Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Simon Williams is an emerging pianist, composer, producer, and audio engineer.  Having graduated from Humber Polytechnic’s Bachelor of Music program (Toronto) in 2025, Simon is an exciting new voice on the Canadian music scene, having already performed and worked across the country.  Simon has performed interprovincially as a pianist, notably at the Winspear Centre, the Aga Khan Museum, Massey Hall, Koerner Hall, the Yardbird Suite, and Hermann’s Jazz club.  After participating in the 2023 Intercultural and Creative Music Fellowship, Simon developed a keen interest and passion for production and recording, beginning by working as an assistant engineer at teh Gordon Wragg Studios in Toronto.  There, he continued developing his skills as a recordist, becoming particularly interested in non-standard stereo recording techniques and applications.  Since then, he has studied audio recording and theory, contemporary production, aesthetics of recorded sound, and immersive audio production.  Simon is excited to continue studying at the Banff Centre and hopes to attain a graduate degree in recording. 

Jessie Gosling is a recording engineer and musician based in Toronto, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Music from Humber Polytechnic, where she studied jazz and music production. Her coursework in recording techniques, mixing, and immersive audio has shaped her technical and artistic approach to sound. Jessie has recorded indie artists, jazz ensembles, and singer-songwriters in Toronto, working as both a Studio Assistant and a freelance engineer. With experience on both sides of the studio glass, she brings a deep understanding of musicality to her engineering work. 

As a performer, she has played at venues across Toronto and released music both as a solo artist and as part of Carmine, Humber’s 2023 Intercultural and Creative Music Fellowship band. Carmine’s EP, Something Is Awake, was released in 2023, and Jessie’s latest single, Slow Descent, came out in February 2024. Jessie is eager to expand her expertise in recording and collaborative studio work at the Banff Centre and is looking forward to working with experienced mentors and peers. With plans to further her studies in sound recording at McGill this fall, she is committed to refining her craft as an audio engineer and producer. 

I’m an Audio Engineer from Chicago, currently studying at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins. I feel most at home creating and recording experimental music. My time at Peabody has sharpened my ability to capture realistic, lifelike recordings, but much of my personal work is spent deconstructing this realism to craft unique atmospheres. I thrive on the challenges our artform presents and believe that it’s often in the limitations and disagreements where the most exciting innovation occurs. 

In addition to experimental music, I also enjoy recording and producing folk, jazz, and country music. Growing up in Chicago exposed me to a wide range of musical styles, and I’ve developed a deep appreciation for each of them. My work has also led me into the world of experimental film, where I explore the intersection of visual and auditory expression. 

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