MENTORS
BIOGRAPHIES
& RECOGNITIONS
-
Allyson Mitchell is a maximalist artist working in sculpture, performance, installation and film. Her practice melds feminism and pop culture to investigate contemporary ideas about sexuality, autobiography and the body, largely through the use of reclaimed textile and abandoned craft. These articulations have resulted in a coven of lesbian feminist Sasquatch monsters, a room-sized Vagina Dentata, an army of super genius Holly Hobbies and a woodland utopic library complete with a wishing well of forbidden political knowledge.
-
Archer Pechawis is a performance artist, new media artist, filmmaker, writer, curator, and educator, born in Alert Bay, BC in 1963. He has been a practicing artist since 1984 with particular interest in the intersection of Plains Cree culture and digital technology, merging "traditional" objects such as hand drums with digital video and audio sampling.
His work has been exhibited across Canada and in Paris, France, and featured in publications such as Fuse Magazine and Canadian Theatre Review. Archer has been the recipient of many Canada Council, British Columbia and Ontario Arts Council awards, and won the Best New Media Award at the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and Best Experimental Short at imagineNATIVE in 2009. Archer works extensively with Native youth as part of his art practice, teaching performance and digital media for various organizations and in the public school system. Of Cree and European ancestry, he is a member of Mistawasis First Nation, Saskatchewan.
-
Billy Gerard Frank (born in Grenada) is a Multi-Media Artist, Filmmaker, and Film Curator--- An autodidact living in New York. He was recently selected to represent Grenada at 58th La Biennale di Venezia 2019 and is also one of the artists in the collective representing the island at 59th La Biennale di Venezia 2022.
Frank's practices mine personal memories, political, and social histories and challenge dominant and normative discourses around them. His research-based work addresses issues of migration, race, and global politics as they relate to gender, minority status, and post-colonial subjects. He moved to London as a teenager, where he began painting and exploring experimental video art and installation before moving to New York to pursue further studies in studio art at atelier like The Art Students League of New York, The National Academy of Fine Arts, and filmmaking at The New School for Social Research. His collected, altered, and own mixed media artworks and films have been exhibited in groups and solo shows in galleries and Institutions like The Brooklyn Museum (2020) and is in several private collections and institutions like the National Academy Museum of Fine Arts and Design. Over the years, he has been an artist-in-residence at several artist residencies.
Frank is also the founder of Nova Frontier Film Festival & LAB that showcases films and arts from and about the African Diaspora, the Middle East, and Latin America. As an educator, he has lectured at universities like the School of Visual Arts, New York University, and he is a Lecturer/Faculty in Design and Directing at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.
Since 2005, after studying filmmaking and media arts at The New School University, Frank has worked as a writer, director, and production designer, in both narrative and documentary films that were screened at international film festivals, like Sundance and Berlinale. His narrative short film, Absence Of Love, which he wrote and directed, premiered at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, shown in over 50 international film festivals. He was nominated for a European Music Video award in the category of Production Design for his design of Warner Music Group artist. He is presently in development on two narrative feature films.
Frank currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
-
Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won jury and audience awards internationally. His debut documentary feature, Framing Agnes, premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed No Ordinary Man, a feature-length documentary about jazz musician Billy Tipton, which was presented at Cannes Docs 2020 as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2020, No Ordinary Man has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” The film has won 9 awards on the international festival circuit, including being named to TIFF Canada’s Top Ten. Joynt’s first book You Only Live Twice (co- authored with Mike Hoolboom) was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail and CBC.
Most recently, he directed episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories for the CW, which are now streaming on Netflix. With Samantha Curley, Chase runs Level Ground Productions in Los Angeles. Agnes, the pioneering, pseudonymized, transgender woman who participated in Harold Garfinkel’s gender health research at UCLA in the 1960s, has long stood as a figurehead of trans history. In this rigorous cinematic exercise that blends fiction and nonfiction, director Chase Joynt explores where and how her platform has become a pigeonhole. Framing Agnes endeavors to widen the frame through which trans history is viewed — one that has remained too narrow to capture the multiplicity of experiences eclipsed by Agnes’. Through a collaborative practice of reimagination, an impressive lineup of trans stars (Zackary Drucker, Angelica Ross, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard, and Stephen Ira) take on vividly rendered, impeccably vintage reenactments, bringing to life groundbreaking artifacts of trans healthcare.
-
Elyla (Fredman Barahona) is a performance artist and queer activist. Their work critically explores the masculine lineage of the Sandinista revolution, the narratives of national identity, and the experience of being a cochon barro-mestiza in a religious, conservative society. Elyla developed a body of work addressing the exclusionary implications of the concept of mestizaje, whose narrative has erased—and converted into commodities—Indigenous and Black identities under the umbrella of inclusive rhetoric. The artist coined the term barro-mestiza to take distance from the traditional understanding of mestizaje and reclaim their Indigenous ancestry, in dialogue with tran-ancestral struggles of precolonial corpodivinities and the memory of the barro (land and soil).
In 2013, Elyla co-founded Operación Queer, a collective that blurred the limits between academia, art, and activism, and took a public position against the persecution of sexual dissidence by the repressive government of Daniel Ortega. The artist’s early work consisted of actions in public space that usually defied the authoritarian restrictions and the acceptance of censorship imposed through persecution and terror.
-
Jas Rault (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture, Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Jas’s research focuses on trans- feminist and queer digital praxes and protocols; media histories of settler coloniality, white supremacy and sexuality; aesthetics and affects of social movements. Recent publications include "Window Walls and Other Tricks of Transparency: Digital, Colonial and Architectural Modernity” (American Quarterly); "White Noise, White Affects: Filtering the Sameness of Queer Suffering (Feminist Media Studies); "Ridiculizing Power: Relajo and the Affects of Queer Activism in Mexico” (Scholar & Feminist Online).
Rault’s first book is Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity: Staying In (Ashgate/Routledge) and they're currently working on a book, provisionally entitled Open Secrets: Technologies of Whiteness in Decline, about the ambient media of white cruelty -- the sound, architecture and interface designs that try so hard to make the violences of settler colonial whiteness feel like comfort, justice and good taste.
Rault is also a co-director of the Critical Digital Methods Institute and a co-author of the Feminist Data Manifest-No.
-
Mark Gevisser is one of South Africa’s foremost writers. To research The Pink Line, Mark travelled to over twenty countries, with the help of an Open Society Fellowship. His journalism on the new global discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity has appeared in The Guardian, Granta, and The New York Times. Mark’s other books include the prize-winning A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, and Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir.
Mark was born in Johannesburg in 1964, and graduated from Yale in 1987 with a degree magna cum laude in comparative literature. Mark’s book, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (also known as A Legacy of Liberation) won the 2008 Alan Paton Prize in South Africa. Both this and his next book, Lost and Found in Johannesburg, won the Recht Malan Prize in South Africa and were shortlisted for the Jan Michalski Prize for World Literature. Mark’s other books are the pathbreaking Defiant Desire, Gay and Lesbian Lives In South Africa (1994), which he co-edited with Edwin Cameron, and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa, a 1998 collection of his celebrated political profiles from the Mail & Guardian. He has also published widely, in anthologies, on sexual politics, culture, art, literature and urbanism in South Africa.
Mark was a 2018 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident. He has also been a Writing Fellow at the University of Pretoria and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), and a Carnegie Equity Fellow at Wits University. Since 2018, he has been a judge on the Gerald Kraak Award for writing on gender, human rights and sexuality in Africa. Mark lives outside Cape Town, South Africa, with his longterm partner and their two dogs, Porridge and Sugar.
-
Originally from East Farnham, Quebec, Moynan King is a Toronto-based performer, director, curator, writer, and scholar.
As an actor she has over forty professional film, theatre, and TV credits, most recently with roles in the hit CBC series Baroness von Sketch Show, and John Greyson's silent subway thriller Murder in Passing and his upcoming feature Last Car. She is the author of six plays; the creator of performance installations, including the The Beauty Salon and Mothering; and was the co-creator and director of trace, which toured across Canada in 2015.
She has been an artist-in-residence at Studio 303 in Montreal and Nakai Theatre in Whitehorse.
Moynan was co-founder and director of the Hysteria Festival (2003-2009), co-director of the Rhubarb! Festival (2003-2005), and has curated many a cabaret (Cheap Queers; Explain Yourself; Anne Made Me Gay; City of Freaks; Strange Sisters; Hysteria @ Edgy Women).A Ph.D. candidate at York University, Moynan's academic writing has been published in journals (Canadian Theatre Review, nomorepotlucks, Canadian Literature), and books (More Caught in the Act; Once More, With Feeling; Compulsive Acts; Toronto Theatre and Performance). She was the editor of Canadian Theatre Review, issue 149, Queer Performance: Women and Trans Artists.
Moynan is currently working on N13, a hybrid verbatim play about the Toronto housing crisis.
-
Nadia Granados: Using her body in combination with multi-media technologies, Nadia Granados artistic practice illuminates the relationships between the representation of state violence in mainstream media, institutionalized machismo, heterosexual pornography, and violence against women. Her work is both performative and technological, both art and activism, and a mix of cabaret, public intervention, and video transmission.
Five years ago she created La Fulminante, a character who invites her audience into the world of auto-representation and meta-pornography, using internet information strategies to condemn globalized society. La Fulminante dismantles the language used in the discourse of emancipation by bringing together in her body eroticism and social criticism. La Fulminante is a character inspired by sexually provocative stereotypes of Latin American women. She embodies erotic fantasies built by the mass media, using reggaeton and pornography. She uses her body as a tool to disseminate information, as an element of attraction to make visible alternative political strategies, a resistance against mass media and a struggle against imperialism.
In 2015, Granados was awarded the 3rd Visual Arts Biennial Bogotá Prize Acquisition Award as well as a FONCA scholarship to create a political multimedia cabaret laboratory in Mexico. In 2013 she was selected for a Franklin Furnace Fund Award for the performance Your Car Is Clean, Your Conscience is Dirty, which she performed in New York City 2015. In 2013, she participated as an invited performer at the Hemispheric Institute’s annual meeting in Sao Paulo, and in 2012 was invited to Canada for La Rencontre Internationale D’art Performance De Québec (RIAP), taking place throughout four cities in Canada. Her work has been presented in Canadá, Venezuela, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Germany, Ecuador, Argentina, Perú, the United States, Mexico, Korea, Brazil, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Estonia, Italy, France, and Colombia.
-
Theo Jean Cuthand was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1978, and grew up in Saskatoon. Since 1995 he has been making short experimental narrative videos and films about sexuality, madness, Queer identity and love, and Indigeneity, which have screened in festivals internationally, including the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, Mix Brasil Festival of Sexual Diversity in Sao Paolo, imagineNATIVE in Toronto, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Images in Toronto, Berlinale in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Outfest, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. His work has also exhibited at galleries including the Remai in Saskatoon, The National Gallery in Ottawa, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, MoMA in New York, and The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
He completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts majoring in Film and Video at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2005, and his Masters of Arts in Media Production at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2015. He has made commissioned work for Urban Shaman and Videopool in Winnipeg, Cinema Politica in Montreal, VIMAF in Vancouver, and Bawaadan Collective in Canada. In 2020 he completed working on a 2D video game called A Bipolar Journey based on his experience learning and dealing with his bipolar disorder. In 2023 he completed his second video game, Carmilla the Lonely. He has also written three feature screenplays and has performed at Live At The End Of The Century in Vancouver, Queer City Cinema’s Performatorium in Regina, and 7a*11d in Toronto. In 2017 he won the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. He is a Whitney Biennial 2019 artist. He has made 32 videos and films and counting. Currently he has a feature film in development.
He is a trans man who uses He/Him pronouns. He is of Plains Cree and Scots descent, a member of Little Pine First Nation, and currently resides in Toronto, Canada.
-
T.L. Cowan (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Arts Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, as well as a cabaret and video artist. Her creative-research practice moves between page, stage, and screen, including the work of her alter-ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane and the I Disown You Right Back campaign. Cowan’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of minoritized digital media and performance practices.
Notable commissions for their creative-critical work include the PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Queens Museum in New York City, and Nuit Blanche in Toronto. She is currently completing two monographs, Transmedial Drag and Other Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods, and The Needs of Others: Trauma, Media & Disorder.
In 2022-23 Cowan will be a faculty fellow of the Queer & Trans Research Lab (QTRL) in Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto, initiating a new research project, “Assisted Living in the Life of the Mind: Building Trans- Feminist & Queer Mental Health and Accessibility Networks in the University.” Cowan’s most recent essays are published in Moving Archives (2020), The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities & Art History (2020), American Quarterly (2020) First Monday (2018), Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (2016), More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016, edited by Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars) and as part of Alexandra Juhasz’s #100 Hard Truths.
Cowan is also a co-director of the Critical Digital Methods Institute and a co-author of the Feminist Data Manifest-No.
-
Vanessa Andreotti is a former Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change and a former David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education. She is Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. She is the author Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (2021) and one of the co-founders of the Gesturing Toward Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Arts/Research Collective.