Dr. Eliza Chandler is Assistant Professor in the School of Disability Studies at X University, wherein she teaches courses on disability arts and culture, cultural representations of disability, leadership and community building, and intersectional activist movements. Earning her PhD from the Social Justice and Education department at the University of Toronto in 2014, Chandler was dually appointed as the artistic director at Tangled Art + Disability, an organization in Toronto dedicated to the cultivation of disability arts, and the postdoctoral research fellow in X University’s School of Disability Studies from 2014-2016. During this time, she was the also the founding artistic director of Tangled Art Gallery, Canada’s first art gallery dedicated to showcasing disability art and advancing accessible curatorial practice. Chandler is also the co-director of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded partnership project, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, a seven-year research project that interrogates the close relationship between activist art and the achievement of social justice. She is also the director of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant that explores how accessibility practices that are led by disabled people and our politics change how we create and interact with arts and culture. Chandler is a practicing curator and regularly gives lectures, interviews, and consultations related to disability arts, accessible curatorial practices, and disability politics in Canada.

Dr. Carla Rice is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph, specializing in disability and embodiment studies and in unconventional and creative research methodologies. In 2012, she founded the Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice as an arts-informed research centre with a mandate to foster inclusive communities and social well-being. She is Principal Investigator of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, a multi-year, multi-site disability and non-normative arts grant that she co-directs with Dr. Eliza Chandler. She has received awards for advocacy, research, and mentorship has published on embodied difference, non-normative cultures, and practices of accessibility and inclusion. Published books include Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain (with Marg Hobbs, 2nd Edition, 2018); Becoming Women: The Embodied Self in Image Culture (2014); The Aging/Disability Nexus (with Katie Aubrecht and Christine Kelly, 2020); and Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice (with May Friedman and Jen Rinaldi, 2020).

Dr. Katie Aubrecht is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Canada Research Chair Health Equity and Social Justice at St. Francis Xavier (St.F.X.) University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Her research program analyzes marginality and mental health, rurality and resilience across the life span as health equity and social justice issues. This work draws on social theory, intersectional disability studies, aging studies and interpretive, decolonizing and arts-informed qualitative research methods to analyze disability and care education, policy and practice. As Director of the Spatializing Care: Intersectional Disability Studies Research Lab at St.F.X., Aubrecht leads a participatory arts-informed health research infrastructure that supports and enhances meaningful and ethical community engagement and cross-sectoral collaboration to bridge medical, social and cultural approaches to care. 

Janice Keefe is Professor and Chair of Family Studies and Gerontology at the Mount Saint Vincent University. She holds the Lena Isabel Jodrey Chair in Gerontology and is Director of the Nova Scotia Centre on Aging. Dr. Keefe is an Adjunct Professor with Dalhousie Medicine and Affiliate Scientist with Nova Scotia Health. She sits on numerous advisory committees such as Statistics Canada’s Demography Committee, Canadian Dementia Strategy, Canadian Institute of Health Information and is Vice-Chair of the European More Years Better Lives Scientific Advisory Board. Earlier this year, Dr Keefe was named a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. She is the Scientific Director of Seniors – Adding Life to Years (SALTY), pan-Canadian research examining quality of life for residents in long term care (LTC), Principal Investigator on CIHR-funded Homecare Pathways project, and leads research examining the implementation of support visitations by family during COVID. Her research expertise centers on family/friend caregivers, continuing care policies and rural aging.  Dr. Keefe has published more than 80 scholarly articles and more than 75 technical reports for government in her 30-year career and mentors many graduate students and post–doctoral fellows in this research area.  She continues to chair the NS Ministerial Expert Panel on LTC and co-authored the 2020 Royal Society of Canada’s report on COVID-19 and the future of LTC.