Student profiles

Laura Acosta

Laura Acosta is a Colombian-Canadian transdisciplinary artist working with textiles, performance, and immersive audio-visual installations. She creates characters and scenographies that put into question the relationship between body and space, exploring identity, representation, and displacement. Collaboration is at the core of Laura’s practice, working with other artists and researchers across disciplines to achieve new aesthetic languages. She has presented her solo and collective work in the form of exhibitions, talks and workshops throughout Canada, Latin America, Europe and South Korea, with the support of Canada Arts Council and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She holds an MFA in Fibres and Material Studies from Concordia University and a BFA from NSCAD University. Through her prolific collaborative project “The Novels of Elsgüer” which combines performance with different technologies to achieve interactive and immersive installations, Laura has received a nomination for the longlist of the Sobey art award from the National Gallery of Canada in 2023, as well as the Plein Sud award in 2021.

Research

Laura proposes a critical intersection between performance studies, new materialism, posthumanism, and post-colonial theories. Through her creative-research, she aims to investigate how the concepts of dislocation, disidentification, and disorientation can serve as catalysts for individual, collective, and social transformation. She is interested in examining the micropolitical implications of shifting and redefining our relationships to the mental, physical, social, and virtual structures we inhabit. Building on her existing work, she intends to delve further into the development of augmented storytelling and expanded performances during her PhD in Humanities. Her research centers on the embodied liminal experiences of 'other' identities—immigrants, BIPOC communities, females, queer individuals, and divergent bodies—as powerful sites for constructing counter-narratives of existence in the world. From this perspective, she works towards the development of decolonial futurisms and an emergent Latinx imaginary.

Badewa Ajibade

Badewa Ajibade is a Montréal-based Nigerian filmmaker, film educator and film curator. Badewa started his filmmaking journey in 2013, studying at the Toronto Film School (2013 – 2015). After making several short films and a feature documentary, he completed an MFA program in Studio Arts (film production) at Concordia University (2021 – 2024). As a seasoned practicing artist, he has extensive experience in film development, production and post- production. Badewa is focused on representation of African bodies in his artistry, the creation and exhibition of these stories being both inside and outside the African continent.

Research

At MFA level, Badewa embarked on an interdisciplinary research in African queerness, loss and the subconscious from a historical, contemporary and personal perspective. This research has evolved since. While keeping his work on queerness and loss in the background, his doctorate research will foreground creating a singular form of decolonial African cinema using the framework of African bodies as expressed through dance and music.

Marie-Pier Beauséjour

Marie-Pier Beauséjour is beginning her fourth year as a PhD student in Humanities. Prior to her arrival at Concordia, she completed a master’s degree in Religious studies at UQAM, which focused on the explicit mention of the dead body in Montreal obituaries (1920–2015).

Research

With a continuing interest in death studies, her doctoral research combines sociology, anthropology and public health to address political issues of accessibility to deathcare. As the average cost of funeral services continues to rise, more and more people are forced to give up paying tribute to their loved ones due to lack of financial means. Meanwhile, recent changes to Quebec’s funeral legislation make some cost-effective alternatives impossible or even illegal. By conducting an ethnographic incursion into the funeral milieu, Marie-Pier sees her research as an opportunity to unravel the complexity of the funeral industry in Quebec in the hope of making deathcare accessible to all.

Raphaël Bessette-Viens

Raphaël was born and raised in Gatineau, on the unceded territory of the Algonquin-Anishinabeg Nation and is currently pursuing their PhD on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. They hold a BA in political science (Université de Montréal), MA in Gender Studies (Université de Genève), an MA in Visual Anthropology (Université Paris Nanterre), and a DIU in research-creation (Université Paris-8/Université Paris Nanterre). Working across documentary and experimental film, their work has been shown at festivals such as Premier Regards – Festival International Jean Rouch (Paris), Festival International du Film Ethnographique du Québec and Festival de la Poésie de Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. Their PhD is supported by a SSHRC scholarship.

Research

Their PhD is situated at the intersections of trans* studies, critical disability studies, science and technology studies and research-creation and focuses on the parallel and connected practices of trans* embodiment and experimental filmmaking. They explore the relations between materials and bodies in their engagements with prosthetics (binders, breast forms, tucking underwear, packing, stand-to-pee devices, sex-toys, etc.) and in filmmaking techniques of frame-by-frame animation and process cinema. What can experimental film practices and trans* prosthetic uses teach us about the body in its relation to materials? About ideas of health, disability, and gender? How are techniques and practices of embodiment, of image making and of research related?

Frederic Bigras-Burrogano

Frederic Bigras-Burrogano’s approach is anchored in the creation of artworks combining a deconstruction of imperial technologies (photography, cartography and the archives) with an exploration of materialities from his field of research. By collaborating with artefacts and matters from the landscape he works with, he hopes to create a space of agency for neglected actors in anthropocentric discourse.

Research

Bigras-Burrogano’s doctoral research will expand on an existing body of work which investigate the dissonance in how the Canadian settler colonial state uses natural symbols to define nationhood while simultaneously basing its economy on extractive industries. This third chapter will focus on the representation of the timber industry through a comparative study of three Canadian museums.

Franklin R. Bonivento van Grieken

Franklin R. Bonivento van Grieken is a Colombian anthropologist, historian, and sound artist. As the son and grandson of Indigenous Wayuu women and the son of a Jewish father, his academic journey centers on understanding and communicating his roots. Drawing from the stories he grew up with, he explores Caribbean histories, Wayuu cosmovision, oralities, migrations, frontiers, and musicology. His work spans academic writing, creative storytelling, and radio and podcasting. He has created several radio documentaries, including La Enramada: historias de arena y viento (La Enramada: stories of sand and wind), which tells the story of his family in counterpoint with the history of La Guajira, Colombia, and Marimberos de mi nación: historia(s) de una bonanza cantada (Marimberos of my nation: memories of a performed bonanza), which explores the relationship between marijuana traffickers in Colombia during the 1970s and 1980s and Vallenato music. He is a member of the Oralities Cluster of the Hemispheric Encounters Network (HEN) and affiliated with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS).

Gabi Branche

Gabi Branche is an educator and multimedia artist whose work explores the intersection between education, art, culture and technology. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Branche has created art that focuses on interactivity and storytelling, particularly centered around the Caribbean. Additionally, she spent time in the classroom as a middle school math teacher. She aims to combine her experiences in her current research at Concordia University. 

Research

Branche's doctoral research will utilize research-as-creation to outline how visual and performance art as well as digital interactive media can be integrated into STEM and challenge the notion of embodied education. It will utilize interdisciplinary perspectives in pedagogy specifically through the use of performance, culture and technology.

Teresa Braun

Teresa Braun is a non-binary visual artist and drag performer of white settler descent. Their work blends queer theory, pop culture and heteronormative archetypes to challenge binary notions of gender. Originally from Treaty 1 Territory/Winnipeg, they are currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University. Their doctoral research investigates virtual reality as a site to develop, express and share the underrepresented life experiences of trans* people. Through this, they are creating Virtual Queerality, a virtual reality living archive that explores the fluidity of queer identity through participatory research, audio interviews and creative collaborations with trans* artists.

Research

Teresa received their BFA with Honors in 2011 from the University of Manitoba and their MFA from Montclair State University (New Jersey) in 2015, where they served as an adjunct professor in the Art & Design program from 2015–2021. Their work has been shown at several notable galleries and performance venues, including Westbeth Gallery (NYC), House of Yes (NYC), PhilaMOCA (Philadelphia), Fleisher Art Memorial (Philadelphia), and in Winnipeg at The Plug-In Institute of Contemporary Art and PLATFORM Center for Photographic and Digital Arts. They are the Canadian curator for The Brick Theater in Brooklyn and co-founder of sacra, a performance collective with Ayodamola Okunseinde that creates interactive artifacts to investigate intimate aspects of the human experience such as taste, fear and sorrow.

www.teresabraun.com
www.sacracollective.com

Clara Casian

Clara Casian is a visual artist and filmmaker whose practice draws parallels between forgotten histories and abandoned sites of memory. Her work combines constructed archive fragments of historical significance, with a hybrid mix of image, layered in a rhythmic montage. The artistic process is based on archival research, investigative interviews with communities and collaborations with locals. Themes include stringent issues of ecology, oral histories, deindustrialized sites, changes in habitats and nuclear culture.

Research

My proposed project will examine the post-industrial transformation of the St. Lawrence River and the Lachine Canal, tracing the pollution left by industrialism (iron and steel, petro-chemical, manufacturing), the ruination of such places and their lasting effects on living ecosystems and cultures. My creative practice will incorporate historical archival materials, moving images and recorded oral history interviews in order to 'read' the post-industrial landscape. More specifically, my research will focus on the matter of the polluting chemical, a scientific microscopic view at radioactive substances, oil and cadmium. At the centre of the enquiry, emphasis will be placed on the human being as a depository of memorial values: the living archive.

Adrean Clark

Adrean Clark is a Deaf artist with decades of experience in publishing, design, cartooning and sequential graphic forms, and activism, producing a diverse body of work in multiple genres and fields. A graduate of the North Carolina School for the Deaf and an alumnae of Gallaudet University, she received her MFA in visual art from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Adrean is also a 2024-2026 Bush Leadership Fellow.

Research

Adrean's research breaks the myth that sign languages cannot be written. She describes major and under-appreciated ways that the Deaf communities depict their language using analog media. Her thesis proves that written sign languages are possible, and in fact, are already utilized by the communities that speak them.

John Lee Clark

John Lee Clark is the 2024 Miriam Aaron Roland Graduate Fellow at Concordia University. His two latest books are “How to Communicate: Poems,” winnder of the Minnesota Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, and “Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays,” both published by W. W. Norton and Company. A DeafBlind writer, translator, historian, and Protactile educator, he is a graduate of the Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf and obtained his M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Randolph College.

Research

John is interested in everything. The Protactile movement, which includes the emergence of the first truly tactile language, is a world-tousling enterprise. One of his projects is “Before Helen Keller,” an interdisciplinary, multi-genre process of archeology, archival research, living history, writing history, and storytelling. Among other questions, this many-rooted probe asks, “How does a community with many pasts, even amply documented pasts, but no sense of collective history begin to remember and to carry stories?”

Megan Gail Coles

Megan Gail Coles is a second-generation Canadian writer, academic and mother of mixed heritage from the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland/Ktaqmkuk. Her books include Squawk, Satched, Eating Habits of the Chronically Lonesome and Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club. Her fiction has been a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller prize, a CBC Canada Reads contender and has twice won the BMO Winterset award. Megan has new fiction forthcoming from DoubleDay Canada Fall 2025. She is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Poverty Cove Theatre Company in St. John's with multiple plays in various stages of development. Megan is a graduate of Memorial University, the National Theatre School of Canada, UBC and is currently pursuing a PhD in Humanities.

Research

Megan's teaching and research fields of interest include Performance Arts, Literature, Neurocultural, Indigenous Storytelling, Psycohoneuroimmunology, Dramaturgy, Cultural Literacy and Postcolonial Ethics. Her doctoral work focuses on art and neuroscience. Specifically, how storytelling through representational art forms uniquely permits opportunities toward or impedes societal meaning making and subsequent mindbody wellness.

Alex Custodio

Alex Custodio is an academic, author and artist based in Tiohtià:ke (commonly referred to as Montreal) whose research focuses on fan communities, residual videogame platforms, and the cultural techniques of hardware and software hacking. Alex’s first monograph, Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform, is available from the MIT Press.

Research

Handheld Histories, Alex’s doctoral research, focuses on how global communities of users modify and repair handheld videogame platforms decades after the end of its market lifecycle, a practice called “modding.” Methodologically, this project combines written work (papers, technical reports, tutorials), ethnographic research methods (interviews, community participation) and hands-on modding practices (tinkering, disassembling, photographing, reverse-engineering, designing, wiring) to document and describe the contemporary uses of residual media as both cultural and computational objects.

Brock Dishart

Brock Dishart is a queer PhD student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program in Montreal, Canada. He holds a bachelor’s degree in French to English Translation from York University, Glendon College, and a master’s degree in Digital Media from X University (Formerly Ryerson University). Brock has worked as a digital producer and strategist for Franco-Ontarian TV shows and has won a Gemini Award (Prix Gémeaux) in 2017 for his work on the BRBR music app.

Research

Brock’s academic work focuses on embodiment of emotion with tangible technology, embodied interaction design and mental health in the queer community. His PhD research will work with the queer community to explore embodied ways of interacting with technology that help facilitate emotion regulation and processing through the body with a focus on queer ways of knowing, post-traumatic growth, resilience and queer joy.

Alexandrya Eaton

Alexandrya Eaton is a contemporary Canadian visual artist whose practice involves painting, textiles, and performance. Her work has been presented in over fifty solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions, and her paintings can be found in public and private collections nationally and internationally. She holds an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art & Design and a BFA from Mount Allison University.

Research

Eaton’s arts-based research demonstrates how traditional textile practices can be integrated into a painting practice as a bodily form of memory, reaffirming matrilineal connections through making. From Sackville, New Brunswick, she acknowledges with respect and gratitude that this area is located within the traditional and unceded territory of Mi’kma’ki.

Dean Farrell

Dean Farrell is from Dublin, Ireland, and holds an MA in Modern Irish, funded by the Mary-Kate O’Kelly Scholarship, and a BA with joint honours in Modern Irish and French and Francophone studies, both from University College Dublin. He moved to Turtle Island (Canada) in September 2018 to teach the Irish language at St. Thomas University in the traditional territory of the Welastekwewiyik people (now known as Fredericton) as an Irish Canadian University Foundation Scholar. He held this position until June 2020. During this time, Dean worked closely with the Irish Canadian Cultural Association of New Brunswick and ran a series of cultural events, locally and across Canada, in collaboration with other groups. He received funding in 2019 and 2020 from the Government of New Brunswick to finance these events.

Research

Dean has recently moved to Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) to begin his PhD at Concordia and has received graduate scholarship from the School of Irish Studies. His research interests include Irish language literature and publishing, Acadian literature as well as the literatures of other lesser-spoken French dialects, gender and sexuality studies, and decoloniality. Dean has presented some of his research at conferences; the most recent were the Canadian Association of Irish Studies Conference, and An Seimineár Dána, the first ever Irish language gender and sexuality studies conference, both in June 2021.

Michele Fiedler Fuentes

Michele Fiedler Fuentes is a Puerto Rican researcher and curator based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She was the curator at Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City from 2016 to 2019 and has been curator in residence at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and Oregon Contemporary, Portland. She has collaborated independently with institutions like the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico, The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California, and Beta Local in San Juan, PR. Through her exhibition projects, she has focused on political and social critique with perspectives towards gender and LGBTTQ+ rights, the erasure of ancient traditions and histories by colonial practices, and underrepresented artists.

Research

Michele holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BS in Agronomy, with a specialization in Horticulture, from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. Her PhD research combines the disciplines of art history, drama therapy, geography, and environment, as well as film, performance, and Caribbean studies to look at a group of experimental films that register and enact oral histories from people who live in the Puerto Rican archipelago or its diaspora. Together, these works weave an archive of Puerto Rican affect and a historical document of development, the colonial project, revolutionary politics, relationships with the land, grief, and spirituality as well as of natural and social phenomena and the ways these linger in memories and bodies.

Danielle Garrison

Danielle Garrison has an MFA in Dance (aerial dance/somatics) from the University of Colorado-Boulder. In 2017–2018 she was a Fulbright France grantee and explored grief and response within embodied performance and media. Danielle brings her aerial practice into film, photography, performance and haptic/biometrics projects throughout the United States and Europe. She is a PhD student at Concordia University and University of Montpellier 3, a visiting artist with Mondes Visuels (France) and on the Fulbright Specialist Roster (2021–2025), exploring synthetic touch through iterations of tethering.

Research

Situating my research in the suspended body, I connect somatics, aerial arts, dance, philosophy, new media and performance studies confronting mediation (immediacy), distances (transversality), archiving (anarchiving), translation (corporeal to ?...) and aesthetics (body-politics). My practice, tethering, activates a non-rigged, horizontal aerial fabric into a movement conduit between human and more-than-human bodies, unearthing questions on synthetic touch in a post-touch social network. I am designing an aerial system that can measure, record and replay the embodied movement of bodies, creating a geo-tactility collection of movement. My question is how to translate this embodied experience via digital, textual, corporeal languages producing a dissertation that embraces a plurality of sensory-based expressions.

Amanda Gutiérrez

Amanda Gutiérrez trained and graduated initially as a stage designer from The National School of Theater. Gutiérrez uses sound and performance art to investigate how these aural conditions affect everyday life. Gutierrez is actively advocating listening practices while being one of the board of directors of the World Listening Project, formerly working with The Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology, and currently as the scientific comitée of the Red Ecología Acústica México. Currently, she is a PhD student at Concordia University in the HUMA department and a research assistant at lab PULSE, the Acts of Listening Lab, and an active member at the Feminist Media Studio at Concordia University.

Research

This research-creation project aims to develop the conceptual framework of the term Sono-(soro)rity, as a feminist collective practice that approaches expressions of sonic agency to create political coalitions. Under this subject, my research will create a survey of activist and artistic projects by feminist collectives embodying sound practices, especially enacted in the public spheres. The methodological execution of the concept of Sono-(soro)rity, employs pedagogical tools such as soundwalking and political listening for the formation of social coalitions and performativity through aural practices.

Ro Heinrich 

Ro Heinrich is an artist-researcher working with grammars of relationality through spoken and unspoken languages. Through (recorded) conversations and collaborations, their practice is multidisciplinary, with an emphasis on film and book making. Her work stages the refusal to separate the human and the more-than human, world and body. She explores our critical landscapes at the fertile edges of neurodiversity, blackness and artistic research, addressing our present predicament at the end of the world as we know it.

Ro is collaborator with artist initiative Quelccaya/Reschooling With, and alumni of THIRD, DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam. Their research project we always need heroes — on the crises of capitalism, nationalism and patriarchal storytelling — included a 46-minute film work and an award-winning artist book, published with Fw:Books.

Research

Ro’s research moves with questions towards how a paraontological filmmaking practice — a practice emerging through autistic perception that refuses ontology as a given — might contribute to resistance to the present. Within the wider conceptual landscape of process philosophy, paraontology is one of the key concepts she studies towards a cinematic practice not grounded in identity and not bound by Being.

Erin Hill

Erin Hill is a choreographer, performer and writer in the expanded field of dance and a birth support practitioner (doula) with the community organization Alternative Naissance. Through observational practices Hill’s work seeks alternatives to alignments of linearity, building relations with ecological protagonists such as Sun (Sunrise Commitment, 2018), and Clouds (Deep Gazing, ongoing), inviting their constraints and their teachings to guide the work. Hill self-published O (an artist book, 2018), was Editor-in-Chief of Moving Parts: Articulated Bodies and Objects in Performance (Café Concret, 2020) and contribute essays to other books such as Chairs (Éditions Tryptique, éditeur Olivia Tapiero 2019), and "Diffracting New Materialisms" (Palgrave 2022). Hill makes home as a settler in the traditional gathering place Tiohtiá:ke, the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Also known as Mooniyang to the Anishinaabeg, or so-called Montréal, Québec.

Research

Erin’s research develops the notion of ineffability, looking at how that which is unmeasurable or ungraspable can offer alternative sites of knowing. Within a critical posthumanist framework she considers the notion of ineffability through the lens of White body supremacy, addressing how the (under)valuing of immaterial presence in a Western worldview affects the possibility of self-sovereignty. Her research is guided by the intuition that without respect for the unknown, there can be no respect for the body. Her research-creation will include historical research and interviews on the domestication and militarization of horses, in counterpoint to her field work with equines to elaborate beyond verbal forms of communication, and relations built on congruency and consent.

Magdalena Hutter

Magdalena Hutter is a documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and photographer. A graduate of the University of Television and Film Munich, she has been making films since 2007 and teaching filmmaking since 2012. In her documentary film work, her focus is on projects about art and artists, as well as on themes of belonging. In her teaching she has worked with groups of diverse ages, ranging from teenagers to older adults, with an emphasis on documentary filmmaking as empowerment for queer and refugee youth. As a HUMA PhD candidate, Magdalena uses her film practice to do research-creation about fatness as method in dance and movement art and to develop frameworks for a Fat ScreenDance. She is an affiliate of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and a member of the Textiles & Materiality research cluster at the Milieux Institute. Magdalena is supervised by MJ Thompson, PhD, Nadia Myre, and Stefanie Snider, PhD.

Research

Magdalena’s doctoral research investigates the performance and representation of fatness in dance and movement art, the potentials of fatness in these art forms, and how they may be transported by and contribute to the artistic vocabulary of a Fat ScreenDance. Her work is rooted in the conviction that fatness has the potential to question and challenge categories and structures – categories of knowledge in dance and film, but also structures implicated in the representation, valuation oppression of bodies more broadly – while offering new visions of materiality and method to contemporary screendance.

Using documentary film, conversations, and movement research, Magdalena works with fat performers to highlight the knowledge that their respective practices can offer, as well as the knowledge that emerges when these practices are brought into conversation with her own work in film, particularly with handheld cinematography as improvised choreography. In addition to the written dissertation, this process will result in a series of short documentary films.

Maurice Jones

Maurice Jones is a curator and PhD candidate under Dr. Fenwick McKelvey, Dr. Bart Simon and Dr. Chris Salter in the Humanities Program at the Center of Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University in Montreal. Previously based in Japan for almost 10 years, he is an active curator and Artistic Director of the electronic music and digital arts festival MUTEK.JP in Tokyo. In 2021 he joined MUTEK’s Montreal headquarters for developing its market activities and the AI-related programming of the professional MUTEK Forum. Through both his curatorial and academic activities he seeks to inspire an open and inclusive discourse about our futures together with technology.

Research

Within his research he investigates cross-cultural visions of Artificial Intelligence and their impact on governance efforts in Canada, Germany and Japan. As a fellow in the Evolving Digital Society research program at the Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society in Berlin he is exploring sociotechnical imaginaries of AI in German civil society. Holding an MA in International Relations from Leiden University and a BA in Asian Studies from the University of Bonn, Maurice’s research interest is founded in the comparative exploration of the impact of cultural perceptions on policy-making processes.

Balam Kenter

Bridging Political Philosophy, Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies, Balam Kenter’s work focuses on the historical and material entanglements of ableism and anthropocentrism under late capitalism.

Research

Balam’s dissertation project seeks to make a materialist intervention into Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies through a performative methodological exercise in intersectionality. They are working on a novel combination of Foucaultian and Marxist analyses of power where capitalism emerges as a system that disables and animalizes certain bodies, human and non-human. The overall objective is to create a new paradigm of domination that envisions structural solutions without sacrificing singular flourishing needs.

Rachel Kirstein

Rachel Kirstein is a multidisciplinary creative practitioner and Humanities PhD student. She holds an MA in Media Studies from Concordia University, as well as a BA in Creative Industries with specializations in visual culture, publishing, and business management from Toronto Metropolitan University (previously Ryerson University). Her MA research was centred on the meaning-making and popularization of sex toys within discourses of wellness and sex-positive feminism.

Research

Rachel’s doctoral research explores estate sales in Montreal through experimental ethnographic writing. More broadly, her research interests include the everyday and the ordinary, intimacy, material cultures, academic writing and knowledge-creation, value circulation, and consumption cycles.

www.racheldylankirstein.com

Katya Korableva

Katya Korableva is a social researcher and curator who works at the intersection of social sciences, arts, and activism. Prior to joining Concordia, Katya completed a master’s degree in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College, NY, with a thesis and a multimedia installation on dissent and migration in Russia during its war on Ukraine. She has previously explored the politicization of migration in Tbilisi, Georgia, and the marginalization of (post)socialist large housing estates in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Additionally, she has facilitated public educational programs and placemaking projects, and contributed as a curator and artist to the festival Barents Spektakel in Kirkenes, Norway.

Research

At Concordia, Katya is pursuing a PhD in Humanities, aiming to shift her focus toward the contestations of public history, reconciliation, and memory-making in post-conflict societies. Her project delves into the politics and relational ethics in the representation of conflict-induced migration. Through this work, she will explore the complex intersection of memory, performance, and migration, found at the site of a new museum.

Greg Labrosse

Greg Labrosse is an educator and researcher based in Cartagena, Colombia, since 2006. He has worked on projects with the Culture and Development Research Lab (L+iD) at the Technological University of Bolivar, where he also held the position of director of Foreign Languages. He is currently a PhD candidate in the interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University. His research focuses on issues of spatial agency, social aesthetics, youth narratives and graphic representations of urban memory.

Research

Greg’s research explores questions of spatial agency and social aesthetics in relation to emerging sites of cultural production in peripheral neighbourhoods of Cartagena. These barrios populares southeast of the city centre were also the location of his master’s research, in which he examined the ways children and youth seek to increase their opportunities for play through the appropriation of abandoned urban spaces. As an extension of this work on play and culture, his doctoral thesis traces the emergence of contemporary dance as a social practice in Cartagena’s periphery and documents the spatial trajectories of local choreographers and dancers over the course of their artistic formation.

Fangdan Li

Fangdan Li (she/her) is a first-year PhD student in the Humanities PhD Program at Concordia University and a cultural historian from China. She holds an MA in History from Concordia University, an MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Japanese and a BL in Law from Amoy (Xiamen) University. Her doctoral studies are supported by the Doctoral Concordia University Graduate Fellowship and the Concordia Merit Scholarship.

Research

Fangdan’s doctoral research draws on her major field in History and her minor fields in Anthropology and Communication Studies. Her research interests include women’s cultural history, gender and labor, media and print culture, nationalism and shojo (girls’) studies in Japan. Her PhD dissertation project examines the historical transformation of the lives and work of female journalists in modern and contemporary Japan. Specifically, she studies how women’s increasing participation in journalism shaped gender discourses in Japanese print media from the mid-twentieth century (circa 1930-1990).

Diego López

Diego López is a Peruvian vegan philosopher and theatre practitioner. He has been working as a philosophy and acting professor, playwright, actor, and theatre director in Peru for over twenty years. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Peru, where he also studied Performing Arts. He created plays such as Golosina, Sabotaje, Karaoke, Madrugada and La Rebelión de los Conceptos, and co-wrote the films Viejas Amigas and El Correcaminos. 

Research

Throughout his career, he has explored the connections between philosophy and theatre in the development of artistic productions, teaching, and research. At the Humanities PhD program, his research-creation project explores testimonial theatre as a means to reflect on identity, offering insights into how the transformation of the performer’s self within the creative process of a testimonial play enables audiences to reflect on personal identity issues. As a case study, he is creating the play Find the River based on his search for his missing grandfather, an emotional journey through his memories that explores the construction of masculinity in Peru.

Laura Magnusson

Laura Magnusson is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, with a focus on video, sculpture, performance and underwater research-creation. She holds an MFA (2019) in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Michigan, and a BFA (2010) in Sculpture from the University of Manitoba, where she has a permanent public sculpture on display (Return Bin).

Research

Magnusson’s doctoral research-creation investigates how how art can open up new testimonial means to communicate felt experiences of trauma resulting from sexual violence. How can art make visible internal, often invisible, dimensions of trauma? How can it do so through affective means, extending beyond word-based language? And, how can it expand our understanding of impacts on survivors?

Blue, Magnusson’s 2019 short experimental film –– shot entirely underwater, 70 feet beneath the surface –– exemplifies this inquiry. Alone on an ocean “tundra,” wearing a protective clamshell-like parka and winter boots, a woman (Magnusson) arduously moves, exhales, and burrows through the afterlife of sexual violence. In this silent, psychic landscape, she bears witness to the complex nature of trauma and the ongoing process of healing.

Kian Moradi

Kian is a PhD student in Humanities at the Department of Fine Arts under the supervision of Prof. Erin Manning, Prof. Lília Mestre, and Prof. Mark Sussman. An Iranian performer and performance creator, he has been deeply engaged with the performing arts since around age 12. Since 2002, Kian has participated in numerous productions in Iran and, more recently, in Canada. He holds an MFA in Theatre Practice from the University of Alberta and an MA in Dramatic Arts from Tehran Azad University. Kian has participated in many national and international festivals as a performer, director, designer, and playwright, including the 19th Highfest Theatre Festival, the 19^th Iran International University Theatre Festival, and the 21^st Fajr Theatre Festival. View Kian Moradi's portfolio.

Research

Kian’s research focuses on the aesthetics of performing arts through practice-based inquiry. His work critiques monophonic aesthetics, which create rigid distinctions between different modes of performance. Instead, he proposes a fluid, spectral aesthetic framework that situates these differences along a continuum. He explores how performance arises not only from bodily potential but also through the interaction of various stimuli, such as objects and sounds, with the body. Drawing upon process philosophy and topology, Kian investigates the fundamental functions of space within performance contexts. He poses essential questions: How does space function? Can the body truly exist independently of space? Drawing from Gilles Deleuze’s idea that we serve as channels through which diverse milieus flow, Kian argues that space is encountered organically, whether within the intimate confines of the womb or the expansive scale of the cosmos. His research lies at the intersection of philosophy, physicality, and performance studies, contributing to contemporary aesthetics by emphasizing processes, relationality, multiplicity, and dynamic perceptions of the world.

Emilie Morin

Emilie Morin is a dance and new media artist based in Tio’tia:ke – Mooniyang – Montreal. Since completing her BA in dance in 2006 (UQÀM), she collaborated with independent choreographers and filmmakers as a dance performer for live performance, site specific works and dance on screen. As well a pedagog and rehearsal director, she has traveled to Europe, the United States and Mexico to present her work, give conferences and teach .

To investigate further the relation between dance and new medias, Emilie completed an MFA at Concordia University in the Intermedia Program in 2021. This academic research was funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC).

Since 2015, Emilie creates and presents her own pieces, hybrid artworks at the limit of dance, new media and visual arts. Her shows Trou (les beaux jours) (2015), Skype Duet (2018), All Voices, Nameless and Singular (2021), Peau (2023) and her animated film using motion capture technology Le spectre anime nos os (2023), question the possibility of creating alternative body images using everyday digital devices.

Research

My research questions digital body images produced with the use of portable and personal electronic devices. I investigate a choreographic method around the body agency and the mastery of repeated gestures manipulating these everyday technologies. I interrogate the possibility of taking (back) control of my own images as a woman, artist and dancer, from the potential of my method to transform the visual representations that these technologies produce and the relation to digital images of the body.

Allison Peacock

Allison Peacock is a PhD candidate and dance artist who has developed artistic work focusing on relational possibilities of dance and choreography, experimenting with forms of presentation, representation, potentiality and imagination. She completed a BA from the University of Toronto in Political Science and Visual Studies, the School of Toronto Dance Theatre’s Professional Dance Training Program, and an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship at the UdK/HZT Berlin. She has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts for training and research periods in Vienna, Brussels and New York and has worked internationally as a performer for William Pope.L and Stefanos Tsivopoulos at Documenta 14, Maria Baroncea, Barbara Lindenberg, and Dancemakers. Her primary artistic focus is creating solo and collaborative works which have been shown at Salonul de Proiecte, Fabrica de Pensule, ADA (Berlin), Uferstudios, Canada Dance Festival, Pleasure Dome’s New Toronto Works, Movement Research at the Judson Church and numerous non-traditional performance spaces.

Research

Her PhD research is a site-specific study of a trio of gardens in Montreal, considering these spaces through methods in ethnography, performance studies and research-creation.

Alexei Perry Cox

Alexei Perry Cox is a writer and teacher and organiser. She is the author of Night 3 | اليوم الرابع (Centre for Expanded Poetics), Re:Evolution (Gap Riot Press), Finding Places to Make Places (Vallum), as well as the full-length poetry collection Under Her (Insomniac Press). PLACE is forthcoming with Noemi Press (2022). Her creative work and criticism have graced the pages of a wide variety of publications, including Jouranl Safar (جورنال سفر), Arc Poetry Magazine, Moko Magazine, Puritan, carte blanche and The Georgia Review.

Research

Her research investigates poetry that works to decolonize the imagination by crossing and re-crossing the ideological boundaries that often separate the beneficiaries of colonialism from those who are objectified and impoverished by it. She interrogates and negotiates the complications of absorbing, heeding, and resisting injustices in the federal judicial systems of two settler-occupied nations — these unceded lands formerly known as North America and the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel — in major works of contemporary poetry and poetics from both regions. In written analysis and collaborative multi-media performance, this research elucidates the often qualitative (asymmetric, counterweighing) language that is used when resistant poet-activists re-calibrate and find new equipoise in their confrontation of the imbalances of law as it pertains to their lives specifically and differently than to those of the colonizers of the un/shared lands. Her work has been supported by SSHRC and FRQSC fellowships, The Power Corporation of Canada Graduate Fellowship, The Split Concordia Merit Scholarship, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Graduate Student Mobility Award, and a John N. and Sophia Economides Scholarship. At the core of her makings is the belief that we imagine relationally, sometimes with words and sometimes with graze. And that both are important.

Melanie Power

Melanie Power is a Montreal-based writer and researcher who holds an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing. Her first book, Full Moon of Afraid and Craving (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) is a meditation on girlhood, memory, and rurality in the context of late capitalism. Her poetry has appeared widely in literary journals and received support from national and provincial funding bodies.

Research

Her SSHRC-funded research project combines the disciplines of literature and sociology with the field of oral history to examine and preserve narratives of home, place, and belonging in the context of rural Newfoundland. Using various methods, such as research-creation and autoethnography, she examines memory as a flexible, dynamic and locally determined force in peoples' lives, with particular attention to memory's power to enshrine and sublimate aspects of personal, familial and community-based identity. A major literary component of this project is the work of American poet Elizabeth Bishop, and her affective and familial connections to Atlantic Canada.

www.melaniedpower.com

Andrew Rabyniuk

Andrew Rabyniuk is an artist and doctoral student in the interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. His work examines the conceptual and practical overlaps between contemporary craft and the built environment. He received the Renata and Michal Hornstein Doctoral Fellowship for research in the fine arts and he is a member of the Milieux Institute’s Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster.

Research

My current research is focused on defining the critical spatial capacity of minor constructive operations and communicative gestures. To develop this definition, and a corresponding theory of minor spatial practice, I am looking at the ways textiles and ceramics are used to furnish the built environment. I am combing art historical studies of craft, architecture history and theory, and artistic research into fabrication techniques associated with both materials. The aim is to identify, analyse, and speculate on the spatial characteristics of their production and use in order to elaborate a new modality of political materialism and spatial production.

Andrew.rabyniuk@mail.concordia.ca
www.andrewrabyniuk.com

Koby Rogers Hall

Koby is an artist, writer and social practice facilitator dedicated to dialogical arts practices, archiving as cultural activism, and public interventions for political engagement. She has facilitated long-term multi-stakeholder projects with the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, the Politics & Care project, and the tactical media Living Archives installation. Her performance work is seen in warehouses, artist-run centres and street demos across the Americas, while she continues to teach in the departments of Theatre and School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia.

Research

Her doctoral research has been awarded a SSHRC Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship, a Concordia Merit Scholarship and Social Justice Fellowship, a Hydro-Quebec Graduate Award, and the Miriam Aaron Roland Fellowship in Humanities. This research-creation project supports her ongoing engagement in migrant justice in social arts practices, with considerations for performance in conflict zones, critical curatorial strategies and trauma in social movements. Koby continues building on her multi-year relationships with im/migrant worker-led campaigns, arts activism and migrant justice organisers across the continent. She integrates this with her commitment to radical mothering, collective care practices and community liberatory projects.

Maria Simmons

Maria Simmons (they/she) is a hybrid installation whose work investigates potentialized, contaminated environments. She collects garbage, grows yeast, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself. Her recent exhibitions include the Visual Art Centre of Clarington, Estonia Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tromsø Centre for Contemporary Art. They have recently completed residencies at Est-Nord-Est (CAN), Mustarinda (FIN), Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (NOR), Trinity Square Video (CAN), and Ed Video Media Art Centre (CAN). Their work has been written about in Peripheral Review, Public Parking, and featured in experimental food archives such as The Artist’s Cookbook vol.2 and Mixed Drinks.

Research

My proposed PhD research is a multifaceted exploration into the intricate relationships between extraction, subterranean mystery, queerness, intersectional feminism, ritual, mythology, and ecological anti-capitalism within peatland ecologies. Focusing specifically on the contentious "Ring of Fire" region in the James Bay Lowlands of Northern Ontario, where large mineral deposits have sparked ongoing mining threats since 2007, I aim to address the potential release of approximately 35 billion tonnes of carbon stored in the peatlands. Beyond purely explaining the ecological significance of peat bogs, my research seeks to re-mystify them, presenting them as anti-capitalistic, feminist landscapes that can offer profound insights into our connections with the Earth and each other.

Misha Solomon

Misha Solomon is a writer in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is the author of two chapbooks, FLORALS (above/ground press, 2020) and Full Sentences (Turret House Press, 2022), nominated for the Expozine Award for English Literary Publications. His poetry has appeared in anthologies and journals including Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Arc Poetry Magazine, CV2, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Malahat Review, and Riddle Fence. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, is forthcoming with Brick Books in 2026. Misha holds a BA in biological anthropology and linguistics from Columbia University and an MA in English (creative thesis) from Concordia University, where an excerpt of his Master's thesis won the 2023 David McKeen Creative Writing Prize. He also leads poetry workshops at Librairie Pulp Books & Café and consults for scripted television.

Research

Misha's research-creation project is a rethinking of the non-reproductive homosexual animal. He uses poetry and lyric essay to explore latent biosocial impulses around breeding and reproduction in gay men through a primate studies lens and to transform or translate gay sex and gay kinship into non-human animal behaviour.

Fernanda Suarez

Fernanda Suarez is a visual artist who holds an MA in Communication and Social Change with honors and a BFA. Her artistic practice is transdisciplinary, deploying a situated approach to drawing, textile, text and craft techniques as means to address issues of gender, subjectivity and collaboration. With an interest in understanding the material implications of textile production from a feminist decolonial approach, her practice explores memory and knowledge in marginalized situations. Environment and technique are central to her understanding of artistic processes as open forms of knowledge that come into meaning through the relations in which they are inscribed.

Research

I decided to pursue my doctoral studies in the Humanities program at Concordia to deepen how I understand the production of knowledge and memory through textile creation, principally through the materiality of wool. My research-creation explores the experience of weaving together with Nahua indigenous and Mestiza women in the Nahua community of Cuacuila, located in the Sierra Norte de Puebla in Mexico. By working together, we have learned and retaken techniques that were almost extinct in this territory. Although we have a complex relationship influenced by colonial legacies, learning and creating together has allowed us to recognize each other and forge different bonds. Due to the conditions of marginality in the community, and considering the different interests among us, there is a fragility to how we learn and produce textiles together; a fragility that I seek to explore in my research-creation.

Casper Sutton-Fosman

Casper Sutton-Fosman is a cross-disciplinary curator, artist, and academic. Their work centers conceptions of identity through a trans and disabled lens, pushing boundaries of medium and discipline to open in-between spaces for being. They hold a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, and an MFA from OCAD University, where their research centred the figure of the haunted house as allegory for queer/disabled resistance to nuclear family structures. They have exhibited, curated, and held residencies in Toronto and New York, and currently serve on the Programming Committee of InterAccess in Toronto.

Research

Casper Sutton-Fosman’s research examines the relationships of queer/trans and disabled communities to lens-based art and image-capture technologies. Finding overlap and kinship in questions of representation, medicalization, and surveillance, they hope to question the politics of visibility. Their curatorial practice guides their research, looking towards lens-based artists within queer, trans, & disabled communities. Drawing on hauntological analysis, crip theory, fine arts, and queer/trans studies, their work takes on multifaceted and non-linear forms.

Darinka Szigecsan

Darinka Szigecsan is a Hungarian-born creative non-fiction writer whose embodied practice lies at the intersection of philosophy and poetry. Her work explores questions of community, movement, queer ecology, and the body. While rooted in language and writing, it is grounded in phenomenal, corporeal experiences and the senses. She understands writing not only as a form of critical and creative expression but also as a method for imagining and bringing new worlds into being. Her PhD project, Kin-aesthetic Ecology of Bodies and Belongings, seeks to foster more inclusive, diverse, and attentive modes of being and belonging. Darinka holds a BA in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Environmental Humanities from Bath Spa University.

Research

Darinka’s research weaves personal narrative, theoretical inquiry, and embodied methodologies to practice deep listening to the lessons offered by the ecosystem of the body. Her thesis envisions (more-than-)human communities where belonging is a dynamic, relational, and embodied practice — one that embraces multiplicity, vulnerability, and change. Grounded in postcolonial environmental humanities, feminist posthuman phenomenology, critical fugitivity, and autoethnographic methods, her work critiques dominant models of belonging — marked by ownership, fixity, and assimilation — that often perpetuate exclusion and alienation. In response, she proposes the concept of kin-aesthetic belonging: a relational and embodied paradigm that emphasizes ecological entanglement (kinship), sensory attentiveness (aesthetics), and dynamic transformation (kinaesthetics).

Vanessa Terán Collantes

Vanessa Terán Collantes is a socially engaged artist, educator, and visual anthropologist originally from the Andes, working with photography and video through collaborative and community-centered practices. Her research is grounded in questions of belonging, migration, and territory. 

In 2023, she was awarded the Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellowship at Yale University’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, where she began Sucúa Haven — a collaborative photo-ethnofiction project developed with members of the Ecuadorian diaspora in Connecticut.

In this project, participants staged fictionalized versions of their memories, imagined futures, or alternative lives to explore what the imaginative agency of collaborators can reveal about their experiences and senses of belonging — both in the U.S. and Ecuador.

Research

At Concordia, Vanessa extends this work by examining how this transnational territory is lived and inhabited. Departing from an oculocentric paradigm, she engages with the anthropology of the senses, performance studies, oral history, and the anthropology of the imagination. Her methodology remains grounded in collaborative creation and the staging of fictional and non-fictional narratives, which she approaches as a means of critically engaging with diasporic place-making and its aesthetic, affective, and imaginative dimensions.

Holly Timpener

Holly Timpener is a queer, non-binary, national/international performance artist. They are interested in communicating by way of performance and finding an accessible language wherein discourses surrounding internal transformations, queer identities and queer resistance can emerge. By balancing their personal experience, knowledge and memories with insight gained through community research, Timpener investigates “The Personal Is Political” in a modern sociopolitical context. Within their works they claim ownership of their body and reflect on how trauma is woven into the lived experience of being queer.

Research

Timpener’s doctoral research studies internal transformations in non-binary and transgender performance art. They examine how felt internal transformations that occur through durational action(s), support transgender and non-binary identity formation, and act as a form of political resistance. This collaborative, community-based research aims to create spaces in which transgender and non-binary people can experience the personal and political impact of internal transformations within durational performance art ultimately inspiring systematic shifts, social justice, and united spaces where non-normative identities can flourish.

Alice Tremea (She/Her)

Alice was born and raised in Brazil, where she originally attended film school at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. She began her career as a filmmaker and further developed her art director and production design skills at Middlesex University, in London (UK). She went on to gain a Master's in Art History and Visual Culture from Richmond American University London, while interning for Essex County Council as a project assistant, where she developed multiple series of educational events for young women across the County. She has been a private tutor to international students of many nationalities since 2021, supporting their education through Film, Media, Art, and Art History studies at GCSE and further education levels. A cinema enthusiast since childhood, Alice had her first job being a video rental store clerk as a teen, which allowed her to consume countless hours of classics, B-movies, and underrated gems on VHS and DVD, cementing her love for physical media and inspiring her to write about movies.

Research

Alice is a horror enthusiast and studies the genre’s ability to represent contemporary fears, as well as cultural and national identities. Her MA thesis gathered and analysed data on the presence and quality of Latinx representation in contemporary Hollywood horror, comparing new characters and tropes to the historical ones described by Latin American studies scholars, such as Charles Ramírez Berg and Mary Beltrán. She has written chapters and presentations about Latin American representation, as well as on themes of colonisation, gentrification, ethnic and racial representations in the genre. 

Alice’s PhD study areas are Irish, Film, and Latin American studies. Her research project is a comparative study between 21st-century Irish and Latin American horror film productions. The study aims to analyse whether the cultures, although geographically and ethnically distinct, present similarities due to a shared history of colonisation and the influence of the Catholic Church. The research touches on themes of folklore, heritage, national identities, and women’s representation within these cinema industries.

Julie Trudel

Julie Trudel is a visual artist who subscribes to an extended definition of painting and whose practice is part of a reflexive and conceptual painting approach. She seeks to update traditional concerns of abstract painting through a renewal of its technical means — in terms of the medium, support and spatial layout. Her most recent plexiglas works are an exploration of the effects of ambient light on colour. Her works have been exhibited throughout Canada, in Europe and the United States, and have also been included in two major survey shows of contemporary Canadian painting. She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (Montréal). As a painting professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, she co-founded a research group focusing on light, the Labo lumière [créations + recherches interdisciplinaires].

Research

In her doctoral research-creation project, she would like to formulate a new definition of painting to better understand the scope of a pictorial practice like hers, and other contemporary artists, where painting as a material is absent. One of the hypotheses she wishes to validate is that colour, historically a founding parameter in the disciplinary definition of painting, remains relevant to its understanding in the multidisciplinary context of contemporary art. In this way, she would like to enrich the definition of “painting in the expanded field” proposed by Fares in 2004. All of this will allow for a new definition of painting to emerge, based on the artists’ perspective and on their feelings, which would have the potential to open up painting as a multidisciplinary artistic approach.

Burcu Yaşin

Burcu Yaşin is an interdisciplinary scholar/pianist/jazz vocal who works across sound studies, sensory studies and embodied research methodologies. She was trained as a musician and received her master's degree in the field of musicology with a thesis entitled A "Sonic" Transformation Story: Gaziosmanpaşa Sarıgöl Urban Renewal Project, which sheds light on the sonic impact of the ongoing gentrification in the Romani neighborhood Sarıgöl, Gaziosmanpaşa/Istanbul. Worked as a teaching assistant at Sabancı University for the courses Major Works of Classical Music and Major Works of 20th Century Music between the years 2017–2020, Burcu Yaşin is also a skinner releasing and Romani dance practitioner.

Research

Her project aims to explore how the Romani communities living in Istanbul use wedding ceremonies to construct their identity, to claim their existence in the space to both their fellows and the non-Romanies, and to constitute an “imagined now,” taking the women's experiences at the center. Additionally, the project also aspires to grasp how gentrification rendered Romani communities imperceptible in Istanbul, leaning on the literature of sensory studies.