A thirty-five-year industry veteran, Ava’s work has seen more than 160 worldwide screenings and received more than 70 awards.  She is a second-generation filmmaker who began her career working on wildlife films with her father. Her work as a director includes Lessons From the Sunflower, the cross Canada CBC special Keeping Canada Alive; Homefront for Global; The Lie Detective; Seeds of Change: The Eco Story; seasons one and two of the APTN series Chaos and Courage; and Albert Karvonen:  Philosophies on Life, Nature and Wildlife Filmmaking. Her works, Finding Bobbi, Wochiigii lo: End of the Peace have received critical acclaim. 

Dr. Adam Dickinson iis a writer and professor of literature and creative writing at Brock University. His research-creation practice integrates expanded modes of writing with laboratory-based scientific experiments to investigate the complicated interplay between bodies and environments. He is the author of four books of poetry, a co-written book of architectural and poetic theory, an edited anthology, and a co-edited anthology. His work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has been featured at international literary festivals such as Poetry International in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the Oslo International Poetry Festival in Norway. He was also part of the VERSschmuggel poetry translation project hosted in conjunction with Poesiefestival Berlin, Germany. Along with Claudia Rankine and Valzhyna Mort, he was a member of the jury for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2023 he was an affiliated artist with the University of Copenhagen working at the intersection of metabolism and art. His most recent book is a lyrical, multifaceted dialogue co-written with the Danish architect Søren Pihlmann, and featured as part of the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Mirin Fader is a senior writer at The Athletic, writing long-form NBA features. She is also the New York Times Bestselling author of GIANNIS: The Improbable Rise of an NBA Champion as well as DREAM: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon. Formerly with The Ringer from 2020-25, she has profiled some of the NBA, NFL and WNBA’s biggest stars, telling the backstories that have shaped some of our most complex, most dominant, heroes. Before that, Fader wrote for Bleacher Report from 2017 to 2020 and the Orange County Register from 2013 to 2017. Her work has been featured in the “Best American Sports Writing” series and honored by the Pro Basketball Writers Association, the Associated Press Sports Editors and the U.S. Basketball Writers Association. She lives in Los Angeles

Morgan Campbell is an award-winning sportswriter, and the author of the acclaimed memoir of My Fighting Family: Borders and Bloodlines and the Battles That Made Us. The book details his experience growing up Black and American, in Canada, in a family whose two halves are locked in a bitter, generations-long conflict. My Fighting Family is a finalist for several major awards, including the Trillium Book Award, and it earned Campbell a nomination for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. it was also named a National Association of Black Journalists Outstanding Book of 2025. Before becoming an author, Campbell spent nearly two decades at the Toronto Star, where his best work focused on the intersection sports, race, business and politics. He’s a past winner of the National Newspaper Award for Sports Writing. Campbell is still an active sports journalist, working as a Senior Contributor for CBC Sports. His work has also been featured in the New York Times, The Houston Chronicle, The Globe and Mail, and ESPN+.

Author and musician Dave Bidini is the only person to have been nominated for a Gemini, Genie and Juno as well CBC's Canada Reads. A founding member of Rheostatics and member of Bidiniband, he has written 13 books, including On a Cold Road, Tropic of Hockey, Around the World in 57 1/2 Gigs, and Home and Away. He has made two Gemini Award-nominated documentaries and his play, “The Five Hole Stories,” was staged by One Yellow Rabbit Performance Company, and toured the country, in 2008. His third book, Baseballissimo, is being developed for the screen by Jay Baruchel, and, in 2010, he won his third National Magazine Award, for “Travels in Narnia,” followed by Calgary Wordfest’s Anne Green Award for artistic audacity. In 2014, he was nominated for a Toronto Arts Award and in 2017 he launched West End Phoenix, Canada’s newest broadsheet newspaper. Midnight Light: A Personal Journey to the North, is his latest book, and in 2023, he co-directed the CBC series, “Summit ’72.”

Ali Taylor is the Program Manager for Indigenous Arts at the Banff Centre, where she leads initiatives that support and promote Indigenous artists and their creative practices. With a deep commitment to fostering Indigenous cultural expression, Ali brings expertise in program development and community engagement to her role, helping to amplify Indigenous voices in the arts sector.

Kalen Iwamoto is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice explores the shifting boundaries of language, art, and technology. A pioneer in blockchain poetics, she is the co-founder of the digital poetry gallery and collective, theVERSEverse. In 2022, she joined forces with her partner Julien Silvano to create Wen New, an art, language and technology atelier that explores the liminal spaces between genres, media, and disciplines. The duo has created book-objects, paintings based on procedural writing, and literary machines and poetic devices, like the Couple Machine and Miniscriber, a conceptual poetry synth. Rooted in conceptual writing, Oulipo, and digital poetics, Kalen’s work often engages critically and playfully with emerging technologies, offering new ways of relating to language through both digital and physical forms. Her pieces have been exhibited internationally, including in Paris, New York, Budapest, Berlin, Tokyo, and beyond. Born in Canada, of Japanese heritage, and based in France, her practice is shaped by experiences of cultural and linguistic in-betweenness.

Dr. Cheryl Thompson is an Academic, Public Speaker, and Director, Research and Creative Strategy of Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), an Ontario Early Researcher Award, and Social Science Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project. She is also Director of Black Creative Lab, an incubator for the curation of public exhibits, speaker events, and YouTube content. Dr. Thompson has written three books: Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019), Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021), and Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (2025). She has held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Black Expressive Culture and Creativity, and in 2021, was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists for her contributions to Black Canadian studies.

Manjula Martin is author of the national bestseller The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, winner of the American Horticultural Society Book Award, and she edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Martin is senior editor of the literary magazine ZYZZYVA and was previously managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning fiction and art quarterly Zoetrope: All-Story. She has written for The New Yorker, Orion, Los Angeles Times, and other publications, and she is a volunteer mentor with the Periplus Collective. She lives in California.