Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. She directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. Additionally, she is a stream lead on a SSHRC partnership grant Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. Other curatorial projects include The Artist’s Soup Kitchen – a 6 week performance project that explore food soveriegnty, queer feminist solidarity, and the communal act of cooking and eating together. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies www.stephaniespringgay.com

Priya Thomas is Research Associate Academic, McMaster University, where she serves as curriculum designer with the SSHRC-funded project, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life. A dance/theatre historian with a multidisciplinary critical practice, her research/creation straddles dance, performance, theatre, music, digital media, sound art, and community-based projects. Across these domains, she pursues questions around ontology and the human in performance. Her research on the historical configurations of the monster has been recognized through publications in leading, peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, international conferences, and a number of research awards, grants, and fellowships.Until June 2021, she served as a tenure-stream assistant professor at Texas Woman’s University, where she taught across the BA, MA, MFA, and PhD Programs in the Department of Dance. She is Book Reviews Editor for Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada (University of Toronto Press); and Affiliate Research Faculty with the York Centre for Asian Research at York University, where she leads the Mindfulness in Motion Lab, an international research consortium/resource centre dedicated to the study of mindfulness in movement-based modalities. She is currently writing a SSHRC-funded book on the monster in transatlantic contexts of the long nineteenth century.