Keynotes
Michelle Caswell
Michelle Caswell, PhD, (she/her), is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) where so co-directs the UCLA Community Archives Lab. At UCLA, she was recently appointed as Executive Vice Chancellor/ Provost’s Special Advisor on Community-Engaged Scholarship. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive, an online repository that documents and provides access to the stories of South Asian Americans. She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), as well as more than four dozen peer-reviewed articles.
Marian Dörk
Marian Dörk is a research professor for Information Visualization & Management at the Design Department and the Institute for Urban Futures of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. His research and teaching focus on data visualization with a particular sensitivity towards social, cultural and technological transformations. Since 2015 he has been co-directing the UCLAB, a transdisciplinary research group that operates at the confluence of computing, design, and the humanities. His current research projects investigate how visual interfaces can bridge linear storytelling and open-ended exploration within cultural collections.
Kristin Kozar
Kristin Kozar, MLIS, is Executive Director and Oral Testimony Program Co-Lead at the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, University of British Columbia. Kristin is a proud member of the Hwlitsum First Nation with familial ties to Penelekut, Lummi Tribe and the Musqueam Indian Band and also served on council for 6 years. She is a 2018 Masters of Library and Information Studies graduate, concentration in First Nation curriculum. She has previously worked at what was formerly known as UBC Aboriginal Health and has worked on a project where she researched and analyzed how to use Blockchain to have Indigenous peoples and community’s autonomy over their own records. Kristin’s currently also working on her PhD with a focus on Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Residential School records. In her role as the Interim Executive Director, Kristin brings her lifetime journey of advocating for Indigenous rights and Indigenous focused engagement. She further brings experience in policy development, community relationship building, and strategic planning.
Ry Moran
Ry Moran is widely recognized as a visionary leader for building and sustaining relationships that advance equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigenous rights. As founding Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), he was responsible for laying the strategic foundations of the organization, while working in close collaboration with national partners to advance its mission, vision, and mandate. Previously he was Director of Statement Gathering and the National Research Center for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was mandated to gather survivor statements, along with collecting residential school records from church and government archives. In his current role at the University of Victoria as the inaugural Associate University Librarian for Reconciliation, he actively works to create spaces for decolonized practices within the library and beyond. He continues to be a champion for Truth, Reconciliation, and human rights domestically and abroad.
Donna Sacuta
Donna Sacuta is the Executive Director of the B.C. Labour Heritage Centre. A lifelong resident of British Columbia, she has been guiding the work of the Centre and supporting its projects since 2017. Her career has included periods in broadcasting, administrative support, political organizing, research and small business where she acquired a wide range of transferable skills.
Presenters
Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda
Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda is Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University where she directs the interdisciplinary research-creation studio cMAS (criticalMediArtStudio). She is the author of Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in post-1968 Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Her research in the histories of women, art and technology; transnational networks of artistic exchange; feminist art, activisms and archival practices in the Americas has appeared in Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, Media-N the Journal of the New Media Caucus, Leonardo Music Journal, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture and Artelogie. Her interactive installations exploring the body as archive and site of cultural, gender and bio-political inscriptions have been exhibited internationally since 1990 and published in Public Journal, Feminist Media Histories Journal, Feral Feminisms and Mapping Meaning Art Journal.
Hafiz Akinlusi
Hafiz Akinlusi holds a degree in Economics from Simon Fraser University, and is focused on developing more sustainable, and equitable systems. He has worked in various roles spanning from tech to finance, and is now focused on the arts. He is specifically interested in ensuring more equitable distribution of resources to black, Indigenous and other BIPOC artists. He is also one of the founders of Madebywe; a collective that uses different mediums to explore ideas around identity and community. He is also currently learning to play the piano.
Sabid Ali
Sabid Ali is a designer and Graduate Student, Master of Design (Interdisciplinary) at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Ali’s objectives are to amplify underrepresented voices for the purpose of creating a positive social impact. He explores queer archives as a designer to understand how the limitations of materiality have been pushed by queer people and how queer material culture evolves alongside queer liberation movements in the English-speaking world for the pursuit of equal rights and legal protections. See Ali’s work at www.sabid.format.com.
Kira Baker
Kira Baker is the Reference Archivist for the City of Vancouver Archives. She worked closely with Ron Dutton to acquire the extensive Vancouver LGBTQ archive and create a digital home for four decades of history. She is a member of the Crossing Fonds research team.
Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte
Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is a Bombardier Doctoral Scholar and PhD Candidate at Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) School of Communication. Her research focuses on Canadian cultural policy, intersections of digital technologies and arts management, and artist-run organizations. She is the co-instigator, with Claudia Sicondolfo and ME Luka, of the SSHRC-funded project Archives in Action: Canadian Audio-Visual Archive Policy Plan (AiA), which addresses the policy issues of vulnerable and/or marginalized audiovisual (AV) collections and archive holdings across Canada.
Ester Bovard
Ester Bovard is an MA student in Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image at the University of Amsterdam, and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Toronto. She was recently awarded the KHMW Jan Brouwer Thesis Prize for Communications and Media Sciences, and has contributed to projects at Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, UMAM Documentation & Research, and the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision.
Gracen Brilmyer
Gracen Brilmyer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University and the Director of the Disability Archives Lab. Their research lies at the intersection of feminist disability studies, archival studies, and the history of science, where they investigate the erasure of disabled people in archives and how disabled people use and experience archives today. Their research is shaped by their experiences as a white, Disabled, non-binary person. For more: gracenbrilmyer.com.
Jessica Bushey
Dr. Jessica Bushey is an Assistant Professor with the School of Information at San José State University in California. At SJSU, she teaches courses on reference and access services and analog and digital preservation. Prior to joining the faculty at SJSU, she was the archivist at the Museum and Archives of North Vancouver (MONOVA), where she led a pandemic collecting project with a digital video oral history program and developed a digital collections portal to connect archival primary sources with museum exhibitions. Dr. Bushey is the Chair of the working group on research and access for the InterPARES Trust AI project (2021-2026). Her research interests focus on digital images and archives. Her artistic practice explores memory-making and knowledge sharing.
Sheelagh Carpendale
Sheelagh Carpendale is a professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. Her primary research areas are Information Visualization and Interaction Design.
Maira Cristina Castro Mina
Maira Cristina Castro Mina is an Afro-Colombian woman interested in social and environmental leadership, especially in marginalized areas. She collaborates with social leaders in Guachene, Cauca, Colombia, in projects such as Empowering Guacenecena Women and Ancestral Afro-Colombian Knowledge. This collaboration is blended (online and in-person) because Maira Cristina lives in Vancouver and studies Interactive Arts and Technology MA at SFU where she belongs to the Critical Media Arts Studio under the supervision of Dr. Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda.
Dana Claxton
Dana Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown internationally at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), and more. Her work is held in public, private and corporate collections. She is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory with the University of British Columbia. She is a member of Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in SW Saskatchewan and she resides in Vancouver, Canada. Dana comments, “ I am grateful for all the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my sundance teachings – mni ki wakan – water is sacred.”
Alan Colín Arce
Alan Colín Arce is a Master’s student in Sociology at the University of Victoria. He’s interested in the politics behind web archives, and how they can be used to study the recent evolution of Sociology. His other research interests are scholarly communication and digital humanities. He is also a graduate research assistant at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, where he works in the development of the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences Commons.
Karrmen Crey
Karrmen Crey is Sto:lo and a member of the Cheam Band. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where her research examines the rise of Indigenous media in Canada, and the institutions of media culture that Indigenous media practitioners have historically engaged and navigated to produce their work. Her current research examines Indigenous film festivals and Indigenous digital media, particularly Indigenous virtual reality and augmented reality.
Kiara Dabreo
Kiara Dabreo is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree specializing in History at the University of the Fraser Valley. She works as a Research Assistant on an archival research project on the documentation of Muslim immigrants of South Asian ancestry. Her research interests lie in South Asian Canadian and Middle Eastern histories, foreign aid and development policy, and ancient civilizations.
Richard Dancy
Richard Dancy is the Systems and University Records Archivist at Simon Fraser University Archives. He graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Master of Archival Studies and has worked at SFU since 1998. Over the last decade, his work has focussed on building up the Archives’ capacities and infrastructure to support its growing digital holdings. He helped implement Access-to-Memory (AtoM) as the Archives’ main description and access platform, in use at the Archives now for almost 10 years. He is a participant in the Crossing Fonds project and is a co-chair of the AtoM Foundation’s Roadmap Committee.
Olivia Daniel
Olivia Daniel is the Archive Coordinator for the Kwantlen First Nation Archive. She began the project in the summer of 2021, digitizing various Kwantlen primary sources. Olivia continued the project in the summer of 2022, working along side Kwantlen’s Cultural Heritage Repatriation Liaison, Jessica Hewitt, to write the Digitization Strategy. The following summer, Olivia was hired again to launch Kwantlen’s Digital Archive. In between work, Olivia studies for her Master’s thesis at SFU and visits her partner on Gabriola Island.
Sara Diamond
Dr. Sara Diamond, Order of Canada, and Ontario is the Principal Investigator of the SSHRC funded Crossing Fonds Partnership Development project and Symposium. She holds degrees in History and Communications, Media and Performance, and Computer Science. She is OCAD University Research Chair and President Emerita. For 15 years Diamond led OCAD University to retain and expand its traditional strengths in art and design while leading its university transformation to become a leader in graduate education, research, digital media, with a deep commitment to Indigenous reconciliation, equity, diversity and inclusion. She is a Senior Fellow at Massey College and Adjunct Professor of Engineering, University of Toronto; and Adjunct Professor in SFU’s SIAT program, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from SFU. Diamond undertakes funded research in cultural analytics, media, and social histories, is co-Principal Investigator of the iCity2.0 project and a member of the Steering Committee of Abundant Intelligences: Expanding Artificial Intelligence through Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
Christine D’Onofrio
Christine D’Onofrio is a practicing artist and educator living, working and learning on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Exhibiting and practicing for over 20 years and as a pedagog at the University of British Columbia she activates artistic practice as a research method for critical inquiry, giving insight into new ontological potentials.
Sky Dragushan
Sky Dragushan is in their third year of undergraduate study at the University of Victoria, pursuing an English degree with a minor in Art History and Visual Studies. Their research interests include Trans studies, ancient artefacts, and the intersection of Queer theory and Archival and Library Studies. Sky is a VKURA scholar, fantasy book enthusiast, and currently completing a Lowens Fellowship with Special Collections at the University of Victoria.
Andrea Fatona
Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at the OCAD University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by “other” Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, culture and education can be employed to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging, and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Fatona is a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Canadian Black Diasporic Cultural Production and the founder of the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, OCAD U.
Mark S. Fox
Mark S. Fox is director of the Urban Data Research Centre in the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. The Centre seeks to make urban data more accessible by providing tools for discovering, integrating, analysing and visualising urban data. He is Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering, Professor of Industrial Engineering and Computer Science, and Founding Director of the Centre for Social Services Engineering at the University of Toronto. His research investigates the semantic representation (aka Ontologies) and standardization of urban data and knowledge. Dr. Fox is a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and the Engineering Institute of Canada. Dr. Fox has published over 250 papers.
Moroti George
OLUMOROTI (Moroti) SOJI-GEORGE (he/they) is a curator, writer and educator based in Vancouver, BC. He is the curator at the Black Arts Centre in Surrey, BC and the artistic director of Gallery Gachet in downtown Vancouver. Olumoroti’s curatorial practice primarily involves unravelling and demystifying the ways Blackness is embodied and codified in our shared milieu and conceptualizing the works of Black Contemporary artists and their contributions to the Black cultural lexicon and our understanding of the state of Blackness. His research and curatorial practice also involve envisioning accessible and community-centred art spaces and highlighting the stories of individuals and communities who construct new ways of being that challenge the Western status quo. At the core of his practice is the belief that space could be used to reflect the agency and lived experiences of individuals whose bodies and identities are not typically valued, respected and represented in traditional art and academic settings. Through an exploration of language, the archive, lens-based works, history and cultural theory, Olumoroti’s curatorial practice is grounded in a passion for non-hierarchical epistemological production that could contribute to the creation of a pathway where new approaches to cultural production and the politics that fuel the ways different bodies perceive and understand the world could emerge.
Oliver Grau
Oliver Grau has over 20 years Chair Professorships in Art History and Image Science at int. Universities and is an Elected Member of Academia Europaea. He has given more than 350 lectures and keynotes at conferences, incl. Olympic Games culture program and G-20 Summit. Grau founded and serves as director of the internationally extensive Archive of Digital Art, ADA.Grau’s Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion, MITP 2002 (Nature & Scientific American Book of the Month) is with 2800+ citations internationally among the most quoted art history books since the year 2000. It offered the first historic evolution in image-viewer theory of immersion and a systematic analysis of the triad of artist, artwork and beholder in digital art. Grau was founding director and is head of the MediaArtHistories Conference Series board. He received several awards and his numerous publications have been translated translated in 15 languages. His main research is in histories of media art, immersive images, art and emotion, the history of telepresence, artificial life and digital humanities. Grau developed new international curricula: MediaArtHistories MA, Image Science, Digital Collection Management, the EU supported the MediaArtsCultures Program with 5.5 Mio.
Jana Grazley
Jana Grazley is a Digital Archivist at the City of Vancouver Archives. Jana has developed preservation and access strategies for everything from reformatted analogue video to open geospatial datasets, and is active in British Columbia’s audiovisual heritage community. Coming to the field from a background in non-profit community radio, Jana remains committed to exploring the application of archival theory and digital preservation principles within the constraints of real working environments. Jana holds Master’s Degrees in Archival Studies and Library and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia.
Emily Guerrero
Emily Guerrero is an archivist, librarian, and parent living on the unceded territories of the xᵂməθkᵂəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaɬ peoples. Their research on gossip, affective archival practices, and the VIVO archives has been published in the Archivaria Fall/Winter 2022 special issue on person-centred archival theory and praxis, and in the Winter 2023 issue of C Magazine. Emily’s new project traces entanglements of family abolition, the labour of parenting, and artistic production in East Vancouver. They currently work as a Community Librarian at Burnaby Public Library, on the territories of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples.
Melanie Hardbattle
Melanie Hardbattle is the Acquisitions and Outreach Archivist at Simon Fraser University Archives, responsible for community outreach and private records acquisitions that support teaching and research at the university and in the broader community. She has a Master of Archival Studies degree from the University of British Columbia and has worked at SFU since 2009. Her research interests centre on community engagement and access and addressing gaps in the archival record with relation to racialized and marginalized communities.
Paul Hebbard
As SFU’s University Archivist and Coordinator of Information and Privacy, Paul leads four integrated programs encompassing records management, access to information and protection of privacy, archives, and digital preservation. Paul has worked in the Archives and Records Management Department since 2002 and has previously held the positions of Records Management Archivist, Staff Archivist, and Digital Records Archivist. He is a graduate of the University of British Columbia’s School of Library, Archival and Information Studies and holds master’s degrees in both Archival Studies (MAS) and Library and Information Studies (MLIS).
Kate Hennessy
Kate Hennessy is an Associate Professor specialising in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. As an anthropologist of media and the director of the Making Culture Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation and production studio, her work uses collaborative, feminist, and decolonial methodologies to explore the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives in the context of technoscience. She is a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective.
Karen Knights
Karen Knights is Archive Manager and Special Projects Lead at the VIVO Media Arts Centre’ Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive. She has 23-years of accumulated experience at VIVO as Librarian, Archivist, Distributor, Programmer, and Development Coordinator since 1984. As an independent curator and writer she has undertaken several historical archive surveys of Canadian artist-run centres. Karen’s current focus is on activating the CDMLA collections through a series of archivist Internships, digitization projects, and exhibition series. Karen represents VIVO in their partnerships with Crossing Fonds and Archive/Counter-Archive. She is on the Crossing Fonds Steering Committee, Interpretation Committee Chair, and a co-researcher with Sara Diamond on the Women’s Labour History case study.
Sheila LaRoque
Sheila LaRoque is Liaison librarian for Indigenous studies and government information at the University of Saskatoon.
Kayla Lar-Son
Kayla holds a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Masters of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from the University of Alberta. Her professional areas of focus include Indigenous librarianship, Indigenous data sovereignty, and embedded librarianship with Indigenous communities. Prior to her current role, she was an Indigenous academic resident at the University of Alberta Libraries, where she primarily worked in the Digital Initiatives unit. Kayla has previously been an instructor for the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alberta, where she co-taught and created LIS 598: Indigenous Library and Information Studies (LIS) in a Canadian Context. Kayla is currently the Acting Head of X̱wi7x̱wa Library and formerly the Program Manager for the Indigitization program. Kayla is the Indigenous Programs and Services Librarian for the X̱wi7x̱wa Library at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She works with Indigenous communities both on and off the UBC campus and collaborates with stakeholders about library services.
Michael Li
Michael Li is an Industrial Design Undergraduate currently completing his Thesis Major Design Project, focusing on consumer data sovereignty and decentralized online interaction, at OCAD University in Toronto.
Raaynaa Madaan
Raaynaa Madaan is a third-year Dean’s List undergraduate student at the University of the Fraser Valley, majoring in psychology. She currently works as a Research Assistant at South Asian Studies Institute. Raaynaa’s research interests include human cognition, neuroscience, attachment styles, forensics and trauma-informed therapy, among many others.
Ng Mawonthing
Ng Mawonthing is a PhD student of English Literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. Her dissertation focuses on collecting, translating and analysing Phalee and Tangkhul proverbs.
Cait McKinney
Cait McKinney is the the author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke 2020), winner of the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize from the Canadian Communication Association and a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for LGBTQ studies. They co-edited Inside Killjoy’s Kastle: Dykey Ghosts, Feminist Monsters, and other Lesbian Hauntings (UBC, 2019). Their new book on the legacies of Pee-wee Herman, I know you are, but what am I?, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in 2024. McKinney’s ongoing collaborations with the artist Hazel Meyer explore shared attachments to queer histories through writing, performance, video, and other archival interventions. Recent activations of their collaborative work include Glasgow International Art Biennial (SCT) 2018, VIVO Media Arts Centre (CA) 2022, and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (CA) 2023. McKinney is Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University.
Roxy Moon
Roxy Moon is in their final year of their Master of Information with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. Their research interests include grassroots and minority archives, archival practices during conflict, settler-colonial and anti-colonial knowledge production, and counter-archival projects. In January, 2024, their paper, “Outside the Locus of Control,” on Palestinian digital archives was published in the Journal of Palestine Studies, and they wish to continue examining expansive notions of digital archiving.
Melissa J. Nelson
Melissa J. Nelson is an award-winning archivist, writer, and educator based in Toronto, Ontario. She is a leading voice in the field of archival studies on issues of race and racism. Her work and research interests are grounded in an ethics of care for the preservation of Black cultural heritage and anti-Black archival materials. Her work centers Black being and belonging in the archives to support collective healing and liberation movements. Melissa is the author of “Archiving Hate: Racist Materials in Archives.” This post has been referenced by collecting institutions in their commitment to equity practices, including Baker Library of Harvard Business School. Melissa is currently an Archivist for the Archives of Ontario. She is also the Founder and Creative Director of the Black Memory Collective. Melissa produces and hosts the podcast, Archives & Things. Melissa holds a Master of Information Studies from McGill University. She received a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in History, with a minor in Sociology, from Carleton University.
Kahani Ploessl
Kahani Ploessl is a research assistant for the Visual Analytics Lab, having completed a BA(Hons) in Digital Futures from OCAD U. Previously, she worked as a research assistant for the Game:Play Lab’s and Social Body Lab’s collaborative project, Bodies in Play. Her research endeavors explore emerging tools and spaces within digital and virtual reality, most notably including work on developing a digital archival space as well as integrating wearable tech controllers within Extended Reality (AR/VR/MR). Kahani’s undergraduate thesis explored similar themes through compositionally and functionally generative avatars within the context of an arcade style fighting game. In her personal art practice, Kahani uses generative art, video game development, and oil based illustrations to imagine the intersection of technology with Indian identities and culture.
Dan Pon 盤大明
Dan Pon 盤大明 is a librarian and archivist of mixed Cantonese and European settler ancestry, living on unceded Coast Salish territories. He is the Archives Manager at grunt gallery, where he works to preserve and share material and non-material culture, support artistic interventions, and platform imaginative models at the intersection of visual arts and information science. His recent work includes facilitating the collaborative public programming series Recollective, creating a digital collection documenting the early years of LIVE Biennial of Performance Art, and managing the migration of grunt’s collection into a new database platform. His writing has been published here and there, but he is most interested in supporting artist and art worker labour toward a more equitable and caring arts sector. Dan holds an MLIS from UBC and also works as a librarian at Langara College.
Cleo Reece
Cleo Reece is northern Cree, member of the Fort McMurray First Nation and spent many years in B.C. before moving home in 2006. Cleo was married into the Tsimshian community in Prince Rupert, BC where she became a teacher and worked for several years before moving her family to Vancouver. During her years in Vancouver Cleo worked in the Downtown Eastside as a community cultural and education advisor and organized the first Missing and Murdered Women’s Memorial March. In the mid 1990s she became involved in the artistic scene in Vancouver at the Video Inn artist run centre where she met other indigenous media artists. With Dana Claxton she formed an Indigenous media arts group (IMAG), and in 1998 Cleo organized the first Indigenous film festival in Vancouver, ImageNation. IMAG became a hub for emerging Indigenous media producers and the film festival provided a venue for new and established artists. When Cleo moved back to her home community near Fort McMurray Alberta in 2006, she established herself as an environmental activist when she saw the extent of the oil sands operations in her home territory and was a founding member of the Keepers of the Athabasca and later a board member the Keepers of the Water based in treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta. As an educator, Cleo uses her traditional knowledge and culture to work with children in the Fort McMurray schools as an elder in residence and cultural teacher. Presently she is involved with the local Arts Council to begin holding an Indigenous film festival where she now resides at the new Arts centre to be completed in 2024.
Jocelle Refol
Jocelle Refol is a core member of Sliced Mango Collective (SMC), a Vancouver Filipinx youth organization that provides opportunities for local Filipinx youth to connect to their culture through the arts. Jocelle is currently at the University of Toronto pursuing her Masters at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Syr Reifsteck
Syr (they/them) is an archivist, collage/fibre artist, and dreamer in so-called Vancouver. They are a graduate from the School for Library, Archival, and Information Systems at the University of British Columbia (Combined M.A.S./M.L.I.S. ) with the First Nations Concentration Curriculum. Recently, Syr has focused on implementing and enriching metadata, migrating to open source web-based collections management and exhibition systems, expanding access, and creating description within special collections and online environments. Their focus is on community accessibility, approachability, hybridity, intentional processes, and the web of relationships in every record. They ask: What whispers do the records have? How do we listen back? What does care to all the beings involved look like, sound like, feel like? They prefer to keep a minimal ambient online presence, preferring to exist within the immediate.
Silvana Sari
Silvana Sari is a graduate student in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University. Currently, she is focusing her Major Research Project on decolonizing foresight frameworks. Her focus lies in decolonization, cultural preservation, and creating inclusive frameworks for community engagement.
Sarah Beth Seymore
Sarah Beth Seymore is a Program Officer, Archiving and Data Services, at the Internet Archive. She supports community programs CARTA (Collaborative ART Archive) and Community Webs. Prior to working at the Internet Archive, she was an academic librarian for a decade, specializing in digital collections, metadata, and digitization.
Elizabeth Shaffer
Elizabeth Shaffer is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at the University of British Columbia (iSchool). Engaging critically with archives, she researches at the intersections of race, gender, and digital infrastructures and technologies with particular attention to issues of, impacts of colonialism, and anti-colonial methodologies and pedagogies. Through critical enquiry, she currently researches in the areas of Black studies and archives with attention to memory production and archives as sites of contestation. She is the research lead for the archive team on the SSHRC funded Transformative Memory International Network research project engaging Indigenous, Black and Southern knowledges in exploring how memory as a mechanism is conceived, documented and practiced in the context of public policy and scholarship on mass atrocity. Elizabeth lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxw.7mesh (Squamish), and lwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.
Carolyn Smith
Carolyn Smith is a graduate student at Dalhousie University completing her Master of Information, Archives Certificate. After completing her Bachelor or Arts at Vancouver Island University in 2022 she gained archival experience working at a community archive and museum in the qathet Region of British Columbia. The focus of her studies and professional work is within the environment of community archives and their potential role in the representation of marginalized communities.
Lauren Sorensen
Lauren Sorensen (she/her) works as Digital Projects & Data Manager for Stanford University Libraries and previously has held positions with organizations such as Bay Area Video Coalition, Library of Congress, Canyon Cinema, Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network (DPOE-N), and as consultant has worked with the City of Los Angeles, Glenstone Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She holds an M.A. from New York University’s Moving Image Archiving & Preservation program.
Miriam Sturdee
Miriam Sturdee is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews in the School of Computer Science. Her interests lie at the intersection between computing and the arts, and is especially interested in how arts based approaches can inform technical fields within STEM, with a particular focus on novel technologies such as shape-changing interfaces. She has chaired conference tracks for Pictorials, looking at visual and process based approaches to knowledge production, and is currently a member of the SIGCHI Futuring Committee. She has an MA in Psychology from University of Edinburgh, an MFA in Visual Communication from Edinburgh College of Art, and an MRes and PhD in Digital Innovation from Lancaster University. Her co-authored book, Sketching in HCI will be published in May 2024.
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is a Developer in the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at Simon Fraser University Library, specializing in text encoding and digital editions, digital project preservation and sustainability, minimal computing, and digital exhibits. He currently sits on the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Technical Council (2023), the TEI By Example International Advisory Committee, and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) Technical Advisory Committee. He holds an MA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia and is currently an MLIS student at the University of Alberta. His writing and work can be found in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.
Andréa Tarnawsky
Andréa Tarnawsky is the Digital and Outreach Archivist at SFU Library Special Collections and Rare Books and serves as lead for digital collections and services. They are also responsible for facilitating discovery of and access to the range of the stories found within SCRB’s holdings. Andréa holds a Dual MAS/MLIS (University of British Columbia) and a BMus in Music History (University of Alberta). Their research practice explores the digital preservation of computer and electroacoustic music, archival representational practices, and the intersection of archival outreach, social media, and algorithmic capitalism.
Mia Chi Vu
Mia Chi Vu is a second-year master’s student in Communication at SFU. Before her MA program, she completed her BA (Hons) in Communication at SFU alongside a double minor in Print and Digital Publishing and Business Administration. Her research interests lie in feminist and queer media studies, and she’s currently looking at Vietnamese queer subcultures as part of her MA thesis.
Kathleen Anne Zaragosa
Kathleen Zaragosa is a core members of Sliced Mango Collective (SMC), a Vancouver Filipinx youth organization that provides opportunities for local Filipinx youth to connect to their culture through the arts. Kathleen is currently at the University of Toronto pursuing her Masters at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).