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.
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.
Through audio and video recordings, Anju Singh has been exploring the sounds, currents, and textures of moving waters in Coast Salish Territories for the creation of new works of manipulated video/sound art pieces. The pieces intend to investigate her personal relationship with the moving waters and messages that they carry. Anju’s previous works include using instruments and sound sources to connect with and give new voices to natural landscapes, water, trees, and plants.
Audrey Lane Cockett is a filmmaker, artistic director, spoken word poet, ecologist, and outdoor educator based in Treaty 7 Land. Their work is rooted in wild and they are a passionate advocate for mental health awareness, love, and intersectional care for community and the natural world.
They believe in art as an avenue for learning, healing, connecting and transforming.
HERD: Inuit Voices on Caribou is a research-based film project led by Inuit from the Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut regions of Labrador, Canada, with the goal of documenting, preserving, and sharing Inuit knowledge and experiences with caribou. Between 2016-2022, we talked with, filmed, and photographed over 80 Inuit from across 12 distinct communities in Labrador; we documented caribou and landscapes from various parts of Nunatsiavut and NunatuKavut; and we collected archival multimedia from decades in the past. As a result, we gathered over 100 hours of footage, thousands of photographs, and countless memories from knowledge holders who were involved in this work. More information, photos, and writings can be found at: www.herdfilm.ca
Hitoko Okada is an interdisciplinary fibre artist, curator, facilitator, and storyteller. Her work explores the politics and cultural significance of Japanese heritage textile folk crafts, fashion, gendered and racialized garment labour from historical, critical, and anti-capitalist perspectives. She engages ancient Japanese practices of thread-making and shifu weaving to commune with ancestral knowledge and relationship to cloth, plants, earth, and spirit. She works on an urban organic farm and is growing her first urban scale crop of Japanese indigo. Her work has been exhibited in various galleries and events in Vancouver, Toronto, Hamilton, and Burlington. She is the recipient of multiple grants and awards including Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council of the Arts and City of Hamilton Arts Awards.
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.
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).
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 (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.
The Climate Art Web (CAW-WAC) is a grassroots network that brings together climate artists living in northern Turtle Island (Canada).
