Events

Queen is a Black Bajan of Nigerian Ancestry, Queer, Femme presenting, Mother, Author, Educator, Scholar, Activist, and International Artist as well as the Executive Director of Operations & Finance with Black Speculative Arts Movement Canada. As a creative, Queen Kukoyi explores spoken word poetry, digital collage, and animations along with installation work that explores concepts around the Afrofuturistic meditative space. Queen uses the lens of Afrofuturism 2.0 in her visual arts, mindfulness, and storytelling to facilitate discourse that decolonizes the Black identity and affirms all intersections of Blackness.

Christine Brubaker is a director, writer, and performer and is a dual citizen of Calgary and Toronto. Cathleen is a Costume Designer, Cutter, and illustrator working out of Calgary, AB, Canada. Cathleen’s formal training began at Trozmer Universidad de Diseño in Puebla, Mexico where she learned the basics of patterning and construction.

Born in Jakarta, Indonesia and raised in Toronto, Tessar Lo works in a variety of mediums and employs diverse approaches toward surface and story. Lo is keen on language, time, the unplaceable and the preposterous. He is motivated by the transitions synonymous with world-building and wishes to engage in modes of mythology.

Quentin VerCetty is an award-winning multidisciplinary visual griot (storyteller) and art educator. VerCetty’s artistic work explores ideas around the Afrotopia and Afrofuturistic public art and the use of semiotics to tell metanarratives about society and politics. VerCetty’s art has been in numerous media outlets and publications. Along with showing his work in countries on every continent from Japan, Haiti, Peru, Ghana, Australia, United Arab Empire and France, to name a few. 

Daniel Rotsztain is the Urban Geographer, an artist, writer, and cartographer whose work examines our relationship to the places we inhabit. The author of All the Libraries Toronto, Daniel is a frequent contributor to CBC Radio, and has had work featured in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and New York Magazine. He is the co-lead of plazaPOPS, a community-lead project to create public gathering places in strip mall parking lots across Toronto’s inner suburbs and beyond.

A Canadian Poet Of Honour, Mahlikah Awe:ri, Enml’ga’t Saqama’sgw, (The Womxn Who Stands and Walks In The Light) is an award-winning; Haudenosaunee Kanien’kéhà:ka & Mi’kmaw L’sitkuk of the Wolf Clan, from the Territory of Kahnawá:ke and the Unceded traditional homelands of the Mi’kma’ki of Kespukwitk, with 9 Generations of Black Loyalist, African American, Afro-Caribbean and Irish Ancestry. Awe:ri is an acclaimed Spoken Word Artist, Arts Educator, Eco-Influencer, Public Speaker, Performance Artist, Curator and Emerging O’nikòn:ra Guide. Shifting paradigms through Indigenized ways of knowing and being; while reimagining what it means to be “In-Relation”, to the Land and to each other.

A. F. Moritz’s most recent books of poems are As Far As You Know (2020) and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018), both from House of Anansi Press. Blaise Moritz is an artist and writer living in East Toronto. He is the author of two books of poems, Crown and Ribs (Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2007) and Zeppelin (Nightwood Editions, 2013).

Esie Mensah is someone whose work – every performance, project, and partnership – embodies the multifaceted artist, and whose creative footprint extends to many genres, disciplines and regions. As a dancer, choreographer, movement director and speaker, Esie brings her mastery in storytelling to audiences as diverse as her experience. From working with megastars like Rihanna, Drake, Arcade Fire, and Janelle Monae to historied brands like Coca Cola, Luminato, TIFF, ROM, AGO, Shaw Festival, Soulpepper Theatre and Toronto Raptors (to name a few), Esie Mensah’s creations show no sign of limits or slowing down.

Bekah is a multi-disciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and mixed European descent who grew up in northern Alberta on Dene territory. Her work reflects what she sees in society. She is continually learning her Anishinaabe culture, using her creative practices to connect and heal. She aims to use the platforms she can access to amplify the voices of Indigenous women and to foreground issues colonialism perpetuates.

Dan Bergeron is a public artist who employs a range of styles, themes and materials to activate and explore the meaning of our shared public spaces. The shape, texture and location of a site and its history or current uses dictate the form and content of his projects. Dan’s projects are sometimes commissioned and sometimes uncommissioned; sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent. His public installations aim to open a dialog with viewers, promoting engagement through both intimate familiarity and wonder at the unexpected. Dan has installed uncommissioned works in cities around the world including London, New York, Paris and Amsterdam. He has completed commissions for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto and the Luminato Festival as well as creating permanent public artworks for the City of Toronto, the City of Richmond, BC and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Dan lives in Toronto with his partner and their two young boys.

Ani Castillo is first and foremost a Fellow Human. She was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. It was pouring rain on that summer day and she loved life from the first breath. Ani became a newspaper cartoonist at age 20, by pure accident. For the next 14 years her cartoons were published in Mexican and Canadian newspapers. These days she’s an author and her books are published in New York and translated to several different languages around the world. She lives in Toronto with her beloved daughters.

Anne Michaels is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Among many other honours she is a Guggenheim Fellow, has received honorary degrees, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel FUGITIVE PIECES was adapted as a feature film.