addition, Cheryl was awarded two imagineNATIVE New Media Awards (2005 & 2006), and two Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards (2006 & 2007), and has been nominated for or received honorable mention for various other arts and music awards. Her work has been published, written about, exhibited, performed, and presented regionally, nationally, and internationally. L’Hirondelle holds a Master of Design from OCAD University’s Inclusive Design program (2015) and is a current member of the university’s Indigenous Education Council. She is currently a PhD candidate with SMARTlab at University College, Dublin, in Ireland.
Denise Booth McLeod is Anishnaabe (Ojibway) and her ancestral lands are Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation on the North Shore of Lake Huron. She has worked closely with urban Indigenous community in Toronto as the Cultural Coordinator at the Native Canadian Cultural Centre, Urban Indigenous Family Violence Prevention, and Culture Coordinator at the Native Women’s Resource Centre. She is currently the Indigenous and Community Engagement Coordinator at Toronto Birth Centre.
Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Myers has an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University. Since 2010, she has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking, and in her stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings, reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions across Canada and her writing has been published in a number of exhibition publications in addition to Senses and Society, C Magazine and FUSE. She is an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. Myers is a member of Beausoleil First Nation and she is based in Port Severn and Toronto.
Esther Neff is the Founder and Co-Director of Panoply Performance Laboratory, a collective making operas-of-operations and a laboratory site for performance projects. She is a collaborative and solo performance artist, independent theorist and member of Feminist Art Group, Social Health Performance Club and Organizers Against Imperialist Culture. In February 2017 her work and research included a dedicated month long series of operations entitled Embarrassed of the Whole.
Lindsay Nixon is a Cree-Métis-Saulteaux curator, editor, and writer. They are the Indigenous Editor-at-Large for Canadian Art, and the editor of mâmawi¬-âcimowak, an independent art, art criticism, and literature journal. Nixon currently resides in Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyaang, unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories (Montreal), where they co-founded the Black Indigenous Harm Reduction Alliance and Critical Sass Press. Their forthcoming creative non-fiction collection, tentatively titled nîtisânak, is to be released in Spring 2018 through Metonymy Press.
Kris Noakes is an Anishinaabe citizen of Nipissing First Nation and the President of Peel Aboriginal Network. She is active in the community and serves in many advisory roles including in a First Nations advisory role on the City of Mississauga’s Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee and as a part of the Toronto Area First Nation, Métis, and Inuit Educational Leads for the Indigenous Education Office of the Ministry of Education.
Rosary Spence is a recognized Indigenous singer, steeped in time-honoured rhythms and styles. Spence's debut album Maskawasiwin (a Cree word for “strength”) was released in 2015. She is a featured artist on a variety of albums and collaborations, most recently a twelve-track compilation titled Women's Voices For Attawapiskat, dedicated to the people of Attawapiskat First Nation. Spence is originally from the coastal Cree community of Fort Albany First Nation, off the coast of James Bay.
Tanya Tagaq’s album Animism earned the 2014 Polaris Music Prize for the best full-length Canadian album. She is a multi-Juno-award-winning vocalist informed by Inuit throat singing and combining avant-garde improvisation, metal, and electronica influences. She delivers fearsome elemental performances that are visceral and physical. Her album Retribution was released in October 2016.
Eve Tuck is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Indigenous Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. She is a William T. Grant Scholar (2015-2020) and was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in 2011. Tuck's writing and research is on urban education and Indigenous studies, and is the author of two recent books, Urban Youth and School Pushout (Routledge, 2012) and Place in Research (co-written with Marcia McKenzie, Routledge, 2015).
Tania Willard, of Secwépemc and settler heritage, works within the shifting ideas around contemporary and traditional, often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Her curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture (2012-2014), co-curated with Kathleen Ritter. In 2016 Willard received the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art from the Hnatyshyn Foundation and a City of Vancouver Book Award for the catalogue Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Willard’s ongoing collaborative project, BUSH Gallery, is a conceptual land-based gallery grounded in Indigenous knowledges and relational art practices. Willard is an MFA candidate at UBCO Kelowna, and her current research constructs a land rights aesthetic through intuitive archival acts.
Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory is a performer of uaajeerneq, a contemporary Greenlandic mask dance, and a recognized storyteller, poet, and actor. She is Inuk of Greenlandic origin, living in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Laakkuluk is a founding member and Programme Manager at Qaggiavuut, a non-profit society advocating for and supporting Nunavut performing artists.
Aylan Couchie is an Anishinaabe artist and writer hailing from Nipissing First Nation. She received her BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media, and Design at OCAD University where her research focused on decolonizing Indigenous monuments and public art. Her work explores First Nations realities/histories from a Two-Spirit, feminist perspective, and has been shown nationally and internationally. She maintains a presence on arts advisories, juries, and boards, and she’s received awards from the International Sculpture Center, Native Women in the Arts, and Colleges Ontario.
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).