Jeffrey Spalding is an artist, writer and curator. His art works are in the principal national public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Canadian Embassy, Washington, Art Gallery of Alberta, Glenbow, Mendel Art Gallery and Mackenzie Art Gallery.  He has served as Director at major art museums, including Glenbow Museum, University of Lethbridge, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Appleton Museum of Art, Florida and Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Calgary.  Spalding organized Canada’s art exhibition for Expo 93 Korea and is author of numerous books and exhibition catalogues for museums such as the Tate Gallery and Russia’s Hermitage Museum. Spalding was President Royal Canadian Academy of Arts 2007-2010, recipient of the Alberta College of Art and Design Board of Governors Award of Excellence (1992) awarded the Order of Canada (2007) and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012). He was named Adjunct Professor, University of Calgary, is a regular contributor to Galleries West magazine and was recently appointed Senior Curator, Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Poet and art writer LISA ROBERTSON began publishing in the 90s in Vancouver. Her 13 books trouble the limits of genre—Debbie: An Epic, a feminist rereading of Virgil, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1997 and published in French translation in 2021; The Weather (2001), a long poem plundering the rhetoric of Romantic meteorology, now translated to French and Swedish; the ficto-essays Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) amplify the urban history of Vancouver; Nilling essays a phenomenology of reading (2012); the bildungsroman The Baudelaire Fractal, shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction; the recent Anemones: A Simone Weil Project, working with translation and annotation. Her writing life has been supported by residencies and visiting professorships: University of Cambridge, Capilano University, Simon Fraser University, University of East Anglia, Queen Mary University of London, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, American University of Paris, California College of the Arts, Piet Zwart Institute; and by the Canada Council for the Arts. She lives in France.

The ethic and practice of collaboration are central to Marcus’ creative work. His plays, many of which were written or created with friends and colleagues, include: Winners and Losers, Jabber, How Has My Love Affected You?, Ali and Ali and the aXes of Evil and Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings, Everyone, Adrift, 3299: Forms in Order, Peter Panties and A Line in the Sand. They have been presented across North America, Australia and Europe, translated into Czech, Flemish, and Italian, and published by Talonbooks and Playwrights Canada Press. He is currently working on King Arthur’s Night with Niall McNeill, and a new play for theatre for young audiences.

He is the Artistic Director of Neworld Theatre in Vancouver. With three indie-theatre partners, Neworld co-founded Progress Lab 1422 in 2009, a collaboratively managed 6,000 sq. foot rehearsal and production centre in East Vancouver that has become a hub for the independent Vancouver theatre scene. Marcus is a graduate of the National Theatre School and holds an MFA from UBC. He lives in Vancouver’s Commercial Drive area with his partner, teacher Amanda Fritzlan, and their sons Oscar and Zak.

Charles Spearin is a musician from Toronto, Ontario. Spearin is a founding member of Do Make Say Think, KC Accidental and Broken Social Scene and also contributes to Valley of the Giants. He is best known for composing and performing in very broad ranges of musical genres. His solo album The Happiness Project is a concept album and was released on February 14, 2009 on the Arts & Crafts Label.This album includes contributions from Do Make Say Think alumni Julie Penner, Kevin Drew, Ohad Benchetrit and Broken Social Scene alumni Leon Kingstone and Evan Cranley. The concept for the Happiness Project (making music out of ordinary speech) is influenced by his early life with a blind father and his own Buddhist studies. On April 17, 2010, Spearin won a Juno Award for the Best Contemporary Jazz Album for the The Happiness Project.He lives with his wife and two small children in the Toronto neighbourhood of Seaton Village that was the inspiration for The Happiness Project.

December 5 to 9, 2016

Ora Barlow-Tukaki is a contemporary performer, composer, storyteller, and multi-instrumentalist from Aotearoa/New Zealand. She is of Te Whanau-a-Apanui and English descent. She has an Honours Degree in Music and has built a career as a performing and touring artist. Her foray into film began in 1996 when she worked with award-winning Tim Finn on his album and documentary film about the Dalai Lama. She also worked with the Crossing Frontiers project in the UK, working with Croatian refugees to create music for a documentary about refugee experiences in the Stoke on Trent region. Ora has worked collaboratively with other artists throughout her career. She co-founded three collaborative and highly-successful music projects - Manuhiri, Planet Woman, and Pacific Curls- and has toured the world with them. She has been a collaborating artist with many international artists and projects including the 2011 Manitoba Music collaboration project, the 100 Years Café project, Vancouver Island Music Festival collaboration project, and many CD recordings. In 2012, Ora was the subject of a documentary film produced by Livingston Productions and Maori Television called ‘I know a sheila like that’ about her political activism for which she contributed to the music score of the film. Ora is currently at work on a collaborative project with the National Theatre of Scotland and teaches music in schools throughout New Zealand. She is the Founder/Director of The NgāTM Festival, a five day music festival on the east coast of New Zealand.

Peta Rake is the Curator of Walter Phillips Gallery and the Banff International Curatorial Institute. She has curated exhibitions at International Studio and Curatorial Program ISCP (New York), CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco), Oakland Museum of California (Oakland), Luggage Store Gallery (San Francisco), Playspace (San Francisco), and Live Worms Gallery (San Francisco). She had previously worked at institutions that include California College of the Arts (San Francisco) and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane, Australia) as well as the former Archivist at Steven Leiber Basement, a Fluxus and artists’ book archive in San Francisco. She writes regularly for C Magazine and her texts have appeared in Canadian Art, Fillip, San Francisco Arts Quarterly, Rearviews, Institutions by Artists, On Apology and ElevenEleven Journal. She holds a Masters in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and was the recipient of the 2014 Curator Award from ISCP in New York. Rake is the co-curator of the 2017 Alberta Biennial.

Brendan is a founding member of Broken Social Scene and a veteran indie rock performer who has been a member of various notable bands including By Divine Right, Blurtonia, Valley of the Giants, Len, and hHead.  He has also released two solo albums and been involved in many ground breaking projects including being featured in a documentary Open Your Mouth And Say... Mr. Chi Pig, released in 2010 as well as an interactive documentary series called City Sonic. He has also added Producer and founder of the record label Draper Street Records to his long list of credits. 

Raghavan has played/toured with Kurt Elling, Taylor Eigsti, Vijay Iyer, Ambrose Akinmusire, Eric Harland, Mark Turner, Aaron Parks, Greg Osby, Billy Childs, Benny Green, Geoffry Keezer, Terrell Stafford, Mike Moreno, Rodney Green, Logan Richardson, Fabian Almazan, Justin Brown, Dayna Stephens, Julian Lage, Gerald Clayton, Marcus Gilmore, Walter Smith III, among others.

Raghavan grew up in Northbrook, Illinois, just north of Chicago. At age eight he began studying Western and Indian percussion, and later switched to the double bass at seventeen. He studied bass with John Clayton at the University of Southern California and also with Robert Hurst. During his years in Los Angeles he recorded and played with many legendary West Coast musicians. In 2009 he was a semi-finalist in the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Bass Competition.

Harish Raghavan is a regular instructor at the Stanford Jazz Workshop and the Jazz at Centrum summer program in Port Townsend, Washington. He is featured on pianist Taylor Eigsti's 2010 Concord release, Daylight at Midnight.

New York based bassist, Linda Oh, has performed with the likes of Steve Wilson, Kenny Barron, Dave Douglas, Kevin Hayes and Cyrus Chestnut. She received an honorary mention at the 2009 Thelonious Monk Semi-Finals and received the 2010 Bell Award for Young Australian Jazz Artist of the year. Linda is working on a jazz quartet with string quartet concept called “Concert in the Dark” where the musicians play with specific movements throughout the audience with very minimal lighting to enhance the listening experience and create a spatial surround sound effect. She currently teaches bass at the Manhattan School of Music pre-college division.