Weyni Mengesha is a groundbreaking stage and screen director. She served as the artistic director of Soulpepper Theatre for the last seven years, and has directed acclaimed productions nationally and internationally, ( ‘da Kink in my Hair, Kim’s Convenience, A Streetcar Named Desire, Queen Goneril, and Power of Sail) 

She has directed across Canada, London, New York, and Los Angeles, receiving numerous Dora Mavor Moore Awards, two NAACP nominations and recognition from the Drama League (New York) and Drama Critics Circle (Los Angeles). In 2024, she received the Trailblazer Award at the CBC Legacy Awards and the 2025 Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize.

A committed educator, mentor, and producer of youth arts initiatives, Weyni was the artistic director of the A.M.Y (Artists Mentoring Youth) Project for seven years and co-founded a platform for young Ethiopian and Eritrean artists. She has trained artists at the National Theatre School of Canada, Canadian Film Centre and The Soulpepper Academy. 
 

Lisa Davies has been working in the professional dance field for over thirty years, in Quebec and internationally. Throughout her career, she danced on international stages as a performer (Les Grands Ballets, Édouard Lock/La La La Human Steps, Crystal Pite, Ohad Naharin, William Forsythe etc.), as a guest teacher and rehearsal director for over 15 different companies (Emily Molnar/Ballet BC, Christian Spuck, RUBBERBANDance Group, BJM Danse, Akram Khan Company, National Ballet of Canada, Ballet Zurich, Czech National Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, Cas Public, Wayne McGregor Random Dance Company, etc.), and founded Danse à la Carte where she was general and artistic director for nearly a decade. In addition to supporting hundreds of professional performers and choreographers annually via daily training, residencies and networking opportunities through dance, the organization annually holds the intensive TransFormation Danse as well as Propulsion, which has taken turns welcoming renowned artists from all walks of contemporary life (Edouard Lock, Hofesh Shechter, Margie Gillis, Louise Lecavalier, Virginie Brunelle, Catherine Gaudet, Victor Quijada, Frédérick Gravel, Alan Lake, Sylvain Emard, Mélanie Demers, Marcos Morau, Adi Salant, Alexandra Spicey Landé, Emmanuelle Le Phan….) in order to provide workshops and networking opportunities to the dance community. In the past decade, Lisa’s commitment to art and artists has supported hundreds of dancers and choreographers and as many creative projects locally and internationally. Sought after for her expertise and renowned for her integrity, her passion and her dedication to exploring and advancing the practice, she took over the artistic direction of the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal in 2023.

Over the past few years, French clarinettist Nicolas Baldeyrou has naturally established himself as one of the most remarkable soloists of his generation. Carving a unique path in today's musical landscape, this "concert artist armed for any challenge" (Diapason) demonstrates a mastery and versatility that transcends eras and styles, navigating with ease through all repertoires, on both historical and modern instruments.

Winning prestigious competitions like the Munich ARD Competition in Munich (Germany), the Dos Hermanas Competition in Sevilla (Spain), and finally, the ICA Young Artist Competition (United States) opened to Nicolas the doors of the most prestigious concert halls all over the world - Carnegie Hall in New York, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Philharmonie de Paris, Salzburg Mozarteum, Wiener Konzerthaus, Bunkamura Orchard Hall in Tokyo, Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

As a soloist he is regularly invited to perform with renown orchestras: Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre National de France, Czech Philharmonic, Sinfonia Varsovia and Saint-Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Starting his career at a very young age he had the chance to work with the legendary conductors – Carlo-Maria Giulini, Claudio Abbado, Bernard Haitink, Kurt Masur. Nowadays, Nicolas performs with Myung-Whun Chung, Alain Altinoglu, Pablo Heras Casado, Mikko Franck, Fabien Gabel.

Today Nicolas is one of the most demanded partners for chamber music – he shared the stage with such musicians as the pianists Bertrand Chamayou, Nikolai Lugansky; violinists Renaud Capuçon, Svetlin Roussev; violist Antoine Tamestit; Modigliani, Ébène, and Chiaroscuro quartets.

Patty Chang is a Los Angeles area based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation, and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects, and impacted subjectivities. Learning Endings, her collaboration with Astrida and Aleksija Neimanis, is a multi-part interdisciplinary research project that surfaced amidst the overlapping contexts of climate crisis, threatened ocean ecosystems, and challenges to scientific expertise. Stray Dog Hydrophobia, her most recent project with David Kelley, explores deepsea mining and the entangled histories of extraction from the sea rooted in British colonialism in Jamaica. In addition to numerous awards and fellowships, her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, M+ Museum in Hong Kong, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.

Meriem Bennani makes groundbreaking video installations and sculptures informed by the circulation of global cultures online. Frequently rooted in Moroccan life off and online, her work speaks to the hybrid nature of contemporary cultural flows. Bennani combines elements of reality television, documentary film, telenovela, music videos, science fiction, and animated cartoons in her videos. Exaggerating media tropes in what Bennani describes as a “hyperactivity of genre,” her works reflect the disjointed state of contemporary mediation, an effect she amplifies in installation settings where her moving images are mapped to sculptural projection structures or viewing stations. Using strategies of immersion, duplication, multiplicity, and remix, Bennani blends a powerful mix of humor and critique, reaffirming the power of family and home while analyzing larger systems of power across a networked world.

“The Australian Chamber Orchestra is uniformly high-octane, arresting and never ordinary.”
 

The Australian.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra lives and breathes music, making waves around the world for its explosive performances that redefine orchestral music. With their fearless leader of 35 years, Artistic Director Richard Tognetti, in 2025 the Orchestra celebrates 50 years of invention, disruption and unforgettable music-making.

The ACO performs more than 100 concerts each year, with programs that embrace celebrated classics alongside new commissions and ground-breaking collaborations, working with artists and musicians who share their ideology: from Emmanuel Pahud, Steven Isserlis, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Pekka Kuusisto, Nicolas Altstaedt and William Barton, to Jonny Greenwood, Neil Finn and Meow Meow; to visual artists and film makers such as Bill Henson, Shaun Tan, Jane Campion, and Jennifer Peedom, who co-create unique, hybrid productions for which the ACO has become renowned.

The ACO has its own streaming platform, ACO On Demand, which hosts the Orchestra’s award-winning cinematic concert films, ACO StudioCasts, alongside live concert streams. The Orchestra also has an active recording program. Its recordings of Bach’s violin works won three consecutive ARIA Awards. Recent releases include Water | Night Music, the first Australian-produced classical vinyl for two decades, Beethoven 1, 2, & 3 Eroica and ARIA award-winning albums River and Indies & Idols.

In 2022 the ACO opened a new, world class venue, ACO On The Pier, continuing their dedication to creating and presenting transformative experiences for all music lovers.
 

Isabella Luisa Diaz is the co-director of Company 29, a contemporary circus collective. They were born in Chicago, Illinois where from a young age, they found a joy for movement and a hankering for heights. They spent their youth competing in gymnastics and studying dance, continuing on at Western Michigan University and the Joffrey Ballet School. In 2016 they joined Pilobolus Dance Theatre as a part of their main company and toured around the world for 4 years. In 2021, they began working with The 7 Fingers contemporary circus and was part of the creation for the show ‘Dear San Francisco’ and the Broadway musical ‘Water for Elephants’. They have held various roles with US-based circuses such as Shoestring Circus and Midnight Circus, including acrobat, musician, guest director, and co-composer.  Isabella is a collector of hobbies, lover of books and a fiend for a good fun fact. They are very excited to be working with the Fuse team at the Banff centre this season.

Andrew Johnson has been Principal Percussionist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra since June 2025, and was previously in the same position with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and l’Orchestre Symphonique de Quebec. Andrew is a former fellow at the New World Symphony, and has appeared professionally with the Toronto Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Sarasota Orchestra, and the Boston Philharmonic. He has performed with conductors Christoph von Dohnanyi, Michael Tilson Thomas, Robert Spano, and Stéphane Denève, and has attended a variety of summer festivals including Tanglewood Music Center, Spoleto Festival USA, Texas Music Festival, and the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.

In addition to orchestral playing, Andrew enjoys performing contemporary solo and chamber music, and within this context has worked under the guidance of Steve Reich, Dawn Upshaw, Steven Drury, and Steve Mackey. Andrew grew up in Nova Scotia and studied at New England Conservatory and Boston University. He is a student of Will Hudgins, Timothy Genis, and Mark Adam. In his spare time, he enjoys playing and watching hockey, and spending time with his wife, Lia, and their dog, Henry. Andrew is an endorser of Zildjian cymbals and Freer Percussion products.

Dai Fujikura is a composer based in London, UK. Born in 1977 in Osaka, Japan, Dai was fifteen when he moved to the UK and then studied under Sir. George Benjamin. 

In recent years, his activities have been diverse. His opera, “A Dream of Armageddon,” based on a short story by H.G. Wells, which draws attention to the threat of totalitarianism, had its world premiere at the New National Theatre Tokyo in 2020. The opera was selected as the "Best of the Year" by numerous music magazines. In the same year, his Fourth Piano Concerto (Akiko's Piano), inspired by a piano owned by a woman who was a victim of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had its world premiere. This was the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing and was released by Sony Music. 

Following that year, “Entwine” was performed by the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, and Hong Kong Sinfonietta. The Orchestre National de Bretagne and the New York Philharmonic are also scheduled to perform it in 2024. 

Another recent orchestral work, “Wavering World,” was commissioned and performed by the Seattle Symphony, Pacific Philharmonia Tokyo, Musikalische Akademie des Nationaltheater-Orchesters Mannheim, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. 

Unique works such as “Metamorphosis of a Living Room,” a music theatre piece created in collaboration with theatre director Toshiki Okada, was commissioned and staged by Wiener Festwochen. This piece was later performed in Hanover and Amsterdam, and it is planned to be staged in Japan. Additionally, “Green Tea Concerto” for flauto traverso and baroque ensemble was commissioned by the B’Rock Orchestra, and “Comic Breath” was commissioned by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the New World Symphony Orchestra.