Playing in Public

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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).

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…

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,…

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,…

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.

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.

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…

SHAWN MICALLEF is the author of Frontier City: Toronto on the Verge of Greatness, Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto and The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure. He’s a weekly columnist at the Toronto Star, and a senior editor and co-owner of the independent, Jane Jacobs Prize–winning magazine Spacing.  Shawn…

Adeyemi Adegbesan is a Toronto based photographic artist whose practice aims to examine the intersectionality of black identity. Reflecting on blackness through pre-colonial – colonial – present day and future timelines; across regions, religions, varying levels of income, and political lines; Adegbesan interrogates the dichotomy of the richness of black experiences with the imposed societal…

Hazel Meyer is an artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and illness.  

Hazel Meyer is an artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture. Her work aims to recover the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and illness.  

Levyi-Alexander Love is an Artist born in Toronto, Ontario. He is passionate about forwarding those of African descent in the Queer and Trans community by creating spaces for folx to be free. As a man of trans experience, he holds to the strength of those in the Black and Queer community who have paved the…

Max Dean is working and staying at home where he continues to ponder how to make and exhibit his large scale sculptural installations and photographs. Andrew Savery-Whiteway was born and raised in Trenton, ON. After extensively studying Jazz performance through his adolescence, Andrew enrolled in the Ryerson School of Image Arts and pursued a photography…

Sean Martindale is an internationally recognized and award-winning interdisciplinary artist and designer based in Toronto, Canada. His interventions activate public spaces to encourage engagement and often focus on ecological and social issues. His playful works suggest alternate possibilities for existing spaces, infrastructures and materials found in urban environments. Frequently, Martindale uses salvaged goods and live…

Ness Lee draws upon history and personal narratives to create tender and surreal illustrations, paintings, sculptures and installations. Exploring states of mind during intimate stages of vulnerability, Lee’s work takes form as an effort in seeking comfort, forgiveness and desire for an end of a self-perpetuated state. Based in Toronto, their work has been featured…