McCormick is a historian of the visual and material culture of modern Japan. She writes about the politics of photography culture and optical technologies in Japan from the 1930s to the 1970s. Her recent research focuses on the first women to become professional photographers in Japan in the 1940s and 50s, marketing the camera as a symbol of Japanese modern design, and female student uses of the camera to document environmental degradation. McCormick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at UBC.

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Althea Thauberger is an artist, filmmaker and educator known for place-based experimental documentary projects involving collaborative research and production. Her final works—films, videos, audio recordings, and photographs—reflect on relationships between community histories and geopolitical events, and sociopolitical power dynamics, including ones involved in the production process itself. Thauberger’s recent exhibitions include the Kaunas Biennial in Lithuania, the Toronto Biennial of Art, and La Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, and The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.

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Solange Adum Abdala (b. 1980, Peru. Based in Vancouver) is an interdisciplinary visual artist. Her research is situated at the intersection of photography, history, and nature, both from scientific and sensorial perspectives. Her artistic practice is presented as a «de/re/construction» of photographic apparatus and the conceptions of landscape. Adum Abdala has had five solo shows and participated in group exhibitions, festivals, and art fairs across the Americas, Europe, and Asia. She won First Place at the III ICPNA Photography Salon (Peru), is a recipient of awards such as the Eugenio Courret Competition (Peru), Huéspedes del Presente (Spain), and NexoFoto (Brazil), and in 2023 she was selected for the publication Collage: Women of the Prix Pictet since 2008. In Vancouver, she was awarded the Affiliated Fellowships Master’s Program for researchers at the University of British Columbia (2024) and was selected for the City of Vancouver’s Launch Pad Program (2025).  She is a Master of Fine Arts, in Visual Arts (MFA) from the University of British Columbia and two undergraduate degrees in Photography and Visual Project Direction and Photography (BFA) from Centro de la Imagen (Peru). Alongside her artistic practice, Solange has 20 years of teaching experience in undergraduate programs and over 10 years in academic management within the arts and culture sector. In 2020, she founded Galería Pública, a platform dedicated to promoting the diversity of photographic production in Peru.

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Born and raised in Metlakatla, Alaska - Annette Islands Indian Reserve, Sm Łoodm 'Nüüsm (Dr. Mique'l Dangeli) is of the Ts'msyen Nation. She is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Arts in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Victoria. Mique’l is a dancer, choreographer, Sm'algya̱x language learner/teacher, and curator. Her work in Indigenous visual and performing arts focuses on protocol, sovereignty, resurgence, decolonization, Indigenous research methodologies, critical curatorial studies, repatriation, and language revitalization. She is an elected board member of the Native American Art Studies Association. Her current book project focuses on the work of Ts'msyen photographer Benjamin Alfred Haldane (1874-1941), who opened a studio in Metlakatla, Alaska, in 1899. Haldane is one of the first professional Indigenous photographers in North America. Using community-centred Indigenous research methodologies and archival research, her work brings to light the complex and subversive ways in which Indigenous peoples throughout Alaska and British Columbia utilized Haldane's photography to challenge and resist colonial oppression of their cultural practices. Mique'l's deep historical research of the individuals who are in Haldane's images and the sociopolitical time in which they lived has formed the basis of the repatriation claims in the US and abroad that she is currently working on with members of her community.

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Yasmin Amaratunga holds a PhD in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom. As an art historian and curator, her research focuses on ephemeral and new media works of art, material culture, museum studies, and critical theory. Yasmin is responsible for the art collections and archives for UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, including policymaking and overseeing collection development and maintenance of 550,000+ items of visual material. She manages the Visual Resource Centre, a hub for digital scholarship and applied arts-based research. She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria.

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Barforoush is a journalism educator with a background in journalism and photography research. Her research interests include journalism education, representation of the “other” in news and photojournalism, foreign affairs and international reporting, journalism ethics, political communication, and the implications of new media technology in journalism and ethical reporting. Barforoush is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in journalism at UBC’s School of Journalism, Writing, and Media and an affiliated faculty with the Bachelor of Media Studies. program.

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Sabine Bitter (b. 1960) is a Vancouver-based artist, curator, educator and professor at Simon Fraser University. From 2009-13, Bitter was the coordinator of the Audain Visual Artist in Residence program and the curator of the Audain Gallery, SFU, realizing projects with Marjetica Potrč, Raqs Media Collective, Elke Krasny with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, Ricardo Basbaum, Claire Fontaine and Muntadas, among others. Since 1993, Bitter has collaborated with Vienna-based artist Helmut Weber on projects addressing cities, architecture and the politics of representation and space. Working mainly in photography and spatial installations, their research-oriented practice engages with specific moments and logics of global urban change in neighbourhoods, architecture and everyday life. Engaging architecture as a frame for spatial meaning, their ongoing research includes projects like “Educational Modernism” and “Housing the Social.” In 2004, Bitter, Weber and Jeff Derksen formed the research collective Urban Subjects.

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Bourges is a Vancouver-based filmmaker originating from France. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Production at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Theatre and Film. His films navigate the intersection of documentary and fiction, with an emphasis on human relations within institutional systems. His practice is based on ongoing collaborations with his subjects, both actors and non-actors, with lived experience within the systems depicted. Bourges’ work has been presented at numerous festivals and film spaces, including the Berlinale, TIFF, Viennale, Centre Pompidou’s Cinéma du Réel, and the Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real.

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Christine D’Onofrio is an artist who works in photography, video, digital media, interactive media, printmaking, sculpture, book work and installation. Her practice explores themes related to art history and the nature of artistic practice, current and historical feminisms, exploitation, virtue, humiliation, humour and desire. She is interested in the contradictions and ambiguities of liberty, especially under capitalism, and her work frequently juxtaposes consumer culture and mass media with art historical references. Her recent work critically addresses feminist strategies and discourses pertaining to structures of exploitation, humiliation and power. D’Onofrio is involved with Art+Feminism in Vancouver, an international campaign to improve the coverage of women and female-identifying artists on Wikipedia.

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Sara Ellis is a librarian with experience in academic, special, and public libraries. As Art & Visual Literacy Librarian at the UBC Music, Art & Architecture Library, she oversees arts-focused collections, reference, instruction, and project work; and leads visual literacy initiatives with library units and partners. Her knowledge of art documentation includes working with special collections in libraries and arts organizations. Ongoing research includes a cross-institutional project to assess the current state of artist file collections in Canadian galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) and artist-run centres (ARCs).

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Denise Fong is the Curator of Urban Cultures at the Museum of Vancouver. She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia’s Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program, where her research focused on community-centered curation and the Asian Canadian representation in museums. Denise has co-curated two award-winning history exhibitions: Across the Pacific at the Burnaby Village Museum and A Seat at the Table: Chinese Immigration and British Columbia, which was featured at both the Museum of Vancouver and the Chinese Canadian Museum of British Columbia. She is the lead author and researcher of Rooted: Chinese Canadian Stories in Burnaby, published by the City of Burnaby, and the co-author of Challenging Racist “British Columbia” and 1923: Challenging Racisms Past and Present.

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Jillian Lerner specializes in the history of photography, nineteenth-century visual culture, and critical pedagogy. An alumna of UBC (BA 1998), she went on to study art history at Columbia University, completing her PhD in 2006 under the direction of Jonathan Crary and Anne Higonnet. Dr. Lerner is the author of two books: Graphic Culture: Illustration and Artistic Enterprise in Paris, 1830–1848 (McGill-Queens University Press, 2018) and Experimental Self-Portraits in Early French Photography (Routledge, 2021). Her essays on print and photography have been published in Grey Room, Oxford Art Journal, History of Photography, The Art Bulletin, and Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024). A study on the phantasmagoria, historical retrieval, and the afterlives of social violence in revolutionary Paris is forthcoming in A Companion to French Art, 1780 to the Present (eds. Natalie Adamson and Richard Taws). Alongside her current research on reparative histories of photography, Dr. Lerner is pursuing a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project that explores approaches to social justice storytelling, place-based learning, and pedagogies of relational accountability enacted in undergraduate courses in art history and media studies.

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Dr. April Liu has over twenty years of experience as a curator, researcher, and documentary filmmaker specializing in Chinese diasporic heritage. She co-curated the major permanent exhibits at the UBC Chung Lind Gallery (2024) with Faith Moosang, bringing new perspectives to Chinese Canadian history and the Klondike Gold Rush.  April has served as the Curator of Public Programs and Engagement at the UBC Museum of Anthropology and as an expert consultant for UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage section (Asia). Her media projects have been featured on CBC Gem, CBC Arts, CBC Radio Canada, Guangzhou Radio and TV, Chinese National Radio (CNR), and the Pasadena International Film Festival. She has published extensively on Asian arts and culture, including Divine Threads (2019), a major book-length study of Cantonese Opera.

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Karla McManus  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. She is art historian and visual theorist who specializes in the study of photography and the environmental imaginary. Her scholarly output, in the form of curation, publications, and presentations, focuses on how historic and contemporary concerns, from wildlife conservation, to environmental disasters, to anxiety about the future, are visualized photographically. Her recent projects include an exploration of the history of bird photography and its impact on the conservation movement and the Prairie Art Network, a community-building project to promote and develop connections in the arts of the prairies.

Karla’s research informs her teaching of the histories and theories of photography and contemporary art. Since July 2019, she has been Assistant Professor of Visual Arts (Art History) in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. From August 2017 to 2019, she was Assistant Professor (Limited Term), at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Image Arts, teaching in the Photography Studies, Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management, and Documentary Media Programs. Karla has presented her research at home and around the world at conferences and public talks that focus on the role of photography in today’s contemporary world. She is a Member of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University as well as an Affiliate Member of the Documentary Research Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Karla received a BFA honours in video art from the University of Manitoba in 2004. Karla then studied at Carleton University, Ottawa, where she completed a M.A. in Art History in 2009. In 2015, she was awarded a PhD from the Department of Art History at Concordia University. From 2015 to 2017, Karla was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation at Queen’s University.

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Olivia Michiko Gagnon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Film at UBC. She is currently completing her first monograph––On Closeness: Archives, Aesthetics, and Forms of Relation––which theorizes closeness as a minoritarian method that moves between the aesthetic and the social. Their writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Text & Performance Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, emisférica, Syndicate, C Magazine, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She has also written for the Vancouver Art Gallery (with Monika Kin Gagnon), the Belkin Gallery, Gallery 44, and the New Museum, and was formerly Managing Editor of HemiPress at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in New York City. They received their PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU.

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Karice Mitchell (b. 1996, Toronto, Canada) is a photo-based installation artist whose practice uses found imagery and digital manipulation to engage with issues relating to the representation of the Black female body in pornography and popular culture. Her work seeks to re-contextualize pre-existing images to reimagine the possibilities for Black womanhood and sexuality detached from the white gaze and patriarchy. She received her BFA at York University in 2019 and her MFA at the University of Waterloo in June 2021.

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Faith Moosang is a multimedia artist, curator, writer, and researcher whose work explores the integration of multimedia imagery, digital interactivity, and archives. She co-curated the major permanent exhibits at the UBC Chung Lind Gallery (2024) alongside April Liu, bringing new perspectives to Chinese Canadian history and the Klondike Gold Rush. Faith has created interactive works for the Museum of Anthropology, Polygon Gallery, City of Richmond Public Art, and Cinevolution Media Arts Society, among others. Her curated exhibits, many featuring archival photographs and media, have been widely showcased across Canada and the United States. She received the Alcuin Society Award (1999) and the Canadian Museums Association Award for Best Canadian Research (2001) for her groundbreaking publication and travelling exhibit on photographer C.D. Hoy.

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Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and independent curator based in Toronto. As a curator, she has organized exhibitions for Access Gallery, Gallery 44: centre for contemporary photography, Gallery TPW, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries and Vtape. Her writing appears in venues including Artforum, Art in America, C Magazine, Canadian Art, Fillip, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, Prefix Photo and the edited volumes Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Duke 2017) and Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made (Routledge 2017). Her first book, Projecting Citizenship: photography and belonging in the British Empire, was published by Penn State University Press in 2019. Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, Ryerson Image Centre, the University of British Columbia and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2017. A founding member of EMILIA-AMALIA, she is the Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University in Montreal.

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O’Brian is an art historian, writer, curator, and Professor Emeritus. He is the author or editor of twenty books and many articles, and is best known for his books on modern art, including Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, one of the New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” in 1986, and for his exhibitions on nuclear photography such as Camera Atomica, organized for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015. Camera Atomica was the first comprehensive exhibition on postwar nuclear photography. O’Brian taught in Art History at The University of British Columbia from 1987-2017, where he held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies (2008-11) and was an Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. He is a recipient of the Thakore Award in Human Rights and Peace Studies from Simon Fraser University.

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Nuno Porto received his PhD from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. He holds a joint appointment with the Museum of Anthropology where he is Curator for African and South American collections. Before joining UBC in 2012, Nuno taught at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, on subjects related to theory in social anthropology, material culture, critical museology, visual culture, photography and African studies. His work has been published in four different languages in ten different countries. He coordinated the Graduate Program in Social and Cultural Anthropology between 2006 and 2011, and also taught in the Graduate Program on Design and Multimedia. He served as Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra between 2002 and 2006, where we developed a series of temporary exhibitions and the notion of ethnographic installation. His PhD dissertation explored the articulation of colonialism, science, and museum culture, and how these merged in the co-development of the Dundo Museum in Northeast of Angola and of its proprietor, the Diamonds Company of Angola. This dissertation was awarded the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation award for the Social Sciences Thesis and was published by the same foundation in 2009.

Between 2006 and 2012 he integrated the Commission for the re-opening of the Dundo Museum, led by the Ministry of Culture of Angola that successfully concluded its works in 2012. During this period he also led a team that developed and implemented the website on the archival materials of the Diamonds Company of Angola held at the University of Coimbra, www.diamangdigital.net. He also collaborated with the research team for the project ‘Bearing Waters’ led by Lisbon sculptor Virginia Fróis, on the renewal of traditional Cape Verdean women ceramics, in the municipality of Tarrafal.

His curatorial work at MOA has focused on self-representation of African identities in contemporary Afro-Cuban Art and in Kenyan popular photography. In 2016, he curated Cherie Mose’s sound installation in the museum’s Multiversity Galleries, questioning how the status of migration can apply both to artefacts and to persons, and disrupting the ocular centric regime of displays. On his project on Amazonia – the Rights of Nature, he explored the transformations of indigenous knowledge into national legislation, and brought new understandings to Amazonian material culture. His most recent curatorial work Sankofa: African Routes, Canadian Roots, co-curated with Nya Lewis (Black Arts Vancouver) and Titilope Salami (AHVA Phd candidate), articulates African and Black contemporary Art with African and Black heritage from MOA’s collections. At AHVA he has been teaching ARTH 410 001 Seminar in African Art – Key debates in the arts of Africa and the African diasporas and ARTH 309 Arts of Africa and the African Diasporas. Both courses are cross listed with the UBC African Studies Minor.

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Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez (b. 1987, Mexico City) is an artist working in photography and film/video to examine the temporal ambiguity of our experience of images—still but in motion, historical yet continuously made present. He employs materials such as found photographs, magazine interviews and film/TV scripts to overlay the recent past against the present. Recent group exhibitions include the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, and Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York City. His work has been featured in Artforum, T Magazine, Musée Magazine and Hyperallergic. Rodriguez received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He lives and works in the so-called “Vancouver”, where he is an Assistant Professor at Emily Carr University.

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Inaugurating the Curator of Academic Programs position at the Belkin, Rosenblum’s role is to develop programs that increase myriad forms of civic and academic engagement at UBC, the wider Vancouver community and beyond. Rosenblum received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014). Her research interests include issues in contemporary art and museum theory, discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative and performativity. Her teaching covers the 17th to the 21st centuries. She remains active in professional associations related to academic museums and cultural studies, attending international conferences and workshops, and recently completed two terms (six years) on the Board of Directors at the Western Front, Vancouver, including serving as Board President. At UBC, Rosenblum is an Affiliate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

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Nadia Shihab is a filmmaker, artist and Fulbright scholar working in the realm of experimental documentary, and she is an Assistant Professor of film at Simon Fraser University’s School for Contemporary Arts. Her projects emerge through processes that are relational, and have taken the form of films, sound composition/performance, visual art and writing. She is the director of SISTER MOTHER LOVER CHILD, ECHOLOCATION, AMAL’S GARDEN, and the feature-length film JADDOLAND, which was awarded five festival jury awards, including the Independent Spirit “Truer than Fiction” Award, and went on to broadcast for three seasons on US public television. Her work has shown in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including at Cinema du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, Cairo International Film Festival, Images Festival, Black Star Film Festival, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Art Museum, DOXA, Kasseler Dokfest, and Alchemy Film & Video Arts Festival. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Djerassi Residency and her work has received support from the Sundance Institute, Arab Fund for Arts & Culture, Center for Asian American Media, Firelight Media, and Tribeca Film Institute.

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Erin Silver is an Associate Professor of Art History and Critical and Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Taking Place: Building Histories of Queer and Feminist Art in North America (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021), as well as co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016), and (with taisha paggett) the winter 2017 issue of C Magazine, “Force,” on intersectional feminisms and movement culture, and (with Elizabeth Cavaliere) a 2022 issue of Journal of Canadian Art History on collaboration as research and pedagogy. Silver’s writing has appeared in C Magazine, CAA Reviews, Canadian Art, Ciel Variable, Prefix Photo, Fuse Magazine, Momus, Performance Matters, Sculpture Journal, Visual Resources, and in the volume Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (ed. Martha Langford, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), as well as in various exhibition catalogues in the areas of Canadian photography and queer and feminist art. She is an editor of RACAR (Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review) and currently serves as President of the Universities Art Association of Canada.

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Monika Szewczyk is a writer, editor, and educator, and Audain Chief Curator at the Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver. Her lifelong interest in art- and/as history-making has evolved in close collaboration with artists, poets, activists, and archivists whose methods vary, but who all tend to reimagine structures and reinvent traditions as they negotiate belonging to more than one place, people and culture. A native of Szczecin, Poland, Szewczyk moved at a formative age to the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, Canada. After studying International Relations (BA) and Art History (MA) as well as theatre, film, and fine arts, she went on to lecture, advise and lead seminars at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Bergen Academy of Art and Design and the University of Chicago. Most recently (2019-2022), she served as director of de Appel in Amsterdam and evolved the curriculum of this foundation’s unique Curatorial Programme. Previously she was one of the curators for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2015-2017); Visual Arts Program Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (2012-2014); and Head of Publications at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam (2008-2011), now Kunstinstituut Melly; Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2004-2007); and Program Coordinator of the Belkin Satellite (2001-2003), a downtown outpost of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, her alma mater. From 2022/2023, Szewczyk was the QuiS research fellow of the Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule and Goethe Universität in Frankfurt. Her writings and interviews, as well as her editorial work, can be found in numerous artists’ publications, readers, catalogues and in journals such as e-flux journal, Afterall, Mousse, OCULA and South as a State of Mind.

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Desiree Valadares is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Valadares’ research and teaching focuses on the cultural memory and infrastructural imaginaries of the Second World War in western Canada and the non-contiguous US. In her current book project, Valadares theorizes repair through Pacific redress movements which coalesce around the preservation and stewardship of Second World War confinement landscapes in Hawai’i, Alaska and British Columbia. She draws insights from archival research, and place-based research methods including architectural drawing and photography in addition to participant-engaged methods such as landscape archaeology, gardening, and salvage at former confinement sites. Broadly, Valadares’ research contributes to ongoing debates on infrastructural repair, war reparations, Asian North American-Indigenous relations, settler colonialism and land dispossession at former Second World War confinement sites in former US territories and in western Canada.

Valadares trained as an architectural historian (Berkeley), urban designer (McGill) and landscape architect (Guelph/Edinburgh) and worked in private practice, government, and non-profits in landscape architecture, master planning, heritage conservation (Canada) and historic preservation (U.S.). Currently, Valadares holds professional affiliations with the Canadian Association of Heritage Professionals (CAHP) and is a registered landscape architect with the British Columbia Society of Landscape Architects (BCSLA).

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Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation, b. 1977) is an artist and curator of mixed Secwépemc and settler ancestry. Willard’s research and creative processes are informed by land-based and community-engaged art practices, connections to culture and family, and intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Often focusing on Secwépemc aesthetics, language and land, Willard explores the shifts and tensions between ideas of the contemporary and the traditional. Willard centres art as an Indigenous resurgent act through her collaborative projects and her support of language revitalization efforts in Secwépemc communities. Willard’s personal curatorial projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land-based art and action led by Indigenous artists. Willard received an MFA from UBC Okanagan in 2018. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kamloops Art Gallery; Burnaby Art Gallery; and SFU Audain Gallery, Vancouver. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at FotoFocus Biennial; Cincinnati Arts Centre; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Germany; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery; and Open Studio Contemporary Printmaking Centre, Toronto. Willard has curated numerous exhibitions, including the traveling exhibition Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture that began at the Vancouver Art Gallery (co-curated with Kathleen Ritter); Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; Unceded Territories: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun at the Museum of Anthropology (co-curated with Karen Duffek); and CUSTOM MADE at Kamloops Art Gallery. She was a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery. Willard was selected as one of five curators for a national scope exhibition in collaboration with Partners in Art and National Parks. She received the 2016 Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, the 2020 Shadbolt Foundation VIVA Award, and was named a 2022 Forge Project Fellow. Her work with BUSH gallery was recognized through the Ruth Foundation for the Arts Future Studies award (2022). 

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Mila Zuo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. Her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium (Duke University Press, 2022) won the 2024 Outstanding Achievement best book award in media, performance, and visual studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Accompanying research can be found in Film-Philosophy, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Celebrity Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Feminist Media Histories, Canadian Literature, and in various anthologies. In addition to her scholarly work, Zuo writes, directs, and produces narrative films, visual essays, documentaries, and music videos including Carnal Orient (2016) and Kin (2021). Zuo is currently working on her non-fiction film feature entitled Mongoloids, which is supported by SSHRC. Zuo also currently sits on the Film-Philosophy journal editorial board and is a 2025 Killam Research Fellow. At UBC, Zuo is affiliate faculty in the Asian Canadian and Migration program, and she is also part of the research cluster Cinema Thinks the World.

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Dr. Reilley Bishop-Stall is a settler Canadian art historian whose research is centered on Indigenous and settler representational histories, contemporary art and visual culture with a specific focus lens-based media, archival practice and ethics, anticolonial and activist art. Dr. Bishop-Stall received her PhD from McGill University and was awarded the university’s Arts Insights Dissertation Award for the year’s most outstanding dissertation in the Humanities. Her work has been published in a number of books and peer-reviewed journals including Photography & Culture, Art Journal Open, and The Journal of Art Theory and Practice. Before joining the faculty at McGill, Dr. Bishop-Stall held a Horizon Postdoctoral fellowship with the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership: The Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq Project, and a Limited Term Appointment in the Histories of Photography at Concordia University.

Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice draws out the philosophies and imaginaries residing in computational technologies and their industries. Working across moving image, computation, installation, theory, and performance, Blas has exhibited, lectured, and held screenings at venues including Vienna Secession, Austria; Whitney Museum of American Art, US; 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany; KANAL—Centre Pompidou, Belgium; Tate Modern, UK; Walker Art Center, US; Twelfth Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; 68th Berlin International Film Festival, Germany; and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico. His 2021 artist monograph Unknown Ideals was published by Sternberg Press and Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, and he is co-editor, with Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, of Informatics of Domination (Duke University Press, 2025). Blas holds a Ph.D. from The Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University and an M.F.A. in Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and was previously Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Catherine Clement is an award-winning community historian, curator and author. She is best known for her extensive, crowdsourced community history projects that help uncover, share and preserve the experiences of ordinary people in extraordinary times. Her projects have relied extensively on photography to help reveal a larger, community story. 

Catherine recently created and curated the landmark exhibition The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. With the assistance of UBC, her 2023 exhibition gathered and showcased the largest collection ever displayed publicly of personal Chinese head tax and other related identity/surveillance documents -- all containing “mug shot” portraiture. The research for the exhibition also excavated the lost stories and hidden human costs of this cruel but largely forgotten period in Canadian history. Beside an exhibition, The Paper Trail project also resulted in the creation of an extensive digital collection of these private documents and stories which are now housed at UBC Library, Rare Books & Special Collections. Her book on this monumental chapter in Canadian history will be published this June 2025. 

Prior to The Paper Trail project, Catherine was best known for her 10-year search uncovering the hidden works of Yucho Chow, Vancouver’s first and most prolific Chinese photographer. Her project, Chinatown Through a Wide Lens: The Hidden Photographs of Yucho Chow also resulted in a crowdsourced exhibition, a digital community collection of over 600 private photos now housed at the City of Vancouver Archives, and an award-winning book. 

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Diack is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and the History of Photography at the University of Miami, where she specializes in conceptual art, critical theory, conflict studies, and civic engagement. She is the author of Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), co-author with Erina Duganne and Terri Weissman of Global Photography: A Critical History (London: Routledge, 2020), and co-editor of photographies (Fall 2017 no. 10.3) Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals including, Visual Studies, History of Photography, Public, and RACAR, as well as in several edited volumes, such as Photography Performing Humor (Leuven University Press, 2019), L’art de Douglas Huebler (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018), Photography and Doubt (Routledge, 2017), and The Public Life of Photographs (MIT Press and Ryerson Image Center, 2016). In 2016 Diack was the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

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Dr. Ayasha C. Guerin (they/she) is assistant professor of intersectionality and practice-based research and media making in the department of World Arts & Cultures/ Dance. They are an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose research and creative practices center socio-ecological histories,connecting human and animal experience through questions of relational reciprocity, care and companionship across Black diasporic contexts and anti-colonial struggles.

Professor Guerin’s first book project, Making Zone A, Nature, Race and Resilience on New York’s Most Vulnerable Shores looks at the colonial foundations of the city’s waterfront development from the 17th-19th century and traces how conquest, slavery, and capitalism have physically altered coastal environments and ecological relations. This work joins important intellectual developments to think through Native American and African American experience, human and species distinctions, and settler colonialism and antiblackness together. It treats the shoreline as important material, historical record of racial and animal (un)settlement.

Dr. Guerin holds a PhD from New York University in American Studies.

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Andrea Kunard is the Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada. She has an extensive background in photography, both historical and contemporary, Canadian and international. She earned her PhD in 2004 from Queen’s University, and taught survey and seminar courses on the history of photography, Canadian Art (historical and contemporary), and museology for over a decade at Carleton University, Queen's University and Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University. She has published in numerous academic journals, magazines and books such as the International Journal of Canadian Studies, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Journal of Canadian Art History, Muse, BlackFlash, Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, and Photography: Crisis of History (edited by Joan Fontcuberta). She co-edited The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (2011) with Carol Payne, Professor of Art History, Carleton University. As curator at the National Gallery of Canada, Kunard explores the intersections of contemporary and historical issues in photography, focusing on cultural uses of the medium, and its capacity to challenge and reconfigure what are understood to be the norms of the public and private, subjectivity, memory (personal and communal), and knowledge.

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Martha Langford C.M. FRSC is a Distinguished Professor Emeriti in the Department of Art History, Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University. From 2012 to 2025, she served as Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art. She was also editor-in-chief of Journal of Canadian Art History/Annales d'histoire de l'art canadien. She currently serves as co-editor, with Dr. Erin Silver, of the Beaverbrook Foundation Series on Canadian Art History of McGill-Queen's University Press. She is also a member of the editorial board of History of Photography. In 2018, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. A long-time member of the Universities Art Association of Canada, she received the UAAC-AAUC Recognition Award in 2020.

Her writing on photography and video addresses mediated experience in relation to constructs of perception, memory, and imagination. These interests have led her to the work in all media of Canadian artist Michael Snow. She is the author of an Art Canada Institute online artbook, Michael Snow: Life & Work, as well as numerous lectures, conference papers, book chapters, and catalogue essays, including "Repetition / La Répétition: Michael Snow and the Act of Memory," in Catsou Roberts, ed., Michael Snow almost Cover to Cover (Bristol and London: Arnolfini and Black Dog Press, 2001);  "Michael Snow: Screen Writing," Switch 3 (Powerplant, spring 2010): 8-15; "Translation, Migration, Fascination: Motion Pictures by Michael Snow," in Michael Snow, Recent Works (Vienna: Secession,2012); and “Light Erasures and Shifting Temporalities in Some ‘Later’ Works by Michael Snow,” in Brad Buckley and John Conomos, eds., Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory (Oxfordshire: Libri Publishing, 2015). She wrote the afterword to Michael Snow's last book, My Mother’s Collection of Photographs (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2022).

Langford was the Executive Producer of the National Film Board, Still Photography Division, from 1981 to 1985, when she oversaw the transfer of its collection and program to the National Gallery of Canada, becoming the chief curator and founding director of the NGC affiliate, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP, 1985-1994). In these roles, she curated numerous photographic exhibitions, both solo and thematic, and published important books and catalogues, notably 13 Essays on Photography (1991) and Beau (1992), which inaugurated the new museum at 1 Rideau Canal. In 2005, she was artistic director of the international photographic biennale, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2005, with 29 exhibitions city-wide. More recently, she co-curated, with Sherry Farrell Racette, Unmasking: Arthur Renwick, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas (2009) for the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris and the Canadian representation in Musée du Quai Branly photographic biennale PhotoQuai 2009. Also in 2009, she was the commissioning curator for Preoccupations: Photographic Explorations of the Grey Nuns Mother House for the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University – an exhibition now on permanent display at the Grey Nuns residence.

Langford received her PhD from McGill University in 1997, followed by fellowships held at the Institute for the Humanities of Simon Fraser University, the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, and the National Gallery of Canada.

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Carol Payne is a Professor of Art History, cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) and the School of Canadian Studies. She is a Research Associate with both the Carleton Centre for Public History and the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre, and since 2020, she has served as Associate Dean (Research and International) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. 

Payne’s research centres on the history of photography and is mainly focused on interrogating the role photography plays in both supporting and disrupting settler colonialism in Canada. She coedited—with Dr. Andrea Kunard, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Canada—the collected volume The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) and the monograph The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941-1971 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).  Since 2005, she has worked collaboratively on photo-based history projects with Inuit groups and knowledge keepers.  Among other publications and community outputs, these collaborations have resulted in the collected volume Atiqput: Inuit Oral History and Project Naming (MQUP 2022), which she co-edited with Beth Greenhorn, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster, and Christina Williamson; the online exhibition  Ajjiliurlagit: The Photographs of Joseph Idlout, co-edited with curator, educator and historian Augatnaaq Eccles; the forthcoming book The Hunter, the Crown and the Cameras: Joseph Idlout (c.1911/15-68)  and the Image of Sangussaqtauliqtilluta (MQUP) with contributions by Augatnaaq Eccles and members of the Idlout family; and a current collaboration with Inuit knowledge keepers Deborah Kigjugalik Webster and Bernadette Dean, and Michael Bravo at the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute.

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Michael Dang is a curator, filmmaker, writer and a PhD student in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University Of British Columbia. His curatorial work includes Unit Bruises: Theodore Wan & Paul Wong, 1975-1979 at the Richmond Art Gallery and Archives Access: Pascal, One Night Only at Western Front, both from 2024. His films include Brother Mary (2020) and the forthcoming At The Very Least, It’s A Roof. He is based in Vancouver on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish nations. 

Amanda Kachadoorian Jordi (b. 1995, California) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores migration, bureaucratic systems, and hybrid cultural identities through mixed media, sculpture, and photography. Raised in San Diego and of Mexican, German, and Armenian descent, she investigates the emotional and psychological complexities of movement, belonging, and in-betweenness. Originally trained as a painter, she began with large-scale oil paintings of surreal, hybridized botanicals, each drawn from plants, flora, and landscapes developing a metaphorical language of layered histories and identities. Her practice has since evolved to incorporate unconventional materials through an evolving collage-based process, reflecting the layered tensions of movement, the weight of bureaucracy, and the fragile negotiations of belonging across shifting borders.

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Henna Mann is a Vancouver-based filmmaker and journalist completing her Master’s in Journalism at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Her work focuses on investigative reporting, international journalism, and documentary storytelling, with an emphasis on underrepresented communities and social impact.

Henna is a Global Reporting Program Fellow at UBC, selected as one of fifteen students for an international reporting fellowship in partnership with the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy. Through the program, she recently conducted field research in Cambodia, examining the social and economic impacts of foreign-aid cuts. As a recipient of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Graduate Award, Henna is also producing a digital archive documenting the histories of older Punjabi-Canadian women as part of her thesis research.

Outside of academia, Henna is developing her next documentary, My Grandmothers’ Dreams, commissioned by CBC’s Absolutely Canadian series. The project was selected for the Documentary Organization of Canada’s Breakthrough Program and promoted at the Hot Docs Film Festival. Her previous documentaries, including the award-winning feature Rails, Jails and Trolleys and the short film Clay Remembers, have been recognized at film festivals, universities, and public institutions across Metro Vancouver, Toronto, California, and New York City.

Henna has interned with PBS Frontline and Global BC, and currently works in production roles with CBC Radio (Cross Country Checkup and Just Asking) and the National Film Board of Canada. Her experience spans research, field reporting, editorial support, and production management across audio, video, and digital platforms.

Henna holds an Honours BFA in Film Production from York University and has received multiple awards as a journalism student, including the SSHRC Graduate Award, Jack Webster Student Award, and OMNI TV Scholarship.

Katica Naude is an MA student in the Department of Geography at UBC, with a background in environmental science and creative writing. Their thesis research focuses on geographic access to gender-affirming hormone therapy in the US using critical geographic information science, under supervision of Dr. Avery Everhart. They are also interested in the intersections of trans life, history, archives, art, and data. This presentation is adapted from a project developed during HIST 585 (History in Photo Archives) with guidance from Dr. Kelly McCormick.

Yerang Park is Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the University of British Columbia. In her Dissertation project on Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik’s event scores and performances in the 1960s, Park investigates how Ono and Paik’s works questioned the relationship between the instructions and the actions, and enriched the political potential of Fluxus performances. Park holds her MA in Aesthetics at Seoul National University where she completed the thesis on Julia Kristeva’s reception and critique of Hegelian aesthetics. Park has been shortlisted for the Fulbright Scholarship, and received the Seoul National University Press Grant and SNU CORE Scholarship.

Florence Plathan is currently pursuing her Masters in Art History and Theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her SSHRC-funded research project, “The Gay Deceivers”: Weegee and Photographic Representations of Trans Femininity, uses Weegee’s images of transvestites as an entry point into the intertwined histories of trans feminine representation and trans misogyny in photography. Her work is interested in archival research, the relationship between art and histories of gender and sexuality, interdisciplinary approaches to art history, and trans feminist art historical methods.

Mickey Semera (he/him) is a second year MA student in the Cinema and Media Studies program at The University of British Columbia. His scholarly work has been presented at the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada and The University of Toronto. His SSHRC-funded MA thesis is forthcoming and investigates the temporal structures of Eritrean and Ethiopian film archives. He is also a filmmaker whose creative practice interrogates the strictures of race and national identity in black and diasporic communities. He is currently working on a film about faith and inherited responsibility in the Eritrean-Canadian community which recently received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Sameena Siddiqui is an Associate Curator of Adult Programs at Surrey Art Gallery. She is also a Ph.D. candidate and SRSF doctoral fellow at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Canada. Siddiqui has presented her research at several international conferences and residencies and published in photography journals. Her dissertation research won the MFAH Joan and Stanford Alexander Dissertation Award, US, 2021.

Gloria Wong (b. 1998) is a visual artist based between T’karonto/Toronto and Vancouver, on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her work explores the complexities and nuances of Asian diasporic identities and how they are shaped by different relationships — between people, their environments or objects. Through her lens-based practice, she is interested in the ways that this identity and lineage is constructed, negotiated and documented through embodied acts of care, memory and gesture. Wong holds a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Arts + Design.

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Yuri Yamaguchi is an MA student in History at the University of British Columbia, where her research focuses on the Japanese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Her work examines how war memory is formed, transmitted, and negotiated across generations, particularly through the experiences of Japanese communities who settled in the region before and after the Second World War. She is interested in questions of identity, silence, and postwar responsibility, and how individuals and institutions remember or choose to forget Japan’s wartime presence in Southeast Asia. Her broader interests include archival photography, transnational migration, and the politics of memory in the Asia-Pacific.

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