Fulbright Scholar Basia Irland is an artist, author, and activist who creates international large-scale water projects featured in her books Water Library (University of New Mexico Press) and Reading the River: The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland (Museum De Domijnen, the Netherlands). A monograph, Basia Irland, Repositories: Portable Sculptures for Waterway Journeys, is authored by Patricia Watts. Texas A & M University Press published What Rivers Know: Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways in 2025 with 210 color images. Irland is professor emerita, Department of Art, University of New Mexico, where she founded the Art & Ecology Program. Her website, basiairland.com, contains extensive documentation, including collaborations with scientists, projects along the entire length of waterways, ephemeral Ice Book series, portable Repositories, waterborne disease scrolls, essays about global rivers, and images from her large museum retrospective in the Netherlands. Her art has been featured in over seventy international publications.

Director and Associate Professor in the School of Craft & Emerging Media at the Alberta University of the Arts. Mackenzie received his MFA in 2005 from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University and his BFA in 1998 from Alberta College of Art & Design. His ongoing research focuses on collaboration with material that considers our co-evolution with plants and animals who provide the fibre we use to make cloth; and the communities and relationships required to sustain this activity. He has exhibited his work internationally, and participated in residencies at the Icelandic Textile Centre in Blönduós and the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland Oregon. His writing includes texts for Prairie Interlace: Weaving, Modernisms and the Expanded Frame, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture and VAV Magazine. Mackenzie lives in Mohkinstsis (Calgary), Canada with husband Kristofer and daughter Elizabeth.

Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer whose work ranges widely across media. Her work adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. Koh's ongoing projects include the Slow Fashion Season, an initiative encouraging sustainability in textiles and clothing; the Home Made Home initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing; and the League project focused on play as a form of creative practice. Koh received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2023 and was a 2023-24 Shadbolt Fellow in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. She served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20 and the 2021 Koerner Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia, where she is now an Assistant Professor in Visual Art. 

https://germainekoh.com

Maïa Tellit Hawad is a US-France-based researcher and writer currently completing a PhD at Yale University. Trained in philosophy, her work examines the imaginaries of the Sahara in French Africanist sciences and the intersection of colonial, racial, and extractivist logics within the contemporary governances of Central Sahara. Her most recent research focuses on nomadic becomings in contemporary Tuareg societies. Her research practice combines ecophilosophy, ecocriticism,and includes multiple artistic and transdisciplinary collaborations. Her most recent artworks have been presented at the Villa Medici (2024) and the Sharjah Biennial (2025). From 2023 to 2025, she was part of the teaching team of the Research Studio RS6 - Saharan Becomings, in the Environmental Architecture program at the Royal College of Art in London.

Martha Kirszenbaum is a curator, writer and editor based in Paris. Her work explores multidisciplinary approaches to curatorial practice, bringing together visual arts, performance, dance, film and music. She has developed major projects with renowned artists such as Laure Prouvost, Meriem Bennani, Ida Ekblad, Pierre Huygue, Cecile B Evans or Kenneth Anger. She graduated from Sciences-Po, Paris and Columbia University, New York. She was the curator of the French Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), and founded and directed Fahrenheit, an exhibition space and residency program in Los Angeles (2014-17). She previously held positions at MoMA, New Museum and Centre Pompidou, and has organized exhibitions, screenings, performances and talks at renowned international institutions with a focus on Middle-Eastern and North African popular culture and related practices. She is a regular contributor to numerous art publications and sits on the Editorial Board of CURA. Magazine. She teaches internationally.

Tareyn Johnson is Anishnaabe and a member of the Chippewa of Georgina Island First Nation. 

She has been the Director of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Ottawa since 2017, as the inaugural leader of the portfolio. She was the project lead for the development and implement the Indigenous Action Plan, the first Indigenous strategic plan at the university. She had been a professor in the Indigenous Studies program since 2021, developing and delivering the Introduction to Indigenous Studies course, as well as the selected topics course, Listen to the Stories: Indigenous Cultural Schemas.