Student profiles

Victor Arroyo

Victor Arroyo (b. 1977 Mexico) is a video artist working in the cross field between cinema and contemporary art. His work has been most recently exhibited at 2021 BIENALSUR, Canadian Centre for Architecture CCA, Cinémathèque Québécoise, Cinemateca do Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Kasseler Dokfest, Sheffield Doc/Fest, RIDM, among others.

Research

His films are informed by various modes of listening and seeing, emerging from long periods of observation and documentation. His research seeks to examine the specificity and geopolitics of place, exploring the possibilities laying dormant between ethnographic research, academic writing and artistic practice.

His most recent research was published by DIO Press (New York, NY).

victor-arroyo.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Emilie St-Hilaire

Emilie St-Hilaire is a multidisciplinary artist and doctoral candidate in the Humanities PhD program. Her FRQSC-funded interdisciplinary doctoral research examines the sub-cultural phenomenon of reborn dolls from a feminist perspective. She has participated in several research-creation projects at Canadian universities and has presented conference papers on research in the arts. She has authored and co-authored writing in Canadian Art Review (RACAR) and the Journal International de Bioéthique.

Research

Emilie studies lifelike dolls and the motivations of their collectors in order to rethink non-human companionship.

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.

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.