Laura Barron
Laura Barron is a musician, writer, facilitator and community artist whose 30-year career as a flutist has brought her from the Yukon to New Zealand, including solo appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and several performances at Carnegie Hall. She now harnesses her experience as a performer and teacher in her role as the Founder /Executive Director of Instruments of Change. This Vancouver-based non-profit leads numerous community arts initiatives that engage with incarcerated women in Canada, at-risk youth in India, educators in Zambia, and many other diverse groups. Here, she has found her greatest reach and impact designing experiences that empower underserved and often marginalized individuals to become instruments of change in their own lives as they find their own creative voices. Most meaningfully, she started the Vancouver branch of Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project, where she works with single mothers escaping violence, to co-create original songs for their children. Always striving for relevance in her work, she guides young artists to find intersections between their talents, passions and social concerns in ICASC’s Futures:forward initiative, as she did on the faculties of the Universities of OR, WI & N. AZ. She also facilitates climate action art projects for the Conservation Council of New Brunswick’s Harm to Harmony initiative, out of which her composition, Come Home – an ancient forest lullaby, emerged from a collaborative lyric-writing process that she led with tree activists across Canada. Laura accepts numerous public speaking invitations to share principles and best practices in Arts for Social Change. She is also a frequent blogger, most recently about artistic responses to the pandemic, globally, in These Adagio Days. And she brings all of her professional experiences together in her new writing project, Key Changes, a novel based on the healing power of music.
Eveline Kolijn
Eveline Kolijn is a printmaker and installation artist. Her interest in natural history and concern for the environment were fostered by growing up in the Caribbean, where she experienced both the beauty and demise of coral reefs. Eveline received a MA in cultural anthropology from the Leiden University in the Netherlands in 1986 and a BFA from the Alberta College of Art+ Design in 2008 including the Governor General’s Award for academic achievement. She has participated in national and international exhibitions and residencies, public art projects and community engagement. She has been published in various scientific publications. She is an instructor at the Alberta University of the Arts School of Continuing Education. In 2018, she joined the Energy Futures Lab as a Fellow and in 2019, she received the AUArts Alumni Legacy award.
seeley quest sie/hir
Currently designing a project of radio drama miniseries with a companion interactive web platform. Focusing on solarpunk narratives, this broadcast/podcast’s episodes are set 15 years ahead in a radically refashioning Canadian urban-scape. Anglophone, Francophone, Allophone, and Indigenous community members liaison across Montreal and Ottawa to continue adapting with climate-resilient housing, localization of food, energy, and healthcare resource generation and recycling operations, and community governance practices to address fair distribution and trade agreements. This “speculative realism” story crafting includes humour, sober and optimistic projections of near-future potentials to build toward. Covering a year of neighbours extending a network of residential/industrial eco-complexes, the project aims for collaborative episode building with scriptwriters and actors. To represent realistic urban futures, a majority of cast and crew will also be disabled and/or racialized.
Brian Postalian
Artistic Director of Re:Current Theatre, which is dedicated to creating work that reimagines gathering. As of Spring 2022, he is currently working on ‘Brian and Jackie’s 100 Neoliberal Climate Change Crusade Plays to Conquer the Malaise of Your Fears to Do Anything in the Age of Climate Change.’ It is a satirical performance about truth, fear, and absurdity in the age of climate change. His touring work ‘New Societies’ is an interactive theatrical experience to create your ideal society in a mega-game of collaboration, competition, and potential.
Danielle Smith- Thistle Cove
Danielle Smith is self-taught mixed media fiber artist from Fredericton, New Brunswick. She received Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in Forestry from the University of New Brunswick. She is the owner of Thistle Cove Fiber Studio.
Danielle taught herself felting in 2018 while living in the UK. Danielle uses art as a mechanism to engage communities in conversations around the impacts of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and the importance of connecting people to nature. She is a juried member of Craft NB and a Member of the Conservation Council’ of New Brunswick’s “From Harm to Harmony Artist Collective”. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions with the aim of creating awareness about the specific challenges that climate change poses in New Brunswick and inspire her community to adopt more thoughtful practices that will mitigate the negative impacts of climate change.
Emerise LeBlanc – Nowlan
Émerise LeBlanc-Nowlan, retired from her career as a mental health nurse, obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Université de Moncton and received the Pascal Certificate of Excellence.
She has participated in several painting and textile art exhibitions in Ottawa, Bouctouche and Moncton. She also managed her own art gallery, Artgora, for 10 years.
Author and illustrator under the artist’s name Emy, the Acadian has published five children’s books with Bouton d’or Acadie. She has received the iParenting Media Award and the Dr. Marilyn Trenholme Counsell Award.
Since 2005, Émerise has participated in several school animation projects combining art and writing in schools in the Moncton, Edmundston, Dartmouth, Montreal, and Ottawa regions.
Director of the Banque d’Art Populaire Acadien collections at the Kent Museum in Bouctouche.
Member of Gallery 12, AAAPNB (Association Artiste Acadienne Professionnelle Nouveau Brunswick), CARFAC, TIGHR (The international Guild of Handhooking Rugmakers), and les Hookeuses du Bor’de’lo
Deltra Powney
My visual language is interdisciplinary, informed by placemaking and a consciousness of what we have come to understand about our being in the world. I develop these thoughts through reading texts about human/environmental relationships, and immersive field research experiences. I focus on riparian zones where I sketch, paint and photograph micro-environments. I further explore the relational enchantment I have with these spaces in my studio through drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and assemblage.
Charmaine Lurch
Charmaine Lurch is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work draws attention to human-environmental relationalities. Lurch’s paintings and sculptures are conversations on infrastructures and the spaces and places we inhabit. Working with a range of materials and reimagining our surroundings—from bees and taxi cabs to The Tempest and quiet moments of joy, Lurch subtly connects Black life and movement globally.
Hannah Gelderman
Hannah Gelderman (she/her) is a settler of Dutch descent, living in the region called Amiskwaciwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, Alberta. She works in the arts as an educator, illustrator and visual artist. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art and Design at the University of Alberta in 2012, and then began to work with a variety of organizations to develop and facilitate art programs for children, youth and adults. Alongside this, Hannah is involved in the climate justice movement, to which she brings extra enthusiasm for arts-based organizing. In 2020 Hannah graduated with a Master of Education in Adult Education and Community Engagement from the University of Victoria. She focussed her research on the role of participatory visual arts in this era of climate crisis, which came together as a series of zines titled Collective Arts for Climate Justice.
Félix Bernier
Félix Bernier is an interdisciplinary artist now based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax with a background in software engineering. His work explores the human connection to land and the impact of digital technologies to our physical environment and to human interactions. Using photography, installation, sculptural elements and digital technologies, Félix presents the complex inter-relations of the physical and the digital as sources of interrogation. Félix completed his Master of Fine Arts at NSCAD University in 2021.
