Described as “the celebrated trumpeter and composer who explores vital connections between jazz and Arabic music” (New York Times), Amir ElSaffar is an Iraqi-American composer, trumpeter, santur player, and vocalist working at the intersections of jazz, Western classical, and Maqam music of Iraq and the Middle East.

Trained as a classical and jazz trumpeter, ElSaffar has invented techniques to perform microtones and ornaments idiomatic to Arabic music that are not typically heard on trumpet. He has worked in the ensembles of Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Danilo Perez, Vijay Iyer, and in 2023 performed the improvised trumpet role in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Anthony Davis's X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.

ElSaffar has premiered new works at the Newport Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazz, Festival, Jazztopad Festival (Poland), Dream City Festival (Tunisia), Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Festival d’Avignon (France), Flamenco Biennale (Netherlands), and the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, among others.

He tours internationally with his six-piece Two Rivers and 17-piece Rivers of Sound Orchestra, and has created works for symphony orchestras, string quartets and small chamber ensembles, large and small jazz ensembles, Middle Eastern music ensembles, as well as hybrid projects with Raga, Flamenco, and Sub-Saharan African trance music.

ElSaffar’s awards and honors include the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award (2013), United States Artists Fellowship (2018), a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton

University (2020-2021) and an IDEA Residency at Opera America (2023-2024), in support of his forthcoming Maqam opera in Arabic. In 2023, he began a new initiative, Maqam Studio, and a record label, Maqam Records, which have a mission of preserving and fostering the development of Iraqi Maqam and related practices in Brooklyn, NY, and in Iraq and the Arab world.

Jason has worked with icons such as Roy Haynes, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Smith (the organist), Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Kurt Rosenwinkel (first trumpeter ever hired by this highly acclaimed guitarist), Ravi Coltrane, Geri Allen, Patrice Rushen, Clarence Penn, Jeff Ballard, Kenny Barron, Phil Woods, Common (hip-hop icon), Roy Hargrove, and Lewis Nash.

Jason took 1st Place ($10,000 prize) in the 2009 Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition. The June 2007 issue of Downbeat Magazine cited Jason as one of the "Top 25 trumpeters of the Future".  Also in 2011 Jason is an awarded Fellow in composition for the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

In addition to performing on over a dozen albums as a sideman, Jason has recorded three albums under his own name and is currently a Steeplechase Records Recording artist. His debut recording entitled "Songbook" (Ayva Musica) features guest saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Greg Osby. The record garnered rave reviews upon its' release and appeared on several "Best of 2008" lists including All Music Guide's list for best jazz album. 

Dylan Pearce has directed six feature films, ten award-winning short films and has worked extensively with virtual reality and 360-degree stereoscopic filmmaking. His films have been screened worldwide from theatrical to festivals, TV and VOD. He most recently directed the award-winning 40 Below and Falling 3D, which included a VR experience. The film is Canada’s first 4K 3D feature film with a VR experience, and has earned him a 2016 Canadian Screen Award nomination for best directing.

Dylan’s latest feature in development, Iron Dogs 3D won the 2015 Best Pitch award at the Stereo Media summit in Belgium this past year. Dylan is currently directing three VR short films and is exploring VR storytelling in trans-media. Dylan’s depth of work in the stereoscopic VR field has led him to work closely with 360/180-camera developers and VR headsets creators.

Mark Clintberg is an artist who works in the field of art history. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta College of Art + Design, and earned his Ph.D. in art history at Concordia University. His work has recently been shown at The Rooms, Doris McCarthy Gallery, Artspace, and the Western Front, and he is represented by Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain. He was short listed for the Sobey Art Award (Canada's largest contemporary art award for young artists) in 2013.

Sarah Fillmore is Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. She has worked at the AGNS since 2005, overseeing the provincial art collection, as well as the Gallery’s acquisition, interpretation, education, conservation and exhibition programs, and Artist-in-Residence program. Fillmore is chair of the jury for the annual Sobey Art Award; Canada’s preeminent award for artists forty and under. 

Fillmore has curated group and solo exhibitions including the retrospective exhibition of Canadian Abstract painter, Jacques Hurtubise, Skin: the seduction of surface, Forces of Nature, The Last Frontier, Open Tuning (WaveUp) by Stephen Kelly, Lisa Lipton: Stop@forever and, since 2008, the Sobey Art Award exhibition. Recent work includes an exhibition of Graeme Patterson, as well as co-curating a major retrospective and accompanying publication of Canadian realist painter Mary Pratt.

Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey (b.1959 / 1959 in England) are internationally acclaimed for creating multi-disciplinary works that intersect art, activism, architecture, biology, ecology, and history. Referencing memory and time, nature and culture, urban political ecologies, climate breakdown, and biodiversity loss, their time-based practice reveals an intrinsic bias towards process and event.

Ackroyd and Harvey are renowned for their monumental architectural interventions, as well as their multi-award winning photographic work, in which blades of seedling grass provide a highly light-sensitive surface that the artists use to create a unique form of photography, imprinting complex images in the living material through the controlled production of chlorophyll.

Recent exhibitions include Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas; Royal Academy of Arts, London; David Attenborough Building, Cambridge, UK; Le Centquatre-Paris, France; Festival Images, Switzerland; Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy; Void, Derry, N. Ireland; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, USA; Mostra SESC des Artes, Brazil; Chicago Public Arts Program, USA; Rice Gallery, Houston, USA. The artists have been awarded numerous prizes, including the Royal Academy Rose Award, Wu Guanzhong Prize for Art and Innovation, L’Oreal Art and Science of Colour Grand Prize, NESTA Pioneer Award, and Wellcome Trust Sci-Art Award.

Matthew Huber is Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University. He teaches on energy, environment and the political economy of capitalism. His research looks at the relationship between energy systems and the larger social, cultural and political forces. His 2013 book, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital examines the role of oil in shaping suburbanization and the rightward turn of American politics in the 1970s and beyond. His new project examines the industrial fertilizer industry and their immense natural gas consumption and carbon emissions.

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg Press, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Easterling’s research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League in New York. Easterling has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. The journals to which she has contributed include Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY.

Stefan St-Laurent, multidisciplinary artist and curator, was born in Moncton, New-Brunswick and lives and works in Ottawa. He was the invited curator for the Biennale d’art performatif de Rouyn-Noranda in 2008, and for the 28th and 29th Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2010 and 2011. From 2002 to 2011, he worked as Curator of Galerie SAW Gallery, and has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa since 2010. His performance and video work has been presented in numerous galleries and institutions, including the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, Edsvik Konst och Kultur in Sollentuna (Sweden), YYZ in Toronto, Western Front in Vancouver and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. He has been a curator and programmer for a number of artistic organizations and festivals, including the Lux Centre in London, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montréal, Festival international du cinéma francophone in Acadie, Les Rencontres internationales Vidéo Arts Plastiques in Basse-Normandie (France), Festival international du cinéma francophone en Acadie (Moncton), as well as Pleasure Dome, Images Festival of Independent Film and Video and Vtape in Toronto. He is currently Director of the artist-run centre AXENÉO7 in Gatineau.