Glenna Cardinal is a Saddle Lake Cree Nation member that resides on the Tsuut'ina Nation land of her maternal grandmothers. A mother of two artist/musicians. A 2023 graduate of the Indigenous Master of Social Work program at University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills, St. Paul. She has been recognized as a finalist for the Salt Spring National Art Prize, SSNAP Society (2021, 2023). Her art practice is informed by land, language, ceremony, ancestral history, and her lived experiences as the child of Indian Residential School (IRS) and day school survivors past and present. This multidisciplinary artist enjoys installation work through film, fabric, textiles, photographs, print making, and archival research.

Along with her son seth cardinal dodginghorse they are a mother/son art collective—tīná gúyáńí (deer road). They were long listed for the Sobey National Art Award, Sobey Art Foundation (2022). Their artwork honors Tsuut'ina Nation grandparents’ and the reserve land they were displaced from in 2014, to make way for the South West Calgary Ring Road—an 8-lane highway. Currently, she is an advocate and member of the Calgary Arts Development Indigenous Advisory board.

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.

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.

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.

Rita McKeough is an installation and performance artist, based in Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.

Her work incorporates audio, electronics, and mechanical performing objects. Utilizing sound to create a rhythmic voice of agency and empathy to articulate forces of resistance in the natural world, recent projects focus on the environmental impacts of resource extraction through a feminist lens.

Her work was included in Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (YYZ Books, Toronto, 2004) and Rita McKeough: Works (EMMEDIA, TRUCK Contemporary Art and Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival Society, Calgary, 2018).

McKeough feels very fortunate to have had the support and assistance of her community to produce her work and offers respect and love to everyone who has helped her.

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.

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.