Thomas Kong

I received my Bachelor of Architecture with honours from the National University of Singapore and a Master of Architecture, with distinction from Cranbrook Academy of Art, USA. I am a licensed architect in Singapore and an associate member of the American Institute of Architects. After teaching architecture and interior architecture in Toronto and Chicago for fifteen years, I returned in 2019 to take up my current teaching and leadership appointments at my alma mater, the National University of Singapore’s architecture department. As an educator and practitioner situated at the nexus of art and design, I eschew narrowly defined approaches to a project, given constraints or outcomes. I see myself as someone who constructs possible worlds in our cultural landscape with care, commitment, empathy and generosity. My works have traversed a bandwidth of scales and complexities and deployed an array of media and methodologies. www.studiochronotope.com

Mary Anne Barkhouse

Mary Anne Barkhouse was born in Vancouver, British Columbia but has strong ties to both coasts as her mother is from the Nimpkish band, Kwakiutl First Nation of Alert Bay, BC and her father is of German and British descent from Nova Scotia. She is a descendant of a long line of internationally recognized Northwest Coast artists that includes Ellen Neel, Mungo Martin and Charlie James. She graduated with Honours from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and has exhibited widely across Canada and the United States.

As a result of personal and family experience with land and water stewardship, Barkhouse’s work examines ecological concerns and intersections of culture through the use of animal imagery. Inspired by issues surrounding empire and survival, Barkhouse creates installations that evoke consideration of the self as a response to history and environment.

A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Barkhouse’s work can be found in numerous private and public collections. (portrait image courtesy of artist’s website)

Nova Bhattacharya

Nova Bhattacharya is an award-winning, barrier-breaking, artist and cultural leader based in Tkaronto.  Her inspiration is found in identities, hybridities and diversities, manifesting creations that resonate with technical virtuosity and lush, vivid imagery.  She’s always been a rebel reinterpreting traditions and reinventing rituals.  In 2008, she founded Nova Dance, embedding the principle that building for the margins ensures inclusion for everyone.  The Company offers a space for vital conversations and serves community with care, compassion and kindness. Nova’s recent choreography Svāhā! features a cast of 22 performers proficient in more than 29 dance forms currently practiced on Turtle Island. The epic work embodies her vision of a diversiform company where the perceived boundaries of culture and technique are dissolved and bodies from the margins are centered.  Nova believes that dance expresses the essence of our humanity.

nova@novadance.ca

Dr. Kai Recollet

An urban Cree scholar/artist/and writer, Recollet’s work focuses on relationality and care as both an analytic and technology for Indigenous movement-based forms of inquiry within urban spaces. Recollet works collaboratively with Indigenous dance-makers and scholars to theorize forms of urban glyphing. Recollet is in conversation with dance choreographers, Black and Indigenous futurist thinkers and Indigenous and Black geographers as ways to theorize and activate futurist, feminist, celestial and decolonial land-ing relationships with more-than-human kinships, and each other.

Archer Pechawis

Performance artist, new media artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and educator Archer Pechawis was born in Alert Bay, BC in 1963. He has been a practicing artist since 1984 with particular interest in the intersection of Plains Cree culture and digital technology, merging “traditional” objects such as hand drums with digital video and audio sampling. His work has been exhibited across Canada and in Paris France, and featured in publications such as Fuse Magazine and Canadian Theatre Review. Archer has been the recipient of many Canada Council, British Columbia and Ontario Arts Council awards, and won the Best New Media Award at the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and Best Experimental Short at imagineNATIVE in 2009.

Archer works extensively with Native youth as part of his art practice, teaching performance and digital media for various organizations and in the public school system. Of Cree and European ancestry, he is a member of Mistawasis First Nation, Saskatchewan. (portrait image courtesy of artist’s website)