what’s on

Ani Castillo

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.

Dan Bergeron

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.

Bekah Brown

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.

Esie Mensah

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.

A.F. Moritz & Blaise Moritz

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).

Mahlikah Awe:ri

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.

Daniel Rotsztain

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.

Quentin Vercetty

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. 

Tessar Lo

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 & Cathleen Sbrizzi

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 Kukoyi

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.

Shawn Micallef

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 teaches at the University of Toronto and was a 2011-2012 Canadian Journalism Fellow at University of Toronto’s Massey College. In 2002, while a resident at the Canadian Film Centre’s Media Lab, he co-founded [murmur], the location-based mobile phone documentary project that has spread to over 25 cities globally.

Adeyemi Adegbesan

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 homogeneity of ‘Blackness’. Through his work Adegbesan pulls from these varying elements to create Afro-futuristic portraits that embody history, future, and culture all in one.

Hazel Meyer

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.  

La-Vane Kelly

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

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 way for him to continue to advocate in the loud and bold ways he does. His art has touched many lives and continues to do so until this day. Currently, he runs an open mic called UnObscured which is dedicated to the BIPOC Queer and Trans community. Levyi is a firm believer in love and how everyone should be able to live freely and speak their truths.

Max Dean & Andrew Savery-Whiteway

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 degree.

Sean Martindale

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 plants in unexpected ways that prompt conversation.

Ness Lee

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 at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Agnes Etherington, The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Toronto, as well as galleries in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Montreal and Toronto. They are currently represented by Patel Gallery.

Bruce Horak

Canadian artist Bruce Horak lost 90% of his eyesight to cancer as a baby and identifies as Legally Blind. His work seeks to explore the unique way he sees the world, experimenting in visual art, performance, storytelling, and music/sound design. He delights in shifting perspectives and inspiring others to do the same.

Hiba Abdallah

Deeply rooted in a socially engaged ethos, Hiba Abdallah’s work examines and responds to issues directly experienced in diverse communities. Her practice aims to re-imagine the cities and places that we encounter by using locality, civic narratives and political structures as tools for fostering collective agency. She has created work across media – from public interventions to community projects, gallery exhibitions, civic think-tanks, and publications.

Malcolm-Emilio

For the past 10 years Malcolm-Emilio has consistently created work that inspires new perspectives on how to communicate and navigate in diverse cultural landscapes.

Anahita Dehbonehie

Anahita Dehbonehie is an Iranian performance designer, creator and installation artist. Currently based in Toronto, her practice is founded on the principle that truths are communicated most powerfully through evocative sensory experiences. She is drawn specifically to work that questions form and content while creating space for contemporary conversation. The evolving relationship between participant, creator and the exchange of ideas is what draws her to the art of live performance.