Vanessa Dion Fletcher is an independent artist. She employs porcupine quills, Wampum belts, and menstrual blood to reveal the complexities of what defines a body physically and culturally. She links these ideas to personal experiences with language, fluency, and understanding. All of these themes are brought together in the context of her Potawatomi and Lenape ancestry, and her learning disability caused by a lack of short-term memory. Her work is held in the Indigenous Art Center Collection in Gatineau, Quebec. In 2016, Dion Fletcher graduated from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago with an M.F.A in performance. She is the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Santa Fe, New Mexico U.S.A.

Alex Bulmer is an award-winning Canadian writer, performer, and art maker. She has written for CBC radio, BBC radio, film and television and UK Channel 4. Notable projects include: Life Unseen, a critically acclaimed sound installation; SMUDGE, which was nominated twice for Best New Play in Canada and named Time Out’s Critics Choice in the UK. She was also a writer for the all disabled BAFTA nominated television series Cast Offs which ran in the UK in 2009. Alex has worked locally with Buddies, Nightwood, Theatre Centre, and internationally with Royal Court Theatre, the London 2012 Olympics, Polka Theatre and Graeae Theatre Company. She is also the artistic director of the UK based company, Invisible Flash. Alex is a fellow of the Winston Churchill Trust and was named one of the UK’s most influential disabled artists in 2014. She is proud to share best actress award with fellow blind performer Margot Carghil in Awake, which screened at Film Festival’s in Moscow, San Francisco and Dresden. Alex celebrates the infusion of disability into the arts and welcomes participatory design for a more inclusive world.

Lara Kramer is the artistic director and choreographer Lara Kramer Danse (Montreal). Kramer is an Oji-Cree (Ojibwe and Cree) choreographer and multidisciplinary artist whose work is intimately linked to her memory and Aboriginal roots. She received her BFA in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University. Working with strong visuals and narrative, Kramer’s work pushes the strength and fragility of the human spirit. Her work is political and potent, often examining political issues surrounding Canada and First Nations Peoples. Kramer has been recognized as a Human Rights Advocate through the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. Her work has been presented widely across Canada and abroad to Australia. Kramer’s works have been hailed by critics, these include Fragments (2009), inspired by her mother’s stories of being in residential school, and Native Girl Syndrome (2013), which exposes the marginalization and victimization of Indigenous women and the effects of cultural genocide. In 2017 the installation and performance piece This Time Will be Different, created in collaboration with Émilie Monnet, denounced the status quo of the Canadian government’s discourse regarding First Nations and criticized the “national reconciliation industry”. Phantom Stills & Vibrations (2018), created in collaboration with Stefan Petersen pulls the spectator into the former Pelican Falls residential school near Sioux Lookout, Ontario where three generations of her family attended.

Max (Sarah) Ferguson has been a practicing artist since 1996 and received his BFA from the University of Regina in 2001. He graduated with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Visual Art and Women’s and Gender Studies) in 2017 and is currently pursuing his PhD in Art and Women’s and Gender Studies at York University. His artistic explorations involve disability studies, gender, non-neurotypical and trans-queer sexualities, activism, the body, surrealism, anti-colonial approaches to artmaking, and psychoanalysis. Max has worked with a variety of media, ranging from computer-based works and readymades, to paintstick, graphite, and digital collage. His practice blends high and low art approaches, and draws from a mixture of art and academic theory, pop culture, and other influences. Currently, his work revolves around hybridized notions of photography, sculpture, music, sound, installation and performance, and involves psychoanalysis, the body, activism, queer/trans theory, assumed whiteness, internalized racism and Indigeneity, and issues of madness and non neurotypical ways of being. He is also a published poet and writer, holds a degree in journalism, and has worked as a political, legal, military and arts writer in four different provinces over the past decade.