Hangama Amiri holds an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, where she graduated in 2020 from the Painting and Printmaking Department. She received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax, and is a Canadian Fulbright and Post-Graduate Fellow at Yale University School of Art and Sciences (2015-2016). She is also a Kaiserring Stapendiatin of 2023 by Monchehaus Museum, Goslar. Her recent exhibitions include A Quiet Resistance (2023) Monchehaus Museum, Goslar; A Homage to Home (2023) The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; 15th Sharjah Biennial: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023); Reminiscences (2022) Union Pacific, London; Henna Night/ Shabe Kheena (2022) David B. Smith Gallery, Denver; Mirrors and Faces (2021) Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto; Wandering Amidst the Colors (2021) Albertz Benda, New York; Spectators of a New Dawn (2021) Towards Gallery, Toronto; and Bazaar: A Recollection of Home (2020) T293 Gallery, Rome.

Amiri works predominantly in textiles to examine notions of home, as well as how gender, social norms, and larger geopolitical conflict impact the daily lives of women, both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora. Continuing to use textiles as the medium, Amiri searches to define, explore, and question these spaces. The figurative tendency in her work is due to her interest in the power of representation, especially of those objects that are ordinary to our everyday life, such as a passport, a vase, or celebrity postcards.

Catherine Blackburn was born in Patuanak, Saskatchewan, of Dene and European ancestry and is a member of the English River First Nation. She is a multidisciplinary artist and jeweller, whose narrative work often addresses Canada’s settler-colonialism. Through stitchwork, she explores Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization, and representation. Her work grounds itself in the Indigenous feminine and is bound through the ancestral love that stitching suggests. Her work has exhibited in notable national and international exhibitions.

Omar Badrin is an interdisciplinary artist born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He obtained his MFA at Ontario College of Art & Design University, Toronto, where he was awarded a graduate medal for his work in the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program. His practice is based on his personal history and examines identity formation through the lens of transracial adoption. His practice explores racial and cultural dynamics of his own upbringing: being a visual minority, adopted by a white parent, and raised in the province of Newfoundland. Badrin has been exploring crochet as a way of belonging to the province’s rich tradition and, more so, in his own family history.

seth cardinal dodginghorse is a Tsuut’ina, Amskapi Pikanii, and Saddle Lake Cree multidisciplinary artist, Prairie Chicken Dancer, experimental musician and cultural researcher. They grew up eating dirt and exploring the forest on their family’s ancestral land on the Tsuut’ina Nation Reserve. In 2014 their family was forcibly removed from their home and land for the construction of the Southwest Calgary Ring Road. This life changing event has been a driving force in their creative work and activism. They are currently a part of the artist collective tīná gúyáńí (Deer Road) which also includes their mother, Glenna Cardinal.

Letitia Fraser is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work centres around her experience as an African Nova Scotian woman, growing up in the province’s Black communities of North Preston and Beechville. Descending from a long line of artists, her creative instincts were nurtured early in life. Through a combination of painting and textiles, she unearths previously untold narratives and pays homage to her community’s history of quilting. Recent exhibitions include Family Patterns with Darcie Bernhardt (2022), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia; Every Chain (2022) Chester Art Gallery, Halifax; Letitia Fraser (2019) Mount St. Vincent Art Gallery, Nova Scotia and Mommy’s Patches: Traditions & Superstitions (2019) Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia. She graduated with a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax in 2019. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the RBC Emerging Artist Award, Nova Scotia Talent Trust (2018) and was recently long-listed for the Sobey National Art Award, Sobey Art Foundation, (2022). Her work is included in several private and public collections including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Scotiabank, the Canada Council and the Wedge Collection.

Jason de Haan (Edmonton, 1981), the son of John de Haan, is an artist settled on Treaty 7 territory, alongside the Rosebud River, near Drumheller. Jason adopts materially conceptual approaches to artmaking with calls for greater sensitivity to reflection, deep time, unfolding, broadcasts, activations, and unseen forces.

John de Haan (Edmonton, 1954), the father of Jason de Haan, is an artist and caregiver settled on Treaty 6 territory, by the Sturgeon River, near Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Through John’s automatic drawings and paintings, we traverse absurd dream spaces, the many pains of nature, magical wonders, primordial soups, and afterlifes.

Hali Heavy Shield/ Nato’yi’kina’soyi-Holy Light that Shines Bright (PhD) is a multidisciplinary artist, author, mentor and emerging curator from the Kainai Nation (Blood Tribe) in Southern Alberta. She is the first Blackfoot woman to earn a PhD from Iniskim, the University of Lethbridge, where her research and art practice include themes of identity, history, community, and Blackfoot pedagogy. Her research and creative projects center on Blackfoot storytelling traditions, and visual culture, with a focus on healing, land-based knowledge, and intergenerational learning.

Heavy Shield’s art spans mural work, beadwork, poetry, illustration, and digital media. Her work has been exhibited at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; and various public art spaces throughout southern Alberta. She is also the author and illustrator of a children’s book inspired by her mother, Faye Heavy Shield, an internationally renowned artist. Their shared experiences have deeply influenced Hali’s creative path, highlighting the importance of family, tradition, and the transmission of knowledge through art. In addition to her studio and literary work, Hali is a passionate educator, committed to supporting youth and artists through culturally responsive teaching and creative empowerment.

Norma Houle, nee Martineau, was born on July 23, 1933 in Le Goff, Alberta. Norma has always had a keen sense of fashion and sewed clothes for her eight children, who she raised for the most part on the Paddle Prairie Métis Settlement in Northern Alberta. The polyester or Fortrel fabric clothes always had a second life as a quilt. Each piece of fabric in the quilts could spark a memory of its origin: whether of a wide collared shirt, stove pipe or bell bottom Wranglers or a bold patterned dress. Still today, she has bags of old clothes to use in denim, cotton, Fortrel, recycled ribbon and ric rac, with nothing ever wasted. She might have one or two of her homemade quilts at her house, but most have gone to the homes of her family and friends, children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews and great grandchildren. She always has at least one quilt on the go in the ‘blue room,’ her sewing room, in her log house in Paddle Prairie.

Norma’s creative energy shines through in multiple ways—from her amazing food, flower gardens and beautiful yard with her well-maintained bird feeders to, of course, her bold and beautiful quilts. And as much as she is known for her nurturing skills in the kitchen and garden, she is also a very good shot with her .22, has a sharp wit and northern woman survival skills that keep her family and friends entertained and impressed. Norma is a resilient matriarch that inspires the younger generations with her insightful humour and self-reliant approach to life.

Sarah Houle is an artist and performer from Paddle Prairie Métis Settlement in Northern Alberta. Her practice is collaborative and time-based, evolving from personal mythology, familial roots, and material explorations to encompass film, animation, installation, sound and performance. A continuous thread follows her work: bold, pastel colours, beadwork motifs, and recurring characters of the Shapeshifter, Bird Boy, and Little People. Sarah makes her home in Mohkinstsis/Calgary, but family—near and far—is integral to her process, both as subjects and collaborators. She draws from ancestry and creates in community, never alone as she explores hidden worlds. Mentorship is an increasingly important part of her practice, sharing in the abundance of communal wisdom and collective work. Her roles as an artist, mother, bandmate, collaborator, and community member evidence Sarah’s belief in interconnected relationships, stretching across place and time.

Frank McKeough was born in Afton, Nova Scotia in 1909. As a young man he worked as a lobster fisherman in Bayfield, Nova Scotia and loved to be on the water. McKeough served in World War II on the front lines as a surveyor and eventually at the rank of sergeant, marrying his wife Molly MacPherson prior to departing for overseas. Following World War II, he moved to Antigonish, Nova Scotia where his daughters, Rita and Karen McKeough grew up until the family moved to Vancouver in 1957. McKeough began to carve later in life, during his last job when living in Masset, Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. Following the passing of Molly McPherson, he moved to Salt Spring Island where he lived for twenty-two years, and where McKeough spent a significant amount of time carving before his passing in 1997.

McKeough largely used materials for his sculptures that he found while beach combing, such as driftwood. He also often used cork buoys given to him by local fishermen as the basis for his animal sculptures. McKeough decided at a certain point to gift all of his work and generously shared his sculptures and the wooden chains he carved with children in hospital wards in Alberta and British Columbia, his children Rita and Karen, his grandchildren, and adults and kids alike who expressed interest in his pieces.

Rita McKeough is a performance and installation artist and musician. Born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, on the traditional and unceded land of the Mi’kmaq people, McKeough received her BFA from the University of Calgary and MFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Halifax. McKeough works from a feminist perspective and her recent work has focused on the impact of urban development and resource extraction on the lives and habitat of plants and animals. Rita is known for her large-scale, multilayered installations and performances often comprised of complex audio works and electronic elements. McKeough uses sound as a medium to articulate forces of resistance, giving voice and agency to her subjects.

As a musician, McKeough is a drummer and has been a member of a number of bands dating back to the late 1970s including The Permuters, Sit Com, Mode d’empoli, Almost Even, Demi Monde, Simian Crease, Confidence Band, Books All Over the Bed and most recently Sleepy Panther.

Rita McKeough has shown across Canada and the USA in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Remediation Room (2022–ongoing), EMMEDIA, Calgary and online; darkness is as deep as the darkness is (2020) Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; dig as deep as the darkness (2019) Richmond Art Gallery; Veins (2018) OBORO, Montreal; and Oh, Canada (2015) MASS MoCA, North Adams. McKeough was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Canada Council for the Arts (2009). Her work has been featured in Radio Rethink: Art Sound and Transmission (Banff Centre Press, 1994), Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (YYZ Books, Toronto, 2004) and the monograph Rita McKeough: Works (EMMEDIA, TRUCK Contemporary Art and Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival Society, Calgary, 2018) as well as many articles and reviews in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Galleries West, and Sculpture Magazine among others.

Currently, McKeough is Associate Professor of Sculpture and Media Arts at Alberta University of the Arts (formerly Alberta College of Art and Design), Calgary, based on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Îyâxe Nakoda Nations, and Métis Nation (Region 3) in Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta. McKeough credits the support and assistance of her community in the production of her work. As an educator, McKeough is grateful to have worked with many extraordinary students and colleagues throughout her teaching career.

Aaron McIntosh is a cross-disciplinary artist and fourth-generation quiltmaker whose work mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire and identity politics. His exhibition record includes numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently The Gloaming (2025), Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montreal; Entanglements (2023), Northeastern University, Boston; and Radical Tradition: Quilts and Social Change (2021), the Toledo Museum of Art. Since 2015, McIntosh has managed Invasive Queer Kudzu, a community storytelling and archive project across the 2SLGBTQ+ Southern United States. He was awarded a United States Artist Fellowship in Craft (2020); a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship (2017) and Windgate Fellowships, Center for Craft (2006 and 2015). His current research-creation project, Hot House/Maison Chaude, has been supported by an Insight Development grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2020-2023). He has held residencies at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle; and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Amherst. His critical writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, the Surface Design Journal, and the Journal of Modern Craft. He currently lives and works in Montreal, where he is an Associate Professor and Coordinator in the Fibres & Material Practices program at Concordia University.

Anne Ngan (b. 1939, Sallanches, Haute-Savoie, France) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is focused mainly on painting and dance. In the 1950s, she studied drawing, painting, and etching at the École des Beaux-Arts, Marseille. In 1961, she moved to Paris to study architecture and expand her knowledge of set design for the theatre. During this time, she also trained in modern dance at the Schola Cantorum de Paris with Karin Waehner, a student of Mary Wigman. Between 1962 and 1966, Ngan apprenticed with theatre designer André Acquart, working on set and costume design. She relocated to Vancouver in 1966 where she worked on costume design for the theatre and also joined Helen Goodwin’s dance group. After a brief return to Paris, she settled on Hornby Island, British Columbia, with her future husband, potter Wayne Ngan. Deeply influenced by the back-to-the-land movement, Ngan spent the 1970s raising her daughters Goya and Gailan Ngan and engaging in fibre arts including spinning, weaving, and natural dyeing, as well as gardening and baking. In 1979, Anne committed her artistic practice fully to painting. Ngan has exhibited primarily in Hornby Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Paris, and Marseille. In 1984, the Surrey Art Gallery presented a retrospective of her paintings. In 2018, she took part in a dance performance choreographed by Evann Siebens honouring Helen Goodwin at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, as part of the exhibition Beginning with the Seventies.

Anne Ngan continues to paint, dance, and garden on Hornby Island.

Gailan Ngan (Canadian, b. 1971, Cumberland) works and lives in Vancouver and occasionally works from Hornby Island. Her practice involves pottery, sculpture and co-managing her late father’s art estate. Ngan's work spans pottery, sculpture, and painting, as well as a deep exploration of material histories. She utilizes clay acquired from commercial suppliers as well as clay and materials sourced from the natural landscape. In recent years, Ngan has incorporated highly textured materials and surfaces in her work, imbuing them with a tactile richness reminiscent of geological formations. Incorporating elements such as grogs and pulverized insulation brick, her surfaces emerge as landscapes of texture, marked by irregularities and dents that echo the passage of time and the forces of nature. This tactile language is often further explored through the lens of modern technology, including the translation of forms into the realm of digital fabrication through 3D scanning and printing techniques. Ngan graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, in 2002. She has shown work at the Esker Foundation, Calgary; Cooper Cole, Toronto; The Apartment, Vancouver; San Diego Art Institute; Nanaimo Art Gallery; Art Gallery at Evergreen, Coquitlam; Kamloops Art Gallery; Unit 17, Vancouver; Christian Lethert Gallery, Cologne; and The Vancouver Art Gallery. In 2015 she received the North West Ceramic Foundation Award. Ngan is represented by Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver.

Wayne Ngan (1937 – 2020) is known for his experimental and intuitive method of creating, and his legacy lies in the way he translated his unique view of the world through art. Considered one of Canada’s preeminent ceramic artists, his technical mastery of the medium allowed him to introduce elements of nature, circumstance, and chance into his practice, creating striking works while stretching the limits of possibility.

Ngan’s prolific body of work spans over 60 years and reflects influences of both traditional and contemporary modes of making. From the roots of traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese pottery, Modernist painting, pre-Columbian and ancient Egyptian art to many contemporary influences, Ngan also drew inspiration from his surroundings to create singular, transcendent works that hint at historical modes but convey a voice that is uniquely his own.

Throughout his career, Ngan exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum; the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and numerous other national and international venues. Ngan was awarded the prestigious Saidye Bronfman Award for Masters of the Crafts, Canada Council for the Arts (1983) and the British Columbia Creative Achievement Award of Distinction, BC Achievement Foundation (2013). Along with the immense number of collectors and fans who enjoy living with Ngan’s art, his works are also held in numerous public collections including the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Racine Art Museum; the Winnipeg Art Gallery; the Gardiner Museum, Toronto; and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.

Jamie Ross is a visual artist, writer and filmmaker. At the heart of Ross’ practice is an investigation into historical Queer cultures, with a particular interest in its modes of secrecy and privacy. Jamie often draws experts into their projects, collaborating with malacologists and their mollusk collections, incarcerated neo-Pagans, scientific glass blowers, and gay entomologists for recent exhibitions.

While participating in the thematic residency Outdoor School at Banff Centre in 2019, Jamie’s father disclosed the story of a secret life that would become Dad Can Dance (2022). Together with the Banff Centre Archives, the artist digitized student film and music from 1973, the year of his father’s residency at Banff Centre, returning it to the artists, who would contribute it to the film. Co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the half-hour film won Best Short Film, Hot Docs Toronto International Documentary Film Festival, (2022) and would go on to be acquired for distribution by The New Yorker Documentary and Tënk.

More recently, Jamie uncovered a gay and trans secret society raided by the Los Angeles police in 1914 that also maintained a massive seashell collection, a finding which precipitated a move to California to deepen the investigation. Supported by a Fulbright Scholarship, the multidisciplinary project was developed at the University of California, Los Angeles graduate art studios (2021-2024). Jamie’s studio is based in Los Angeles and Montreal. jamieross.org

Kirsten Ryder is an Îyethka beadwork artist from the Stoney Nakoda Nation located in Mînî Thnî, Alberta. She is a mother, granddaughter, daughter, sister, aunt, friend, and a professional who works in community helping to build people up as a Training & Development specialist. Kirsten was taught how to bead by her mother and grandmother. The specific techniques she uses in her beadwork have been passed down for generations. Kirsten enjoys beading regalia for herself and family members for ceremonial dancing purposes and helping her friends in their beading business endeavors.

tīná gúyáńí (deer road) is collective comprised of parent-child duo Glenna Cardinal and seth cardinal dodginghorse. The loss of their ancestral home in 2014 on Tsuut’ina Nation, due to a land transfer agreement for the Southwest Calgary Ring Road influences their research and exploration of displacement. Through film, music and visual arts the pair critique colonial institutions that continue to destroy matrilineal homes, dividing families and communities. Through a heartfelt tribute to their land/home, and kinship, their work highlights personal agency: one that is self-determined, non-colonial, and non-patriarchal.

Signed to Atlantic/Warner Records at the tender age of nineteen,  4-time Juno nominee and modern-day Renaissance woman Sarah Slean has since released 11 albums in over 10 countries worldwide – but perhaps the most astonishing aspect of her artistry is its breadth. Over her 25-year career, Slean has published two volumes of poetry, starred in short films and a movie musical (spawning two Gemini Award nominations), penned award-winning chamber works, held numerous exhibitions of her paintings and performed with 14 of the country’s professional orchestras. Classically trained from the age of 5, she routinely collaborates with cutting-edge contemporary classical ensembles like The Art of Time, and has been invited to sing world premieres by Canada’s leading living composers.  She composes orchestral arrangements for her own music as well as for her pop colleagues (Dan Mangan, Hawksley Workman) and her recent collaborative recording with the Symphony Nova Scotia was just nominated for both an East Coast Music Award and a Juno Award in the Classical Album category (2021). Sarah is also a recent alumna of the prestigious Canadian Film Centre's screen composing residency (2017-8) and just earned her first Canadian Screen Award  (2021).  She can also be heard on the CBC's national hybrid pop/classical radio program "About Time" as an occasional host.

Citing such diverse influences as Leonard Bernstein, philosophy, Joni Mitchell, Buddhism and Bach, her music borrows aspects of cabaret, pop, and orchestral: all knit together by the startling poetry of her lyrics, unique arranging and piano-playing, and that voice, described by the CBC as “a 19th century Kate Bush”.  In addition to headlining theatres across Canada, Sarah has also toured Europe, the US and Scandinavia and has opened internationally for such artists as Bryan Ferry, Rufus Wainwright, Alanis Morissette, Andrew Bird, Feist, Ron Sexsmith, and Chris Isaak. Her 11th solo recording, "Metaphysics", released in 2017, is described as a "breathtaking amalgamation of Slean’s dramatic orchestral arranging and her signature take on songwriting".  In 2023, Sarah completed a Master's Degree in Composition and will be composing the music for the stage musical adaptation of the award-winning film "Maudie".