Jacqueline Bell is curator at Walter Phillips Gallery. Recent exhibitions include Cassils: Movement (2024, co-curated with Carol Stakenas); The Shape of an Echo: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2022); darkness is as deep as the darkness is by Rita McKeough (2020); A materialist history of contagion by Candice Lin (2019); Guidelines by Carmen Papalia with Heather Kai Smith (2019); If the river ran upwards (2018) with Silvina Babich, Alana Bartol, Diane Borsato, Carolina Caycedo, T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss and Anne Riley, and Genevieve Robertson; THE CAVE (2018) by Young Joon Kwak with Marvin Astorga, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Adrian Stimson, and Kim Ye; and the exhibition and performance, Everything I Say Is True (2017) by Kite. Prior to joining Walter Phillips Gallery, Bell contributed to a number of projects and exhibitions at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). As an independent writer, Bell has been published by C Magazine, FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, and X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly, among others. She is a graduate of the MA Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere program at the University of Southern California.

Ivy Pan is a Toronto-born violinist turned arts administrator. In the words of Soundweavings 2025, she is “relentless in her support of participants, incredibly organized, and quick to troubleshoot any issues that arise. She was a major contributing factor to the success of this program.”

Ivy graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Music, studying under Annalee Patipatanakoon. She began her professional career as an educator and musician before transitioning to arts administration, working with organizations including Sistema Toronto, York Region Arts Council, The Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Ivy has developed diverse programs with meaningful social impact, including the Artrepreneur Program, a business accelerator for creative professionals; TSOUND Connections, a COVID-19 response initiative connecting youth musicians with isolated individuals; and Tuned for Tomorrow, which addresses non-performance skills for emerging artists. Among her proudest projects is following a grant which allowed her to create Dear Dearest, a poetry collective connecting Asian-identifying youth using literary arts as a tool to address #StopAsianHate.

For Ivy, music and arts administration isn’t just a career - it’s a way of de-alienating the human experience and foster meaningful connections in a world that sometimes feels divided, with anyone willing to listen. 
 

Nicholas Dourado is all of the above and none of the latter. Adisciple of the school of creative mysteries and hard nocks and the
holder of innumerable leafs. Don't hold your expectations too tightly around this artisté.

Nicholas was generously supported by the Banff Centre Artists' Awards and the Alice and Betty Shultz Scholarships Endowment Fund for Dance and Music.

Born in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, and raised in Northern Ontario, Colleen Murphy won the 2016 and 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for English Language Drama for her plays Pig Girl and The December Man / L'homme de décembre respectively. Both plays were also awarded a Carol Bolt Award. Other plays include The Breathing Hole (shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Carol Bolt Award), The Society For The Destitute Presents Titus Bouffonius, I Hope My Heart Burns First, Armstrong's War, The Goodnight Bird, The Piper, and Beating Heart Cadaver, which was shortlisted for a Governor General's Literary Award. She is also a librettist - Fantasma for composer lan Cusson, My Mouth On Your Heart for composer August Murphy-King, and Oksana G. for composer Aaron Gervais - and is an award-winning filmmaker. She has been Writer-in-Residence at seven universities and Playwright-in-Residence at two Canadian theatres as well as at Finborough Theatre in the UK. She is a member of the Order of Canada. 

Shelma is a sucker for a good story. Whether it’s documenting cyclists of color in New York City, building a temporary community art park in the Lower East Side or highlighting underrepresented stories in the outdoors, she focuses on bringing people together and sharing their stories. She is the founder of Flash Foxy, a multi-media platform that celebrates women and genderqueer folks in climbing. Shelma's directorial debut, Do Better Together, was an official selection for several festivals, including but not limited to MountainFilm, Kendal Mountain Film Festival, No Mans Land Film Festival and Filmed by Bike Film Festival. Shelma recently completed her first featured length film, On The Land, which documents a skill swap between two women - one a hunter and the other a climber - over the course of two years and the community they find with one another.

The current Vice President of the Access Fund Board of Directors, Shelma was named one of 40 women who’ve made the biggest impact in the outdoor world by Outside Magazine in 2017 as well as listed on the 30 Most Powerful Women in Travel List by Conde Nast Traveler in 2019. A leader in our community, she has written, spoken and presented on the importance of creating a climbing community that reflects and welcomes everyone who identifies as a climber. Shelma currently splits her time between Brooklyn, NY and the Eastern Sierra, CA and can often be found plugging widgets into horizontal cracks at the Gunks or getting scared on granite highballs in Bishop.

Masha Gordon is an experienced board executive, an avid alpinist, and a mother-of two. She started her career as a journalist for the Washington Post in Moscow and spent the next two decades working in finance leading investment teams at Goldman Sachs and PIMCO. She moved to a portfolio career of non-executive board roles in 2014 and currently serves as a board chair of Constellation and a non-executive chair of Capricorn Energy. She is a founder of GRIT&ROCK, a foundation that supports female attainment in mountaineering through annual expedition grant program.

A passionate alpinist, Masha participated in over 30 expeditions and is a holder of two Guinness world records.

Kasia Biernacka is an expedition caver and cave photographer. Her favorite destinations are North, Central and South America. 

Kasia works as Film Programming Director for the Ladek Mountain Festival in Poland. She also translates outdoor films from English, French and Spanish into Polish, gives talks about her expeditions and does cave photography workshops.

Joaquin Gomez is a composer, sound designer and producer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He started working in the audiovisual world at 15, creating soundtracks for documentaries, animations, video games, trailers, TV series, mapping and films. With both classical and contemporary formation, he blends sound design and music with modern techniques. His great passion for nature and outdoor sports led him to find his true north, combining his music with this amazing industry and creating ONA Sounds in 2015, a film scoring and sound design company. During 2020 with his brother Tomas, they created ONA Short Film Festival, an event that takes place in Venice, Italy.

Joaquín entered the Banff Centre for Arts And Creativity in the audio post-production and audio recording department as a practicum. He has presented several films during the festival and has collaborated as a jury as well. Definitely an experience that changed his life forever.

Some of his major works include the sound design for Game of Thrones, Harry Potter & Call of Duty video game trailers. He composed the soundtrack for Ruin & Rose, The River Runner, Champions of the Golden Valley, Wallmapu, The Time Within, The Traverse, Near the River, The Passage and Movements (which won the Chrystal Pine Award for best soundtrack). Since 2020 he is working for Disney Latin-America as a composer & sound designer for different projects.