Sarah Fillmore is Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. She has worked at the AGNS since 2005, overseeing the provincial art collection, as well as the Gallery’s acquisition, interpretation, education, conservation and exhibition programs, and Artist-in-Residence program. Fillmore is chair of the jury for the annual Sobey Art Award; Canada’s preeminent award for artists forty and under. 

Fillmore has curated group and solo exhibitions including the retrospective exhibition of Canadian Abstract painter, Jacques Hurtubise, Skin: the seduction of surface, Forces of Nature, The Last Frontier, Open Tuning (WaveUp) by Stephen Kelly, Lisa Lipton: Stop@forever and, since 2008, the Sobey Art Award exhibition. Recent work includes an exhibition of Graeme Patterson, as well as co-curating a major retrospective and accompanying publication of Canadian realist painter Mary Pratt.

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey (b.1959 / 1959 in England) are internationally acclaimed for creating multi-disciplinary works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology, and history. Referencing memory and time, nature and culture, urban political ecologies, climate breakdown, and biodiversity loss, their time-based practice reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event.

Ackroyd and Harvey are renowned for their monumental architectural interventions, as well as their multi-award winning photographic work, in which blades of seedling grass provide a highly light-sensitive surface that the artists use to create a unique form of photography, imprinting complex images in the living material through the controlled production of chlorophyll.

Recent exhibitions include Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas; Royal Academy of Arts, London; David Attenborough Building, Cambridge, UK; Le Centquatre-Paris, France; Festival Images, Switzerland; Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy; Void, Derry, N. Ireland; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA; Mostra SESC des Artes, Brazil; Chicago Public Arts Program, USA; Rice Gallery, Houston, USA. The artists have been awarded numerous prizes, including the Royal Academy Rose Award, Wu Guanzhong Prize for Art and Innovation, L’Oreal Art and Science of Colour Grand Prize, NESTA Pioneer Award, and Wellcome Trust Sci-Art Award.

Matthew Huber is Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University. He teaches on energy, environment and the political economy of capitalism. His research looks at the relationship between energy systems and the larger social, cultural and political forces. His 2013 book, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital examines the role of oil in shaping suburbanization and the rightward turn of American politics in the 1970s and beyond. His new project examines the industrial fertilizer industry and their immense natural gas consumption and carbon emissions.

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg Press, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Easterling’s research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League in New York. Easterling has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. The journals to which she has contributed include Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY.

Stefan St-Laurent, multidisciplinary artist and curator, was born in Moncton, New-Brunswick and lives and works in Ottawa. He was the invited curator for the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda in 2008, and for the 28th and 29th Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2010 and 2011. From 2002 to 2011, he worked as Curator of Galerie SAW Gallery, and has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa since 2010. His performance and video work has been presented in numerous galleries and institutions, including the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, Edsvik Konst och Kultur in Sollentuna (Sweden), YYZ in Toronto, Western Front in Vancouver and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. He has been a curator and programmer for a number of artistic organizations and festivals, including the Lux Centre in London, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montréal, Festival international du cinéma francophone in Acadie, Les Rencontres internationales Vidéo Arts Plastiques in Basse-Normandie (France), Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie (Moncton), as well as Pleasure Dome, Images Festival of Independent Film and Video and Vtape in Toronto. He is currently Director of the artist-run centre AXENÉO7 in Gatineau.

Eleanor King is a Halifax based artist. King received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2001, and is currently a Fulbright Fellow and MFA candidate at Purchase College in New York. She has participated in residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity among others. King has received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia, and was short-listed for the 2012 Sobey Art Award. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Nuit Blanche Toronto, and Galleri F15 in Norway. Her solo exhibition Dark Utopian at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (2015), was highlighted in a feature-length cover article for Canadian Art magazine. Previously, King was an instructor at NSCAD University, and Director at Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is represented by Diaz Contemporary in Toronto.

Jeffrey Spalding is an artist, writer and curator. His art works are in the principal national public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Canadian Embassy, Washington, Art Gallery of Alberta, Glenbow, Mendel Art Gallery and Mackenzie Art Gallery.  He has served as Director at major art museums, including Glenbow Museum, University of Lethbridge, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Appleton Museum of Art, Florida and Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Calgary.  Spalding organized Canada’s art exhibition for Expo 93 Korea and is author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues for museums such as the Tate Gallery and Russia’s Hermitage Museum. Spalding was President Royal Canadian Academy of Arts 2007-2010, recipient of the Alberta College of Art and Design Board of Governors Award of Excellence (1992) awarded the Order of Canada (2007) and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012). He was named Adjunct Professor, University of Calgary, is a regular contributor to Galleries West magazine and was recently appointed Senior Curator, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Poet and art writer LISA ROBERTSON began publishing in the 90s in Vancouver. Her 13 books trouble the limits of genre—Debbie: An Epic, a feminist rereading of Virgil, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1997 and published in French translation in 2021; The Weather (2001), a long poem plundering the rhetoric of Romantic meteorology, now translated to French and Swedish; the ficto-essays Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) amplify the urban history of Vancouver; Nilling essays a phenomenology of reading (2012); the bildungsroman The Baudelaire Fractal, shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction; the recent Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, working with translation and annotation. Her writing life has been supported by residencies and visiting professorships: University of Cambridge, Capilano University, Simon Fraser University, University of East Anglia, Queen Mary University of London, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, American University of Paris, California College of the Arts, Piet Zwart Institute; and by the Canada Council for the Arts. She lives in France.

The ethic and practice of collaboration are central to Marcus’ creative work. His plays, many of which were written or created with friends and colleagues, include: Winners and Losers, Jabber, How Has My Love Affected You?, Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil and Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings, Everyone, Adrift, 3299: Forms in Order, Peter Panties and A Line in the Sand. They have been presented across North America, Australia and Europe, translated into Czech, Flemish, and Italian, and published by Talonbooks and Playwrights Canada Press. He is currently working on King Arthur’s Night with Niall McNeill, and a new play for theatre for young audiences.

He is the Artistic Director of Neworld Theatre in Vancouver. With three indie-theatre partners, Neworld co-founded Progress Lab 1422 in 2009, a collaboratively managed 6,000 sq. foot rehearsal and production centre in East Vancouver that has become a hub for the independent Vancouver theatre scene. Marcus is a graduate of the National Theatre School and holds an MFA from UBC. He lives in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive area with his partner, teacher Amanda Fritzlan, and their sons Oscar and Zak.

Charles Spearin is a musician from Toronto, Ontario. Spearin is a founding member of Do Make Say Think, KC Accidental and Broken Social Scene and also contributes to Valley of the Giants. He is best known for composing and performing in very broad ranges of musical genres. His solo album The Happiness Project is a concept album and was released on February 14, 2009 on the Arts & Crafts Label.This album includes contributions from Do Make Say Think alumni Julie Penner, Kevin Drew, Ohad Benchetrit and Broken Social Scene alumni Leon Kingstone and Evan Cranley. The concept for the Happiness Project (making music out of ordinary speech) is influenced by his early life with a blind father and his own Buddhist studies. On April 17, 2010, Spearin won a Juno Award for the Best Contemporary Jazz Album for the The Happiness Project.He lives with his wife and two small children in the Toronto neighbourhood of Seaton Village that was the inspiration for The Happiness Project.