Alyssa Kostello
Alyssa is a queer filmmaker based in Musqueum, Squamish, Tsliel Waututh land (Vancouver). Her first short film Zero (writer, Sustainability Producer) won a Green Seal from the Environmental Media Association and played at festivals globally. It’s now streaming on Sofy.tv and The Green Channel. She has produced a handful of short films, plays and live events, and is a co-producer for the indie feature How to Ruin The Holidays starring Colin Mochrie and Amber Nash. In 2021 she was a Sustainability Coordinator on the Netflix film Mixtape starring Julie Bowen. She is a Climate Reality Leader, a Vancouver Community Climate Leader and has worked with the Sustainable Production Forum for 3 years and is always looking for different ways to educate other filmmakers on how to green their film sets both on and off camera.
Elizabeth Sampson
My work investigates shifts in landscapes that are impacted by climate change. My driving questions are “What is an environment’s adaptive capacity for survival?”, “At what point will environments fall apart?” and “How will these spaces be rebuilt?”. I am drawn to the way that living beings navigate and adapt to climate-vulnerable landscapes; specifically how resilience manifests in response to degrading habitats. My work is a resting point for these narratives; both for the present reality and the imagined future.
Sarah Joy Stoker
Deeply preoccupied by and committed to ecological health and justice, I am a settler living and working in art and movement practice. With the utmost respect and gratitude, and deep sadness for what has come before and continues today, honouring the land, water, sky and animals of the unceded ancestral homeland of the Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit territories on this, Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland, and Labrador).
Melanie Kloetzel/kloetzel&co.
kloetzel&co. is a dance theatre company committed to works that span stage, site, and screen. Begun in New York City, kloetzel&co. now makes its home in Canada, where it has grown increasingly concerned with the intersection between art-making and social and environmental justice. The company’s research projects emerge from practice-as-research methodologies and result in events, workshops and encounters in theatre spaces, alternative venues, online environments, and spaces of public assembly. kloetzel&co. is particularly dedicated to artistic collaboration and interdisciplinary practices and the company enjoys fostering creative experiments with writers, filmmakers, composers, designers, visual artists, landscape designers, and musicians in each place along its choreographic journey. Award-winning films from the company have been presented across four continents, and live presentation highlights include presentations at New York’s Movement Research at the Judson Church, Danspace, and The Flea Theatre, as well as in hotels, train stations, board rooms, parking lots and gallery spaces. kloetzel&co. is directed by Melanie Kloetzel (MFA, PhD) a performance maker, scholar and educator who has created over fifty works for the company. Kloetzel is also the co-director of the art intervention collective TRAction. Kloetzel’s publications can be found in many scholarly journals as well as in her co-edited anthology Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces (2009), the co-authored (Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Perspectives (2019), and the co-authored Covert: A Handbook, which are currently available from University Press of Florida, Intellect, and Triarchy Press, respectively. Kloetzel is Professor of Dance at the University of Calgary.
Sally Morgan/Slow Dance Lab
Sally Morgan (she/her) lives in K’jipuktuk/Halifax. She is a mother, an improviser, an interdisciplinary dance/performance artist, a movement and environmental educator. She has been a part of the Canadian dance community for 25 years, studying nationally/internationally in contemporary and postmodern dance, improvisation/contact improvisation, and somatic practices. Her work has been presented across Canada, in Europe and the USA.
Juliet Palmer
Juliet Palmer’s music has come to life under a highway off-ramp, in a swimming pool, in the plastic flotsam of a remote beach and in concert halls across North America, Europe and Oceania. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Juliet makes her home in Toronto where she is artistic director of Urbanvessel, a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Urbanvessel
Urbanvessel creates new performance works through interdisciplinary collaboration. Rooted in music and sound, the power of the human voice is at the heart of our creative process. Led by Artistic Director Juliet Palmer and drawing upon the diverse talents of our collaborators, Urbanvessel fuses sound, music, text, imagery and movement. Urbanvessel shares knowledge through our educational programmes and community outreach activities.
Marie LeBlanc
Marie LeBlanc is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist. Through photography, multimedia projection, short film, performance and wordsmithing she explores themes related to landscape, isolation, beauty, health and nature. Capturing faces, shapes, shadows and reflections with digital and on-camera effects, often superimposing her own reflection, she seeks to embrace the present moment and the ethereal world around her.
Danielle Manuel
Saint John-based creator, Danielle Manuel, is creating and learning in the unceded and traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaw Nations. Her self-taught work holds many forms including digital art, mixed media, acrylic painting, felting, photography, and most recently, spore printing. She has experience in designing and creating art for an annual publication of poetry, designing album covers, large scale acrylic painting, murals, custom portraits, and other adventures.
Aeris Körper Contemporary Dance
Aeris Körper is a professional dance company based in Hamilton. We bring people into their bodies through movement, awareness of sensations and connection to self and others with the aim of fostering resilience, understanding and empathy. This allows us to lean into blocks of self-expression which ultimately leads to self empowerment, community building and social change.
