The Fellows

two hands, one light brown and the other darker brown, grasping each other

Our participants were selected through a nationwide open call. We invited creative practitioners to apply as collectives or groups, and to have a research question prepared. Applicants were encouraged to base their questions on problem-solving new ways to thrive as artists in increasingly turbulent economic, social and political times. Out of 150 applicants, we selected 17 creative practitioners, who made up eight collectives. Gudskul, our partners in Jakarta, selected four artists from various parts of Indonesia to take part in the program.

 is a Gambian/Canadian, Montreal-based filmmaker. Recently a graduate from Concordia University, creating art through moving images has given her the means to describe experiences that may otherwise be forgotten or rarely explained. It has given her the power to illustrate blackness and queerness through film as reclamation. With her work, she is inspired by the inherent value of simple memories and how these tiny poignant moments almost escape description yet say so much. She hopes to continue to create entertaining films that resonate and keep viewers subtly reflecting.

 (they, she) is a Nigeria-born, Vancouver-raised filmmaker and photographer currently doing a BFA in film production at Concordia University. As a female growing up in a traditional Nigerian home in Canada, the dichotomy between the two cultures fuelled various projects she has taken on over the past few years and further pushed her to pursue storytelling in the form of visual arts. Emem strives to create work that challenges the notion of black portrayal, female representation, as well as explore the realms of afrofuturism, surrealism and expanded cinema. Her films, scripts, and photography have exhibited in spaces such as WIP Gallery, Cinema Quebec, VAV Gallery, Silicon Valley African Film Festival, the Diving Bell Social Club.

holds a Spec. Hons. Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Visual Arts from York University, and has over 6 years of experience in digital communications. Throughout her career, Avia set her intentions to giving back to the communities she is a part of, developing arts-based mental wellness programs and initiatives to empower youth. Having worked 4 years at the Ministry level focusing on workforce development in Toronto, Avia found her way back to the arts and mental health fields to continue creating programming designed to be impactful, culturally-relevant, and long-lasting for communities of colour and the systematically marginalized. Currently, Avia brings her unique skillset to her role as Communications Manager at AGATA Resource Centre (ARC), while continuously seeking opportunities to focus on art, community, and collective change.

(they/them) is an artist and non-architect currently living and studying in unceded Algonquin territories. They are interested in de-professional practices, liberatory education and subversive possibilities in the minor textures of everyday life. They
are inspired by abolitionist imaginaries, fugitive infrastructures, oceanic poetics, slow militancies and riotous possibilities towards collective liberation. Their work seeks speculative and tactile approaches to space and politics that are often situationist, improvisatory and unfinished. Their recent projects concern labour, time travel and collective practice.

Born in Palembang, Sumatra in 1994, Bandung-based artist Azizi Al Majid is an inquisitive observer of the art world. Dealing with meta-commentaries on contemporary art, the artist is particularly interested in the interpolation among art education, pedagogy, the public and contemporary practices. These ideas are expressed through a range of media, such as drawing, painting, video, installation and performative works.

Since graduating from the Department of Fine Arts, Drawing studio at Bandung Institute of Technology in 2017, Azizi has taken part in various exhibitions, including his two solo exhibitions, ‘It Ain’t Five Minutes Yet!’ (2017) at OMNISPACE, Bandung and ‘Not All Who Wander Are Lost’ (2017) at Lir Space, Yogyakarta. Other activities include showcasing at the last three editions of Art Jakarta (2018 to 2020) and taking part in the Sixth Bandung Contemporary Art Award 2019, where he was a finalist. At the same time, the artist double-hats as a part-time visual art teacher for secondary school students. This dual role as artist and educator further informs his interest in the pedagogical aspect of art and its practices.

Brandon Membrere is an audio-industry aficionado who was born in 1994 in Oakville, Ontario, and currently lives and works in Toronto. Since 2014 Brandon has been involved in an assortment of projects spanning the Music, Film and Live events realms through the medium of audio. He graduated from Seneca college in 2014 with a diploma in Independent Music Production and went on to obtain a diploma from the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology (OIART) in 2016. In 2017, he was assistant engineer at Room 21 for Anton Delost and Sam Guaiana, working on projects with bands such as Cleopatrick, Like Pacific, Bearings and All the Wasted Years. That same year he moved to Howl Studio to begin his engineering, producing and live sound engineer endeavours. He worked on musical projects with West End Jazz, Hotknives & Excuse Me, and on a short film called Allurement. Throughout his career he has also been involved in his personal music projects through Membrain, Ninety-5 and Cheezy Beats, gaining thousands of listens and playing gigs throughout the GTA. His approach when it comes to his music is being authentic, raw and groovy. This also translates to his production style too. His eclectic ear allows for a unique, fresh approach to projects. He blends genres and specific production techniques in unconventional ways, creating an explosion of musical fusion. Brandon is currently working with artists Amanda Movio and Upper Paradise on upcoming music, at Streamland Media doing post-production on TV shows and movies, as well as continuing his own music series Godless through Membrain.

is a Kanien’kehá:ka woman from Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory. She is a queer, multi-disciplinary artist in a wide spectrum of media. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from York University in Theatre Production and Design. She works within the theatre industry with a specialization in costuming. Her past works include the Costume Designer/Coordinator for The Way of The World, An Octaroon, Phillis Wheatley Creation, The Marriage of Figaro, African Cargo and Olaudah Equiano Creation. She looks forward to working with the ADC for Designing the Revolution. She is a mural artist working within the city as a member of the RUN Collective and the EarthSky Collective. She works with StART as a project coordinator and she is an Indigenous advisor for multiple projects. Previously, she worked at imagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival in Operations. She is the Programming Coordinator for the Toronto Queer Film Festival. She is the Indigenous Youth Artist-in-Residence at U of T Scarborough. She continues to grow within her field and explore new opportunities.

is an artist and writer based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish Territories. His artworks often take the form of long-term collaborations which engage collective labour practices and the histories of science and mathematics. With the activist and community television producer Sid Chow Tan, he is also currently working on a film centred around anti-colonial mythologies of the spirit Kwan Kung, to be released in 2023. He teaches at UBC and Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on science and technology studies, the history of consciousness and madness, and contemporary art practices within and beyond South Asia. Sajdeep currently works as a research assistant at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and serves as the Chairperson of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), a collective member of Sanghum Film, as a programming committee member of InterAccess. He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.

Don Vaillancourt (they/them) is a French-Canadian sound designer, musician, DJ, vinyl collector, and artist. They are also an outreach/harm-reduction worker, who found common ground marrying their passion for the arts with their compassion for marginalised communities. Don is currently an outreach/harm-reduction worker at The 519, and is one of the founding individuals responsible for co-facilitating their Breaking The Ice program, which focuses on supporting people who use crystal meth in Toronto’s Downtown east district. They have a specific focus on understanding the needs and barriers faced by LGBTQ2S people who use drugs and who also face mental health barriers. They also have extensive lived experience with bipolar disorder, body dysmorphic disorder, is a trauma survivor and implements their complex history as an educational tool in their work.

Don is also on the Service User Research & Ethics Subcommittee at the Center For Addiction and Mental Health. Additionally, Don is a member and Peer Support worker at Workman Arts and graduated from Yale University’s Lived Experience Transformational Leadership Academy in June 2022. They are currently pursuing a degree in Sexuality and Gender studies at York University and hopes that their combined education and experience will launch their career as an arts therapist.

Emkay Adjei-Manu (they/them) is GTA based multidisciplinary artist, community- engaged arts worker, and researcher. Their work is concerned with the function and form of visual storytelling as it relates to the study of Black embodiment, myth, and memory. Through their collage practice, they seek to challenge traditional and normative ways of storytelling. Their work has been exhibited by Factory Media Centre, Nia Centre for the Arts, McMaster Museum of Art, Xpace Cultural Centre, and published in Black Canadian print magazines such as PITCH magazine and 1919 MAG. At the moment, part of Emkay’s research centres the mapping of Black Canadian arts/collectives, community-archival practices, and Afro-diasporic visual and cultural production. They are passionate about community and relation building grounded in the arts, and is currently a founding member of bblackarts.co, an emerging Black arts-based collective.

Nuri Mahadere is an interdisciplinary artist and community arts worker based in Toronto. Building on a long time and inherited practice of note-taking, Nuri’s art and other creative practices seek to remember that which is forgotten, or not explicitly made visible, in order to work towards individual and collective healing.

is a fat, trans, Disabled, Sikh, panjabi, settler, and multidisciplinary artist and designer based in Tkaronto. Harmeet is doing their MA at York University in the Critical Disability Studies Program, and their academic work speaks to disability arts specific research and exploration. In their arts practice, Harmeet is currently focusing on textile art, illustration, painting and digital design. They use a disability justice framework in their art, by creating visuals that sensorily activate alternative paces, intimacy, rest, pleasure, and slowness. Harmeet is also a community organiser whose work further grounds the intentions of their artistic and academic practice. They are interested in creating and imagining temporalities and portals to elsewhere – where folks can show up as their fully embodied selves. Currently they are completing the ArtworksTO program and are the artist in residence and social media coordinator at the Possibilities Podcast,

As a community arts facilitator, Harmeet teaches digital zine making and digital design workshops to youth with accessible design in mind. Harmeet also has experience with creating a variety of cover art, along with compiling and publishing zines and journals. Harmeet’s select Shameless magazine, LGBT Youth Line, Canadian Roots Exchange, Sherbourne Health Centre, Toronto Market Co, Playwrights Canada Press and CBC. Additionally Harmeet has had their work sold at pop ups and markets at the Leslie Lohman Museum of art, The 519, Hard Feelings mental health shop, Stakt and AGO.

is a Pakistani-Canadian Muslim settler, visual artist and incoming medical student living in Treaty 14 territory. A self-taught comic artist, Harris comes to art as survival. He uses single- and multi-frame comics to explore joymaking, survivorship, chronic illness, gender, radical love, and dreaming futures. His primary medium is digital webcomics/zines self-published to instagram. His digital comic/zine collections include: “Herbert Lemon” (2013-16), “I’ll Talk to You Later” (2019), and he is currently working on “I am Harris” (2021-Present) and “I’m Sorry, Thank you, and You’re Welcome” (forthcoming). As an emerging independent artist, Harris is now looking to better curate his collections and transition into the Canadian and international publishing landscape. His artistic and design work has been produced in collaboration with acolourdeep.ca, LGBT Youthline, Pride Toronto Festival, and the federal public service. You can find his comic collections on instagram at @harris.i.qureshi

As an aspiring family physician, Harris is interested in providing longitudinal, trauma-informed primary care to suburban and peri-rural queer and trans Black, Indigenous and People of Colour. His vision is to collaboratively facilitate safety for marginalized folks and survivors at first contact with health systems, improve patient retention, and offer stewardship through wider medical and health systems. Harris was a Peer Counsellor and Head Coordinator of the UTM Sexual Education & Peer Counselling Centre for three years, and currently serves as a Community Advisor for 2SLGBTQ+ community health education programming and research on HIV and STBBI testing for Moyo Health Care Services, the Community-Based Research Centre, and most recently the Region of Peel Office of office of Culture, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

is a nonbinary, mad and multiply disabled, digital media artist, settler of Guyanese and English descent living in Tkaronto. They are interested in where community arts meets community health. They practice arts admin. and project management as care work with roots in disability justice. As a whole, their creative work seeks to create breathing space for survivors and queer, disabled, racialized communities. During the pandemic, this work has grown to revolve around explorations of love-grief as praxis, on a multi-sensory scale, and through the celebration of diverse bodyminds. Chosen media include: illustration, poetry, and film.

Last year, Jasmine was selected as a featured storyteller in the public arts project, Dis/Play, created by Ophira Calof in partnership with the ReelAbilities Film Festival Toronto/Miles Nadal JCC – part of ArtWorxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art 2021-2022. Jasmine was also selected as part of the second cohort of CBRC’s Summit Creators Project and was a contributing illustrator for the Two-Spirit, Trans, and Nonbinary mental health affirmation colouring book “Tales of Our Truths” by Consent is Golden at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Currently, Jasmine is an Educational Programming Assistant at DMG Toronto, a member of the Board of Directors at the Toronto Queer Film Festival, and former Project Manager at AccessCBC. They are also a part of the first cohort of the Ways of Attuning Curatorial Study Group through ~wave~form~projects and Critical Distance. They hold a B.A. in Radio & TV/Media Production from Toronto Metropolitan University’s RTA School of Media. 2022 marks 10 years for them working as a community artist-facilitator and in creative industries.

(they/she) is a queer, ace spec, neurodivergent, chronically ill/“spoonie”, second generation South Asian-South Indian settler, born and raised in Tkaronto. They are an interdisciplinary student + creative engaging in various community led & mutual aid organizing, communal creative forums, “activist scholarship”, and “desire-based research”. They have a dedication to learning and actively engaging with the knowledge of community, elders, peers, activists, scholars, through explorations of art and scholarship. Their academic work, creative practices, and personal work are interconnected and revolve around disability justice, traditional and holistic healing modalities & non- colonial approaches to medicine, abolition of “carceral care” in favour of “deviant care”, relational & environmental sustainability, with the liberation of Black and Brown women, femme, and gender diverse people at the centre of that. She believes that reproductive justice – in part with sexual health education and intimacy as whole – is integral to that. MJ is a strong believer in healing through community and (co)creation – whether that be creating zines, painting, photographs, collages, storytelling, or cooking and combinations of the above. Mediums that they often work in are: jewelry, textiles (such as sewing, embroidery), photography, and watercolour painting – all surrounding themes of milestones, memory keeping, processing traumas, and healing in tangible ways in a manner of record-keeping.

was born in SoE in 1998. Media art is his primary focus. He is currently interested in AI-generated visuals, open-source software, and sound art, especially microtuning. He is an emerging artist from East Nusa Tenggara and has been part of group exhibitions like Artidentity 2021 Tangerang Indonesia and “Solo” Exhibition in Sydney Australia. He makes art about the Psychological, Limerence, Local Culture and Archiving through Sound.

was born 1992 in Bogor. Her personal experiences as a child, wife, and mother are the predominant themes in her artwork. For Meita, family constitutes the smallest social sphere of society. Meita is an embroidery artist who applies her art form to various types of presentation, including installation art and participatory art. Engaging in embroidery is for her an intimate process and part of the identity of personal work. Meita uses intimacy and honesty as self-control in relating her experiences in the art of embroidery.

was born and raised in Palopo in 1992, before he moved to Makassar to continue his study in Universitas Hasanuddin. During his undergraduate degree in the English Department, he was a member of an art community in his faculty named Kelompok Study Seni, Sastra, dan Teater (Kosaster FIB-UH), mostly playing the instruments (gandrang and suling) and working in installation for a theatre performance.

After graduation, he worked with several event organizers and on several film productions as a prop master and builder. At the end of 2020, he started to hang out and work in Riwanua, an initiative based in Makassar. From August to November 2021, he participated in a residency program organized by Riwanua in Gudside/Gudskul, Jakarta, for literature research and book publication about the stories of relation between Indonesia and countries around the world through youth exchange programs. From November 2021 to February 2022, he participated in the program “P2P Ngariung,” an online residential program held by Gudskul Indonesia and PARI australia. He joined as a runner for the production of Sebastian Diaz Morales’s video installation project Smashing Monuments for documenta fifteen in March 2022.

is an artist, poet, and educator from Venezuela. Susana’s work is infused with intentional happiness and it responds to her recovery journey, and the desire to spread joy. Susana is currently preoccupied with the preservation of memories, retracing family migrations, and diasporic trauma. Susana is a Yale University fellow and founded ReclaimedArts.ca as her final project. She sits on the Member Advisory Committee of Workman Arts, and is a Writers Collective of Canada facilitator. Susana is actively working on various solo and group shows and is on the 2023 cohort of the Global Leaders Program.

Website: https://cargocollective.com/susanameza
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susanamakesart/

is a writer and editor. Her lived experience informs her writing on topics related to mental health and trauma. Miranda’s work has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Broadview Magazine, The Walrus, Xtra, and more. Her story, “Kids in Crisis,” received an honourable mention from the National Magazine Awards.

She writes a monthly(ish) newsletter, Life as a Lunatic, about coping with mental illness. She’s also co-editor of AFTERNOON, a yearly arts and letters magazine. From 2021 to 2022, Miranda was a Fellow at Yale University’s Lived Experience Transformational Leadership Institute. In her spare time, Miranda sits on numerous mental health advisory councils.

Instagram: @mirandanewman