Ora Barlow-Tukaki is a contemporary performer, composer, storyteller, and multi-instrumentalist from Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is of Te Whanau-a-Apanui and English descent. She has an Honours Degree in Music and has built a career as a performing and touring artist. Her foray into film began in 1996 when she worked with award-winning Tim Finn on his album and documentary film about the Dalai Lama. She also worked with the Crossing Frontiers project in the UK, working with Croatian refugees to create music for a documentary about refugee experiences in the Stoke on Trent region. Ora has worked collaboratively with other artists throughout her career. She co-founded three collaborative and highly-successful music projects - Manuhiri, Planet Woman, and Pacific Curls- and has toured the world with them. She has been a collaborating artist with many international artists and projects including the 2011 Manitoba Music collaboration project, the 100 Years Café project, Vancouver Island Music Festival collaboration project, and many CD recordings. In 2012, Ora was the subject of a documentary film produced by Livingston Productions and Maori Television called ‘I know a sheila like that’ about her political activism for which she contributed to the music score of the film. Ora is currently at work on a collaborative project with the National Theatre of Scotland and teaches music in schools throughout New Zealand. She is the Founder/Director of The NgāTM Festival, a five day music festival on the east coast of New Zealand.

Peta Rake is the Curator of Walter Phillips Gallery and the Banff International Curatorial Institute. She has curated exhibitions at International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP (New York), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco), Oakland Museum of California (Oakland), Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco), Playspace (San Francisco), and Live Worms Gallery (San Francisco). She had previously worked at institutions that include California College of the Arts (San Francisco) and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia) as well as the former Archivist at Steven Leiber Basement, a Fluxus and artists’ book archive in San Francisco. She writes regularly for C Magazine and her texts have appeared in Canadian Art, Fillip, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Rearviews, Institutions by Artists, On Apology and ElevenEleven Journal. She holds a Masters in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and was the recipient of the 2014 Curator Award from ISCP in New York. Rake is the co-curator of the 2017 Alberta Biennial.

Brendan is a founding member of Broken Social Scene and a veteran indie rock performer who has been a member of various notable bands including By Divine Right, Blurtonia, Valley of the Giants, Len, and hHead.  He has also released two solo albums and been involved in many ground breaking projects including being featured in a documentary Open Your Mouth And Say... Mr. Chi Pig, released in 2010 as well as an interactive documentary series called City Sonic. He has also added Producer and founder of the record label Draper Street Records to his long list of credits. 

Raghavan has played/toured with Kurt Elling, Taylor Eigsti, Vijay Iyer, Ambrose Akinmusire, Eric Harland, Mark Turner, Aaron Parks, Greg Osby, Billy Childs, Benny Green, Geoffry Keezer, Terrell Stafford, Mike Moreno, Rodney Green, Logan Richardson, Fabian Almazan, Justin Brown, Dayna Stephens, Julian Lage, Gerald Clayton, Marcus Gilmore, Walter Smith III, among others.

Raghavan grew up in Northbrook, Illinois, just north of Chicago. At age eight he began studying Western and Indian percussion, and later switched to the double bass at seventeen. He studied bass with John Clayton at the University of Southern California and also with Robert Hurst. During his years in Los Angeles he recorded and played with many legendary West Coast musicians. In 2009 he was a semi-finalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Bass Competition.

Harish Raghavan is a regular instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop and the Jazz at Centrum summer program in Port Townsend, Washington. He is featured on pianist Taylor Eigsti's 2010 Concord release, Daylight at Midnight.

New York based bassist, Linda Oh, has performed with the likes of Steve Wilson, Kenny Barron, Dave Douglas, Kevin Hayes and Cyrus Chestnut. She received an honorary mention at the 2009 Thelonious Monk Semi-Finals and received the 2010 Bell Award for Young Australian Jazz Artist of the year. Linda is working on a jazz quartet with string quartet concept called “Concert in the Dark” where the musicians play with specific movements throughout the audience with very minimal lighting to enhance the listening experience and create a spatial surround sound effect. She currently teaches bass at the Manhattan School of Music pre-college division.

Lucy Orta, Chair of Art & The Environment at University of the Arts London, is a Paris based installation artist whose work bridges fashion, sculpture, and architecture, to include social and environmental issues such as water pollution, waste recycling, global warming and population control. Through the use of diverse media, Lucy investigates the boundaries between the body and architecture (both structural and societal) while exploring issues of mobility, identity and communication. 

Through collaboration with artist Jorge Orta, the projects Refuge Wear (1993-1998) and Body Architecture (1996-2002) resulted in the creation of new modes of portable, lightweight, and autonomous structures for mobility, diaspora, and survival.  Her public intervention project Nexus Architecture (1994–2007), connected people from Toulouse, Johannesburg, Miami, London, to the Uyuni Salt Desert in Bolivia, through use of the body to create modular collective structures.  Lucy’s work has been the focus of major survey exhibitions at the Weiner Secession, Austria (1999); Contemporary Art Museum of the University of South Florida, for which she received the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Award (2001); and the Barbican Centre, London (2005).

Lucy Orta holds a BA from the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University.  In recognition of her contribution to the field of visual art, she was awarded an honorary MFA from Nottingham Trent and an honorary Doctorate from the University of Brighton.  She was the inaugural Rootstein Hopkins Chair at London College of Fashion (2002–2007), and former Head of the Man & Humanity Master in Industrial Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven - a pioneering program which she co-founded with a goal to stimulate socially driven and sustainable design solutions. Lucy currently holds the position of Chair of Art and Environment at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

Jorge Orta is an Argentinian born Paris based artist whose work centres on alternative modes of expression and representation resulting from extreme social and political unrest.  Jorge’s practice began during the Argentinian dictatorship period (1972-1979) working with the mediums of video art, mail art, and large-scale public performances, and eventually led him to represent Argentina with Crónica Gráfica at the Biennale de Paris (1982). Pursuing an interdisciplinary and collective art practice, he founded the research groups Huapi and Ceac to create a bridge between contemporary art and mass audiences; staging the public performances, Transcurso Vital (1978), Testigos Blancos (1982), Madera y Trapo(1983), Arte Portable (1983), and Fusion de Sangre Latinoamericana (1984). Jorge has published several Manifestos, including Arte Constructor, Arte Catalizador, and Utopias Fundadoras.

An inventor of technology, Jorge developed a ceramic glass plate projection method that he later used to create his ephemeral Light Works paintings. He went on to stage many monumental Light Works in mythical sites of cultural significance across the world, including the Mount Aso volcano, Japan; Cappadocia, Turkey; the Zocòlo, Mexico City; the Gorges du Verdon; and the Venetian palaces along the Grand Canal, representing Argentina for the Venice Biennale in 1995.  His five-week Light Paintingexpedition across the Andes culminating at Machu Picchu, and was witnessed by two-hundred thousand Peruvians (1992).

In 1991 he co-founded Studio Orta with his wife Lucy.  Their collaborative practice realizes large scale installations and performances commenting on the social and ecological factors of human and environmental sustainability. 

Jesse Wente is a husband and father, as well as an award-winning writer and speaker. Born and raised in Toronto, his family comes from Chicago and Genaabaajing Anishinaabek and he is an off-reserve member of the Serpent River First Nation. Jesse is best known for more than two decades spent as a columnist for CBC Radio’s Metro Morning. Jesse spent a decade with the Toronto International Film Festival as a curator, including leading the film and gallery programming at the Tiff Lightbox. Jesse was the founding director of the Indigenous Screen Office and is the first Indigenous person to serve as Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts. His award-winning first book “Unreconciled: Family, Truth and Indigenous Resistance” was a national bestseller. Earlier this year, Jesse was named the Storyteller in Residence at Toronto Metropolitan University. His first children’s book, Danger Eagle, has just been released by Tundra Books.

Photo is by John Paille.

Imre Szeman is Professor of Drama & Speech Communications and English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo. He is also Adjunct Professor of Research and Graduate Studies at Ontario College of Art & Design University. Szeman is the recipient of the John Polanyi Prize in Literature (2000), the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2003), the Scotiabank-AUCC Award for Excellence in Internationalization (2004), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (2005-7), the President's Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision at McMaster (2008), and the Killam Research Professorship, among other awards.

Szeman’s main areas of research are in the areas of energy and environmental studies, critical and cultural theory, social and political philosophy, and Canadian studies. His most recent books include: After Oil (2016); A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory (2017); Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (2017); Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, and Culture (2017); and Energy Humanities: An Anthology (co-ed, 2017). 

Greg Hollingshead has published three novels and four story collections. His collection The Roaring Girl won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. His novel The Healer won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. His novel Bedlam was a Globe and Mail 100 Best Books of the Year and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta and former Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada, Greg has received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Gold Medal for Excellence in the Arts and is a Member of the Order of Canada. He lives in Toronto with his wife Rosa Spricer.