Research Collaborators
“I am really excited by the salvatory growth and intensified exchange, gathering, literacy and sharing in each other's Indigenous art histories, practices, and knowledges of relational time-space, through this expansive world-making research partnership across continents and communities. I look forward to contributing to unexpected and ambitious outcomes in multiple contexts and dreaming the kinds of relationships and societies we deserve and need through this unique international Indigenous cohort working in visuality and textuality.”
— Dr Léuli Eshrāghi
Dr. Julie Nagam
Project Director
Dr. Julie Nagam (Métis/German/Syrian) is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts, Collaboration and Digital Media and is an Associate Professor in the department of Art History at the University of Winnipeg. She is the inaugural Artistic Director for 2020 and 2022 for Nuit Blanche Toronto, the largest public exhibition in North America. Dr. Nagam's SSHRC research includes digital makerspaces + incubators, mentorship, digital media + design, international collaborations and place-based knowledge. She is a collective member of GLAM, which works on curatorial activism, Indigenous methodologies, public art, digital technologies, and engagement with place. As a scholar and artist she is interested in revealing the ontology of land, which contains memory, knowledge and living histories. Her artistic work has been exhibited internationally, including in Brazil, France, New Zealand, and England, which includes solo and group exhibitions. Nagam’s scholarship, curatorial and artistic practice has been featured nationally and internationally. She was the Concordia University and Massey University (NZ) Scholar in Residence for 2018/19, and will be the Terra Foundation Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney (AUS) for 2021-22. Dr. Nagam is the Director of Aabijijiwan New Media Lab and Co-Director of Kishaadigeh Collaborative Research Centre in Winnipeg, Canada.
Dr. Johnson Witehira
Pacific Lead
Kia ora! Ko Johnson Witehira tōku ingoa. Ki te taha tōku whaea, no Whanganui ahau. Ko Tamahaki te iwi, ko Ngāti Hinekura te hapū. Ki te taha tōku matua, No Ngāpuhi ahau. Ko Ngāi Tū-te-auru te hapū. I’m an artist, designer and researcher of Māori and Pākehā (British descent). I’ve been on a journey into Māori art and design since completing my Masters in Graphic Design (2007) and then my Doctorate in Māori visual arts (2013). I spend most of my time thinking about how we, Māori, did things in the past, and how we might apply our mātauranga (knowledge) to contemporary problems. My thoughts and writings on Māori design have been published in some of the worlds leading academic journals and books including; Visible Language (University of Cincinnati), The Graphic Design Reader (Bloomsbury), AIGA Eye on Design (US), Novum (Munich) and Monocle (London).
My kaupapa (mission) as both an artist and designer is to bring Māori visual culture back into the lives of all Māori. This is done through careful consideration of how indigenous culture, design and technology intersect.
Brook Andrew
Brook Andrew is a Wiradjuri/Celtic Australian artist, artistic director and scholar. He works across installation, painting, sculpture, video, print-making, neon and with found and archival objects. His scholarship and artistic director practice encompasses cultural and trauma studies of the Frontier Wars in Australia, restitution and repatriation, museum intervention and First Nations led philosophical collaborations. He aims to reveal forgotten stories and histories and offer alternative choices for interpreting history in the world today. Apart from drawing inspiration from vernacular objects and the archive he travels internationally to work with communities and various private and public collections, creatives and scholars. He is the Artistic Director of NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney 2020; Associate Professor in Fine Arts and Associate Researcher Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab, MADA, Monash University; Enterprise Professor (Interdisciplinary Practice) Faculty of Fine Art and Music, University of Melbourne; and Associate Researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Brook Andrew is a DPhil candidate, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University.
Dr. Huhana Smith
Dr. Huhana Smith is a visual artist, curator and principle investigator in research who engages in major environmental, trans-disciplinary, kaupapa Māori and action-research/orientated projects. She is co-principle investigator for research that includes mātauranga Māori methods with sciences to actively address freshwater way decline and climate change concerns for coastal Māori lands in Horowhenua-Kāpiti. Huhana actively encourages the use of art and design’s visual systems combined in site based and art museum based exhibitions, to expand how solutions might integrate complex issues and make solutions more accessible for local communities. As Head of School, Huhana is working with programmes to grow more cross-culturally savvy students across the creative sector, who are passionate about transforming the world we inhabit via digital mediums.
Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua
Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua is a Kanaka Maoli, born and raised in Hawaiʻi. A professor of political science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, she teaches Native Hawaiian and Indigenous politics. A lifetime commitment to aloha ʻāina fuels her academic and activist work. Noelani’s research has involved documenting, analyzing and proliferating the ways people are transforming imperial and settler colonial relations through Indigenous political values and initiatives. Her books include The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School, The Value of Hawaiʻi, 2: Ancestral Roots, Oceanic Visions, and A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty, and Nā Wāhine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization. Noe is an award-winning teacher commitment to Indigenous education spans more than two decades. She is a co-founder of Hālau Kū Māna public charter school and an active board member of the Kānehūnāmoku Voyaging Academy.
Carly Lane
Carly Lane is the Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She is a Murri woman from Queensland, Australia, and has worked as a curator for nearly twenty-five years, including at the National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia and the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. Carly uses her role as curator to care for culture, to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices are part of the national conversation, and to enable self-determination, equality and social change. Three shows dear to her curatorial-heart are the Second National Indigenous Art Triennial (National Gallery of Australia, 2012), Everyone has a history: Plain Speak (Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2017) and Desert River Sea: Portraits of the Kimberley (Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2019), which she co-curated with Emilia Galatis and several more curators from the Kimberley region. She finds inspiration in political art and any art (really) where the artist speaks their political, social and cultural truth.
Davis Heslep
Davis Heslep is an Arts Administrator, Educator, Media Artist and Producer based in Yellowknife, NT. Davis is currently the Programming and Out-reach Director for the non-profit arts organization Western Arctic Moving Pictures (WAMP) based in Sǫ̀mbak'è/ Yellowknife NT, and serving the five regions of the Northwest Territories. In 2014, Davis developed the travelling workshop Hackspace NT which aims to develop the digital skills of young Northerners through hands-on workshops on VR, Video Game Design, 3D modelling and printing, Laser cutting, Modular Electronics and other forms of digital fabrication. Davis has been the representative for WAMP’s partnership with The Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF). As a practicing artist, Davis has presented work at arts festivals, galleries and events both nationally and internationally. Through incorporating analog and digital technologies in his practice, the breadth of Davis’ creative Media Arts projects spans an array of aesthetic experiences - from analog video feedback paintings to VR documentaries.
Dr. Fabri Blacklock
Dr Fabri Blacklock’s family are Nucoorilma/Ngarabal people from Tingha and Glen Innes and Biripi people from Dingo Creek in New South Wales Australia, she also has English and Scottish ancestry. She is a Scientia Research Fellow at UNSW Art and Design Sydney, she is also an artist, historian, curator and educator who is passionate about improving equity in education for Aboriginal people and is committed to embedding Aboriginal research methodologies, pedagogies and perspectives into mainstream education.
Her research utilises Aboriginal research methodologies of yarning and deep listening and she has been instrumental in the revival and teaching of NSW Aboriginal women’s artistic practices like possum and kangaroo skin cloak making and weaving.
She has facilitated arts-based community engagement projects for schools, community organisations and national and international corporate companies. She has recorded oral histories with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen and women for the City of Sydney and recorded oral histories with Aboriginal people in the Blue Mountains documenting the impact of the crossing of the Blue Mountains by Europeans on Aboriginal people.
She is a member of the Myall Creek Memorial Committee, which acknowledges and raises awareness of massacres of Aboriginal people across Australia and the continued impact of colonisation on Aboriginal people. She is also a member of the Pindi Pindi Research Council.
Jeremy Emerson
Jeremy Emerson is an Arts Administrator, media artist and producer based in Yellowknife, NT. Jeremy has been the executive director of Western Arctic Moving Pictures (WAMP) since 2009 which serves the whole Northwest Territories. As part of his role at WAMP, he has been the director of the Yellowknife International Film Festival which promotes local NWT as well as circumpolar content at its annual festival which showcases a significant amount of indigenous artists. Jeremy has been a workshop partner with the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF) a SSHRC project, since 2015 attending a series of partnership meetings and symposia over the course of the project. Jeremy’s work focuses mostly on film and video production in Canada's Northwest Territories.
Dr. Janine Marchessault
Dr. Janine Marchessault is a Professor in Cinema and Media Studies, and holds a York University Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement. Her research has engaged with diverse models of public art, festivals, and site specific curation, as well as 21st century moving-image archives and notions of collective memory/history. She is a founder of the Future Cinema Lab, A Trudeau Fellow, and a Member of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the PI for Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating AV Heritage (2018-2024 SSHRC Partnership Grant) counterarchive.ca, a research collaboration involving more than 14 community and artist run archives in Canada devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, LGBTQ+, immigrant and women’s histories. Her research explores the afterlife of moving image archives as art forms and historical knowledge.
She is the author of Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias and Ecologies (MIT 2017), and numerous collections including the Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (w/ W. Straw Oxford University Press 2019), Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (w/ S. MacKenzie MQUP 2019), Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (w/ M. Gagnon MQUP 2014); and Cartographies of Place: Navigating the Urban (w/ M. Darroch MQUP 2014).
Jason Edward Lewis
Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media poet, artist, and software designer. He is the University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal. Lewis directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures Partnership Grant, is co-founder of the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Workshops, and co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design. His creative and production work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Elektra, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and FILE, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, two Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mentions, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and six solo exhibitions. He is the lead author on the award-winning “Making Kin with the Machines” article as well as numerous chapters on experimental digital media. Born and raised in northern California, Lewis is Hawaiian and Samoan.
Professor Jennifer L. Biddle
A/Professor Jennifer L. Biddle is Senior Research Fellow and Director of Visual Anthropology & Visual Culture, a program specializing in Indigenous and Asia Pacific research, one of only a few programs in Australia to support ethnographic and practice-led research as a basis for critical and creative research innovation in the arts. Former Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, she is currently Chief Investigator on three ARC and SSHRC funded projects and acting member of the ARC’s College of Experts. In 2021-22 she is Gough Whitlam and Malcom Frazer Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard.
She has worked with northern Warlpiri in Lajamanu for three decades, and for the past nine years, in partnership with Central and Western Desert community art organizations. Her interdisciplinary research spans Indigenous languages and vernacular literacies; translation; theories of embodiment; sensory formations and immersive new media; trauma, memory and predicaments of occupation; intercultural ontologies and ecologies, and experimental ethnography. Her recent Remote Avant Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation was published by Duke University Press.
Dr Léuli Eshrāghi
Dr Léuli Eshrāghi, Sāmoan artist, curator and researcher, intervenes in display territories to centre Indigenous presence and power, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Through performance, moving image, writing and installation, ia engages with Indigenous possibility as haunted by ongoing militourist and missionary violences that erase faʻafafine-faʻatama from kinship structures. Ia contributes to growing international critical practice across the Great Ocean and North America through residencies, exhibitions, publications, teaching and rights advocacy. Eshrāghi is the inaugural Horizon/Indigenous Futures postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University and co-guest editor with Kimberley Moulton of Artlink Indigenous art issue titled KIN CONSTELLATIONS languages waters futures (June 2020). Eshrāghi holds a PhD in Curatorial Practice (2019) from Monash University, a Graduate Certificate in Indigenous Arts Management (2012) and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Indigenous and Francophone Studies (2009) from University of Melbourne.
Nikii Little
Niki Little (Wabiska Ma’iingan) is an artist/observer, arts administrator, and a founding member of The Ephemerals (Sobey Art Award longlisted, 2017/2019). She is Anishininew/English from Kistiganwacheeng, MB. Her interests investigate Indigenous womxn, kinship, and community-based initiatives. Little is the Artistic Director of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, Toronto, ON. She was the Director of the National Indigenous Media Arts Coalition, where she organized Listen, Witness, Transmit, a national Indigenous media arts gathering (June 12-15, 2018). As an independent curator, Little and Becca Taylor co-curated níchiwamiskwém | nimidet | my sister | ma soeur, the La Biennale d’Art Contemporain Autochtone (May 03-June 19, 2018) and co-hosted Migration a three week on the land residency in Demmitt, AB (August 13-31, 2018). Little is a part of the commissioned co-curated exhibition Nests for the End of the World at the Art Gallery of Alberta (January 24-May 03, 2020) with collaborator Bruno Canadien.
Reuben Friend
Reuben Friend (Ngāti Maniapoto, European-New Zealand) is an artist, curator and the current Director of Pātaka Art Gallery and Museum in Porirua, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Friend was the inaugural Curator of Māori and Pacific Art at City Gallery Wellington from 2009-2013 and was previously the Senior Advisor for Treaty Relations at the Wellington City Council. His curatorial practice has in recent years shifted from emerging artists to refocus on the works of Māori elders whose pioneering contemporary art works have made an important contribution to Māori and Pākehā (settler-New Zealand) conceptions of modernity in Aotearoa New Zealand. Upcoming major projects include a major lifetime survey exhibition and publication about senior Māori painter Sandy Adsett and his pedagogical methodology as an Indigenous arts educator.
Dr. Sanna Valkonen
Dr. Sanna Valkonen is a Professor of Sámi Research at the University of Lapland. I am a Sámi scholar from Northern Finland. My academic background is in political science, but I have concentrated during my whole research career on developing the field of social scientific Sámi research. The main themes of my research have dealt with politics of indigeneity, belonging, political subjectivity and identity, gender, religion as well as related power relations in the Sámi context. Recently, the focus of my research has extended to the questions of Sámi cultural heritage and human-nature relations as well as environmental questions, traditional knowledge and developing Sámi research concepts and methods in cooperation with Sámi artists and cultural experts.
Dr. Serena Keshavjee
Serena Keshavjee coordinates the Curatorial Practices stream of the Masters in Cultural Studies, while teaching Modern Art and Architectural History at the University of Winnipeg. Her academic publishing focuses on the intersection of art and science in visual culture at the fin-de-siècle. In 2015 she co-edited with Fae Brauer, Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture (Cambridge Scholars Press) for which she was awarded an SSHRC grant. In 2009 she edited a special issue of Canadian Art Review (RACAR) entitled “Science, Symbolism and Fin-de-Siècle Visual Culture”(no. 34, vol. 1, 2009). Keshavjee’s current SSHRC funded research is a book and exhibition on a Canadian medical doctor who studied and photographed ectoplasmic materializations of ghosts for 15 years in order to prove life existed beyond death.
Dr. Brian Martin
Dr Brian Martin is a descendant of Muruwari, Bundjalung and Kamilaroi peoples and has been a practising artist for twenty-seven years exhibiting both nationally and internationally in the media of painting and drawing. His research and practice focus on refiguring Australian art and culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a reciprocal relationship to Country. Brian was previously Professor and Head of Research at the Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin University. Brian is the inaugural Associate Dean Indigenous in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture (MADA) at Monash University, where he leads the Wominjeka Djeembana research lab. He is also Honorary Professor of Eminence at Centurion University of Technology and Management in Odisha, India.
Mark Ledbury
Mark Ledbury is the Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney. He researches histories of genre, of theatre and visual art, and the relationship between art and fiction. He's the author of Sedaine, Greuze and the Boundaries of Genre (2000), James Northcote, History Painting and the Fables (2014) and of numerous studies of European Art. At the Power Institute he's been helping to transform the range of global art that students, researchers and the public engage with through curated programmes and research projects including Getty Foundation Projects, "Site and Space in South East Asia" and "Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art", as well as Terra Foundation Visiting Professorships in First Nations Art, and lecture series , conferences and workshops addressing vital issues in global art theory and history.
Dr. Sarah Wiebe
Dr. Sarah Marie Wiebe grew up on Coast Salish territory in British Columbia, BC, and now lives in Honolulu, HI. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa where she focuses on environmental sustainability. She has published in journals including Citizenship Studies and Studies in Social Justice. Her book Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada's Chemical Valley (2016) with UBC Press won the Charles Taylor Book Award (2017) and examines policy responses to the impact of pollution on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's environmental health. Alongside Dr. Jennifer Lawrence (Virginia Tech), she is the Co-Editor of Biopolitical Disaster. At the intersections of environmental justice and citizen engagement, her teaching and research interests emphasize political ecology, participatory policy making and deliberative dialogue. As a collaborative researcher and filmmaker, she worked with Indigenous communities on sustainability-themed films including Indian Givers and To Fish as Formerly. She is currently collaborating with artists from Attawapiskat on a project entitled Reimagining Attawapiskat funded through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.
Dr. Mishuana Goeman
Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Tonawanda Band of Seneca, is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies, Chair of American Indian Studies, and affiliated faculty of Critical Race Studies in the Law School. She is also the inaugural Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at UCLA. She is the author of Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations(University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and the forthcoming Settler Aesthetics and the Spectacle of Originary Moments: Terrence Malick’s the New World (University of Nebraska Press). She is a Co-PI on two community based digital projects, Mapping Indigenous L.A (2015), which gathers alternative maps of resiliency from Indigenous LA communities, and Carrying Our Ancestors Home (2019), a site concentrating on better working tribal relationships and communications as it concerns repatriation and NAGPRA. She publishes widely in peer-reviewed journals, including guest edited volumes on Native Feminisms and Indigenous Performances. In 2020-2021 she will be a Distinguished Visiting Scholar with the Center for Diversity Innovation at the University of Buffalo located in her home territories
Daina Warren
Daina Warren is from the Akamihk (Cree) Nation in Maskwacis (Bear Hills), AB. She was awarded two Canada Council's Aboriginal Curatorial Residencies the first to work with grunt gallery, Vancouver BC (2000-2001) and a second residency at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario (2010-2011). She has a BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art (ECUAD) and Design (2003) and an MA from UBC (2012). Warren was awarded the 2015 Emily Award from Emily Carr University and was selected as one of six Indigenous women curators as part of the Canada Council for the Arts Delegation to participate in the International First Nations Curators Exchange that took place in Australia (2015), New Zealand (2016), and Canada (2017). Her most recent accomplishment was winning the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellency in 2018. She is currently the Director of Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Dr. Ngarino Ellis
Associate-Professor Ngarino Ellis is a Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Porou writer and academic in the Art History Department at the University of Auckland; she is the only Māori to be employed at tertiary level in this field. She is currently completing a book manuscript with Professor Deidre Brown (Ngāti Kahu) entitled ‘Toi Te Mana: A History of Indigenous Art from Aotearoa New Zealand’ (Auckland University Press) which was funded by the Royal Society Marsden Fund. She transformed her PhD thesis (2012) into a book, A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving 1830-1930, (2016), with new photography by Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou). This won multiple awards including Best First Book (Ockhams National Book Awards) and Best Māori Art Book (Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards). In 2020 Ngarino begins a new 3-year Royal Society Marsden Fund project ‘Nga Taonga o Wharawhara: The World of Māori Body Adornment’ as the sole Principal Investigator. Her teaching and supervision includes Maori art and architecture, Art Crime, Gender, and Indigenous Museology; she has been recognised with a National Tertiary Teaching Award 2019 (Kaupapa Māori category) and the University of Auckland Sustained Teaching Excellence Award (2018). She is currently Convenor/Head of Art History, the first Māori to hold this role.
Dr. Jolene Rickard
Jolene Rickard, Ph.D. is a visual historian, artist and curator interested in the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and contemporary art, materiality, and ecocriticism with an emphasis on Hodinöhsö:ni aesthetics. A selection of publications includes: Diversifying Sovereignty and the Reception of Indigenous Art, Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017), Aesthetics, Violence and Indigeneity, Public 27, no. 54 (Winter 2016), Arts of Dispossession, in From Tierra del Fuego to the Artic: Landscape Painting in the Americas, Art Gallery of Ontario (2015), The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art, Sakahán, National Gallery of Canada (2013), and Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors, The South Atlantic Quarterly: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, 110:2 (2011). Recent exhibitions include the Minneapolis Institute of Arts national exhibition, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, 2019-2021, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Art For a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950’s to Now, 2018-2020. She co-curated two of the four inaugural exhibitions of the National Museum of the American Indian (2004-2014). Jolene is on the editorial board of American Art, a founding Boardmember for the Otsego Institute for Native American Art and an advisor to GRASAC-The Great Lakes Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture. Jolene is a 2020 Fulbright Research Scholar at McMaster University, ON, CA, an Associate Professor in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program 2008-2020 (AIISP) at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Jolene is from the Tuscarora Nation (Turtle Clan), Hodinöhsö:ni Confederacy.
Natalie Robertson
Natalie Robertson is a photographic and moving image artist and scholar of Ngāti Porou and Clann Dhònnchaidh iwi/bones/tribes/clans, born and raised in Kawerau, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Natalie’s research terrain and artistic practice draws on Māori knowledge practices, Ngāti Porou oral customs, cultural landscapes, and historic archives to engage with indigenous relationships to land and place. Centring Waiapu—the ancestral river of Ngāti Porou—world-famous for its erosion, her work responses to tribal aspirations for environmental reinvigoration. Natalie advances Māori counter-narratives to landscape photography, exploring how photofilmic images might contribute to environmental justice and revitalisation. Her work was recently included in To Make /Wrong/ Right/ Now Honolulu Biennial 2019; Natalie photographed extensively for the multi-award-winning book A Whakapapa of Tradition: One Hundred Years of Ngāti Porou Carving, 1830–1930, written by Ngarino Ellis (2016). Natalie is a Senior Lecturer at AUT University, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland).
Deidre Brown
Professor Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) teaches design and history in the School of Architecture at the University of Auckland. Her specialist teaching, supervisory and research interests are in the fields of Māori and Pacific architectural and art history, and the broader discipline of Indigenous design. She has written several books, including the multi-authored Art in Oceania: A new history (2012) and A Book of New Zealand Beasts: animals in our culture, history and everyday life (2012) and sole-authored Māori Architecture (2009), Introducing Māori Art (2005), Māori Arts of the Gods (2005) and Tai Tokerau Whakairo Rākau: Northland Māori woodcarving (2003). She has curated a number of exhibitions in galleries around the country. She is currently completing a book manuscript with Associate Professor Ngarino Ellis (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou) entitled Toi Te Mana: A History of Indigenous Art from Aotearoa New Zealand (Auckland University Press) which was funded by the Royal Society Marsden Fund. Deidre has belonged to boards of governance for organisations such as Objectspace, The Physics Room and the Christchurch Arts Centre and she has been a Governor of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand and member of the Humanities Panel of the Marsden Fund (Royal Society of New Zealand). She is currently a member of the Auckland Branch of the New Zealand Institute of Architects, the Māori Trademarks Advisory Committee of the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, and the Minimum Standards Working Group of the Registered Architects Board as well as an Assessor for the Science Investment Round of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).
Liisa-Rávná Finbog
Liisa-Rávná Finbog is a Sámi scholar and duojár from Oslo/Vaapste/Skánit on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. She is based in Olso where she is currently pursuing a PhD in museology at the University of Oslo.
As a long-time practitioner of duodji [Sámi practices of aesthetics and storytelling], she has combined her practice with an Indigenous research focus which looks into duodji as a Sámi system of knowledge. Her dissertation, which is titled “’It speaks to you’ – making kin through people, duodji and Sámi museums” looks, firstly into how the epistemicide following the colonization of Sámi worked to disrupt the knowledge[s] contained in duodji. Secondly her research traces the work that is being done in Sámi communities today to re-remember practices within duodji and in the process negotiate Sámi identities, and how museum with their vast collections of Sámi heritage objects play into these processes.
Extending from her research, she curated the seminar “Dåajmijes Vuekie – the material expressions of Sámi aesthetics”, which was convened during the Sámi Art Festival of 2019.
The same year she was also the curator of a seminar convened jointly by Office for Contemporary Art – Norway (OCA) and Norwegian Crafts (NC) relating to the United Nations International year of Indigenous Languages, titled “Båassjoeraejken Tjïrr – Workshops and conversations on Indigenous languages, aesthetic practices and landscapes”.
She is a collaborator on the research project “Mediated Arctic Geographies” that aims to look at how Arctic geospheres are aesthetically shaped and mediated to become vehicles of environmental, [geo]political and social concerns.
Nivi Christensen
Christensen is an expert on Greenlandic art history, and the representation of Greenlandic art in museums. She holds a master degree in Art History from the University of Copenhagen. Since 2015 she has been the Director of the biggest of the two art museums in Greenland - Nuuk Art Museum. She has written numerous articles on both Greenlandic art and the issues that arises when curating Greenlandic art. She has curated numerous exhibitions on Greenlandic art both in and outside of Greenland and is participating in several research networks.
Stephen Gilchrist
Belonging to the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group of northwest Western Australia, Stephen Gilchrist is Associate Lecturer of Indigenous Art at the University of Sydney. He is a writer and curator who has who has worked with the Indigenous Australian collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2003-2005), the British Museum, London (2008), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005-2010) and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (2011-2013). Stephen has curated numerous exhibitions in Australia and the United States and has written extensively on Indigenous Art from Australia. He has taught Indigenous Art in Australia and in the United States and is currently completing his PhD at the University of Sydney. From 2012-2016 he was the Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University.
Rachael Rackena
Rachael Rakena is video artist who, frequently in collaboration with others, works to create richly layered performative installations, videos, and photographs. Rakena is of Māori and Pakeha descent (Ngai Tahu, Nga Puhi) and has a Master of Fine Arts (Distinction). Having coined the term “Toi Rerehiko” to centre, claim and name digital spaces within a Māori paradigm, Rakena’s work describes and locates Māori digital/electronic-based art practice in terms of continuum, motion, and collaboration. She has an international exhibiting practice and her artwork has featured in major survey and retrospective exhibitions of New Zealand art and in international exhibitions. Rakena is a senior lecturer at Massey University school of fine arts in Wellington.
Dr. Gunvor Guttorm
Gunvor Guttorm was born in 1958 in Karasjok, Norway. Gunvor Guttorm Professor in duodji (Sámi arts and crafts, traditional art, applied art) at Sámi allaskuvla/Sámi University of Applied Sciences, Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino in Norway. She has also been rector/principle at the same institution. Her research is interconnected with cultural expression in the Sámi and indigenous societies, especially duodji. The focus of her research deals with duodji in a contemporary setting, and indigenous people’s context. She also has had the fortune to work with elderly duodji artisans and share their knowledge in traditional techniques. This has indeed benefited in her theoretical work. She has in her approaches tried to understand duodji of today, by discuissing what position and meaning it has had and has for the Sámi societies.
She has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in duodji both practically and theoretically. She has written several articles about how the traditional knowledge of Sámi art and craft is transformed to the modern lifestyle, both in Sámi language, Norwegian and in English. In an Indigenous world, she has participated as invited speaker as well as presenter at Indigenous research congresses. Guttorm has also participated in exhibitions in Sápmi and abroad.
Jonas Nilsson
Jonas Nilsson is the project manager of one of Greenland's biggest cultural events: Nuuk Nordic Cultural Festival, and is also a musician and performing artist in several projects of which the Greenlandic band: “Small Time Giants” is the most well known, where he also co-wrote the theme song for Arctic Winter Games 2016 “We Are The Arctic”. He is originally from Denmark, but has been coming to Greenland in the last 10 years. He has a background in music, both teaching, and performing, and has taken part in many different projects both as an organizer and a participant, in Greenland and the North primarily. Jonas is also event manager in Kommuneqarfik Sermersooq, the biggest municipality in Greenland.
In art he works actively on breaking down the boundaries between artist and audience, and is very interested in improvisation and co-creation, as he finds it is often the way to create something unique.
Dr. Shana MacDonald
Dr. Shana MacDonald is an artist-activist-scholar of Scottish, French, and Mi'kmaq ancestry from the Qualipu First Nations of western Newfoundland. She is Associate Professor in Communication Arts and the current President of the Film Studies Association of Canada. Her interdisciplinary research examines feminist, queer, Indigenous, and anti-racist media activisms within social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, and contemporary art. Dr. MacDonald is a co-director of the qcollaborative (qLab), a feminist design lab dedicated to developing new forms of relationality through technologies and public performance. Through the lab she co-runs the online archive Feminists Do Media (Instagram: @aesthetic.resistance) and the Feminist Think Tank, a space for the public mobilization of feminist theory and. She has published in Feminist Media Histories, Media Theory Journal, Feminist Media Studies and is lead author on the forthcoming book Networked Feminist Activisms (Lexington Press).
Mark Igloliorte
Mark Igloliorte (Inuk, Nunatsiavut) is an artist, essayist and educator. He is an associate professor of Frameworks and Interventions in Indigenous Art Practices, Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University.
As a scholar and artist his work investigates relating to indigenous futures through a grounding in the embodied practices and language. Igloliorte's artistic work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across Canada as well as internationally. Including including New Zealand and The Netherlands.
Anna Binta Diallo
Anna Binta Diallo is a multidisciplinary visual artist who explores themes of memory and nostalgia to create unexpected works about identity. She was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1983, grew up in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, and has lived for more than fifteen years in Montreal/Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang.
She is currently an assistant professor in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, on Treaty 1 land, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples and the Métis Nation. She is represented in Canada by Towards Gallery.
Peatr Thomas
Peatr Thomas is an Ininew and Anishinaabe self-taught full-time visual artist from the Pimicikamak and Miskooseepi territories located near the heart of Turtle Island.
Raised on reserve then later acquainted to the city life, street art was an early voice and a way to practice creative challenges. In the late 1990’s Indigenous culture was finally introduced to Peatr where today he is visually merging passed down cultural knowledge with street art practices, mostly in the form of large scale murals. He is also a Youth workshop Facilitator/Instructor of many years; sharing skills and practices of paintings small to large scale. All while passing knowledge, traditional teachings, and culture. His hopes are to pass on our culture and stories through murals / art. To inspire youth with colourful visuals as they are what inspired him to pursue art.
Paul Robles
Born in the Philippines, Paul Robles is a Canadian artist based in Winnipeg, Treaty One Territory.
Recognized for his intricate cut paper works, Robles combines the delicacy associated with traditional hand work that addresses psychological and emotional states ranging from animist familiars, folklore, spirits, trauma, and grief. His newest work is currently included in the group exhibition, "The Undead Archives" - at the School of Art gallery - Sept - Nov 2023.
He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Gold Medal) from University of Manitoba School of Art and Bachelor of Arts degree (Sociology) from The University of Winnipeg. Robles has exhibited widely in Canada, USA, and France. He has participated in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute Residence Program, and Papier Art Fair, Montreal. In 2019, his work was the subject of a 2 person exhibition at C2-Centre for Craft (Wpg), included in an exhibition at the Regina Art Gallery (May 2021);Winnipeg's Wall to Wall Festival (2021); produced an outdoor installation for Winnipeg's Nuit Blanche (2021)and recently at the Lumen Festival 2023 (Waterloo,ON).
Yung Yemi
Adeyemi Adegbesan, a Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist, explores the complexities of Black identity. His work delves into the evolution of Black cultural ideologies across different timelines, emphasizing the richness of Black experiences and challenging the oversimplification of "Blackness." Yemi’s art includes Afro-futuristic portraits with themes of history, fantasy, and spirituality. He's a self-taught artist, skilled in photography, mixed media collage, murals, and assemblage. He has exhibited internationally and collaborated with brands like HBO, Instagram, and the Toronto Raptors.
Rah Eleh
Rah is a multimedia artist, specializing in video, digital, and performance art, while simultaneously pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work has achieved significant national and international recognition, displayed in prestigious venues like the Venice Biennale and Nuit Blanche. Rah has received numerous awards, including the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and grants from prominent arts organizations. She has also participated in several artist residencies, representing underrepresented communities.