Sana Akram
PhD Candidate, Cinema and Media Studies, York University

Sana Akram is a Pakistani XR creator, media artist and an urbanist, currently pursuing a doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University as a recipient of the prestigious Elia Scholars Program Award. Her research-creation explores the themes of wonder, relationality, and enchantment in storytelling, performance, and worlding. Her broader research interests include immersive storytelling and performance, oral tradition, worldbuilding, emergent media, cocreation, and civic engagement.

Tara Rose Morris
New Media Artist

Tara Rose Morris is a new media artist with a practice that spans live performance, immersive installation, and digital artifacts. They investigate the thresholds between spectacle and embodiment, using technology as a site for speculative imaginaries where bodies, memory, and identity converge, flicker, and dissolve.

Shirin Fahimi
Digital Media Artist

Shirin Fahimi is a first-generation Canadian-Iranian digital media artist based in Toronto. Through digital world-building, she explores the role of occult sciences and mysticism in empowering female presence across political, spiritual, and digital domains. Her work is deeply informed by mystical literature and magical practices from Islamic culture, as reflected in Iranian society and diasporic communities. She has exhibited and performed internationally at venues such as SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), TIFF Bell Lightbox (Toronto), and the CAFKA Biennial (Kitchener). Her practice has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Banff Centre.

Ali Phi
Transmedia Artist

Ali Phi is a transmedia artist based in Toronto. His works are at the intersection of art, science, and technology, Through installations, autonomous machines, and performances, he explores the underlying mechanisms of new media, technology, interactions and data.

Haoran Chang
PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, York University

Haoran Chang is a visual artist, media art researcher, and experimental game designer.  He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at York University in Cinema and Media Studies. His practice and research focus on game studies, immersive media, posthuman media, ethnographic game design, somatic design, reenactment studies, and art in cosmotechnics.

Gangping Zuo
Sixth-Generation Successor of Traditional Yang-Style Tai Chi

Gangping Zuo is a sixth-generation inheritor of Yang-Style Taijiquan, a sixth-duan Chinese martial artist, and a first-class national martial arts coach. He is also the founding president of the Jiangyin Yongnian Yang-Style Taijiquan Association. He apprenticed under Master Zhao Youbin, a ninth-duan Chinese martial arts grandmaster and a fifth-generation family inheritor of Yang-Style Taijiquan.

Haoran Chang
PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, York University

Haoran Chang is a visual artist, media art researcher, and experimental game designer.  He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at York University in Cinema and Media Studies. His practice and research focus on game studies, immersive media, posthuman media, ethnographic game design, somatic design, reenactment studies, and art in cosmotechnics.

Elke Reinhuber
Associate Professor for Expanded Photography, SCM School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong

Elke Reinhuber is a media artist, educator and researcher at SCM City University of Hong Kong. With her award winning and internationally presented immersive projects, she explores different modes of presentation and strategies of storytelling to emphasise the parallel existence of multiple truths of the here and now, anchored in Expanded Photography.

Xinchen Du
Curatorial Director, Funshine Culture Group

Xinchen Du graduated from the Curatorial Practice Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2020 and received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2018 with a major in Fine Arts and a minor in Museum and Curatorial Studies. She also studied Asian Culture and Economic Studies at Waseda University in 2018. Her practice and research interests lie in the history of social technology as well as in the application and reflection of technology and new media art from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Xueyu Liu
Curator, Raiden INST

Xueyu Liu, a curator at Raiden INST in Shanghai, graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and Chelsea College of Arts, UAL. Her practice centers on mixed-media spatial narratives, integrating diverse forms such as installation，AR/VR and Generative Digital Visuals to create sensory-extended exhibitions. Inspiring from daily life and local issues, she explores the interplay between technology, history，emotion, and reality. She initiated the interdisciplinary project “Capacitor” in 2022 and curated Tech-Driven exhibitions like “Hu Zhi Ling” (2023) and  “Turing Square” (2024).

Momo Yoshida

Momo is the founder and owner of Momo Tea, an online tea store based in Toronto. She selects high quality tea in her home country Japan and offers them at an affordable price in Canada.

Momo is a serious tea lover. She is Nihoncha(Japanese Tea) Adviser certified by Japan Tea Industry Central Association. She is also certified Tea Sommelier with George Brown College and Tea Association Canada.  She is a member of Tea Guild Canada. She belongs to the Urasenke school of Chanoyu (Tea Ceremony).

Keisuke Itoh
Artist

After graduating from Tama Art University’s Department of Graphic Design, Keisuke Itoh gained experience as a graphic designer and is currently active as an XR artist. His works, including the VR play “Typeman,” have been shown at several well-known events, including the Venice International Film Festival, the Cannes International Film Festival, and the world’s largest CG festival, SIGGRAPH. Since 2019, he has directed a VR animation work that has been screened for five consecutive years in the XR category at the Venice International Film Festival, and has been nominated for four consecutive years.

Momo Yoshida

Momo is the founder and owner of Momo Tea, an online tea store based in Toronto. She selects high quality tea in her home country Japan and offers them at an affordable price in Canada.

Momo is a serious tea lover. She is Nihoncha(Japanese Tea) Adviser certified by Japan Tea Industry Central Association. She is also certified Tea Sommelier with George Brown College and Tea Association Canada.  She is a member of Tea Guild Canada. She belongs to the Urasenke school of Chanoyu (Tea Ceremony).

Sana Akram
Lead Producer of the VR Presentation

Sana Akram is a Pakistani urbanist, media maker and a Fulbright alum based in Toronto, Canada. Her award-winning interactive documentary, Little Pakistan – Future Histories, has showcased at several international festivals and her research has been published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Currently, she is pursuing a doctorate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University as a recipient of the prestigious Elia Scholars Program Award. Her research-creation interests include immersive storytelling and performance, oral tradition, worlding and worldbuilding, emergent media, cocreation, and civic engagement.

Emmie Tsumura

Emmie Tsumura is a multidisciplinary artist and designer. Her work is positioned where politics meet the everyday, and advocates for more accessible, inclusive, and joyful communities through justice-oriented design strategies. She holds a master’s in design from York University, and her current area of research focuses on chaos, absurdity, and the occult.

Crystal Chan

Crystal 倩瓊 Chan is a Hong Kong-born, Montreal-based artist, producer, and former film critic dedicated to telling stories in new ways. She teaches media writing at the University of British Columbia and works for RavenSpace, a pioneering multimedia platform for Indigenous and collaborative creation.

Noor Khan • Prescriptions
Video Installation

In 2019, artist Noor Khan began filming her project titled ‘Postscript’. PostScript is a double screen installation, exploring the geographical intersections of Parkdale and Scarborough. P.S. stands for Parkdale and Scarborough- suitably also short for “postscript” for all afterthoughts written after the letter has been signed. Policy-making in Toronto has caused both Parkdale and Scarborough to suffer, as the two are afterthoughts compared to more affluent areas (therefore, P.S.). Footage of storefronts located in each place sits side-by-side, while the audio provides a meditative experience of activity inside these stores as sites of cultural practice. This film draws parallels between communities by unraveling similar stories of cultural practice retained with the support of local stores and restaurants, and the conditions of gentrification that threaten cultural and economic livelihood throughout the West (Canada, U.S., U.K., and more). 

Three months after winning the Silver Prize at Reel Asian Film Festival’s 2019 So You Think You Can Pitch competition, the pandemic hit, changing Noor’s production plans completely. Many changes occurred, especially the closing of the stores she documented, including Parkdale’s infamous ‘Island Foods’ on King and Dufferin.Three years later, this project takes on a new form after having time to reflect on past footage, and creating new components. The resulting project is titled ‘Prescriptions’. The word “prescription”, from “pre-” (“before”) and “script” (“writing, written”), refers to the fact that the prescription is an order that is written down before action takes place. This retrospective project takes the form of a sculptural installation, in which we see the film projected onto scrolls of paper. In this way, the artist compares her footage to policy, both predetermined, with no real knowledge of the after effects.

Vince Ha • Danger Comes Through the Mouth
Photographs and sculpture

When I was younger, my mother would often remind me “to keep my head down, and keep quiet,” or that “danger comes through the mouth,” all with the goal of maintaining family or community unity. At times, sharing collective stories in institutional spaces can be simmered down to reductive images of community harmony that can later develop into hurtful dynamics. I am not endorsing an overemphasis on disunity, or espousing a false dichotomy, but we must make room for conflict: it is a natural, and vital, element of our growth.

In this work, I use family photos, stripping them from their original coherence and weaving them into new contexts. The work encourages space for alternating narratives and messiness, possibly transcending the boundaries of our biological social institution. This work traces part of my meditation on what it means to embrace hurting—on a personal and communal level—to help us explore pre-healing and move beyond remembrance.

Jes Hanzelkova • I couldn’t see but it didn’t seem to matter anyways
Photographs and sculpture

I couldn’t see but it didn’t seem to matter anyways because the busy street, the quiet alley, the dark space, the empty mall, the sky, the ground, the air, my breath was displaced regardless. 

As a series of three images taken between two-years this work documents an ongoing project in mask making and performance art. Each image holds one version of the mask and captures the performances from the same perspective in different places. Each mask is consistently white (a play on my cultural identity), positioned on the head (to play with the surface of the face), and modulates light to the rhythm of the wearer’s heartbeat (as a way of playing with the beautiful abjectness of mortality). 

I am interested in masking as a way of both eluding and sitting-with the act of identification I undergo within the gaze of others as an East-Asian and feminine-presenting womxn. A push and pull between culture, place-memory, and constraint affects the ease of movement and the amount of face shown from image to image as the project progresses in time. In this way, these performances serve as a mirror where I perform my identity and all its ornamental and artificial derivatives. I focus on the ways which racialized and gendered identities have been forged out of the space between the biological, technological, and artificial. The space between the surface of the skin; the lens of the camera; a sleeve, an eye; the remixed and the glitching.

Brannavy Jeyasundaram • touch & flesh
Video installation

‘touch & flesh’ is a visual rendering of a workshop facilitated as part of Healing Arts Dinner Circle, a segment of Tamil Archive Project. The work is an attempt to understand our bodies as archives of tenderness, joy, laughter, and love. It was produced in April 2020 at the onset of the pandemic.

Touch is being increasingly removed from our physical vocabularies through the alienation of our labour and community networks. ‘touch & flesh’ asks what it means for our bodies to be called to attention through isolation. It also positions the archive as an embodied experience that must be retrieved, interpreted, and committed to memory. 

As participants locate emotions that exist between the curves and contours of their flesh, they create dance at a time of increased restriction and paranoia around movement. Through screens in our independent spaces, we produce choreographies of tenderness and action. We insist — there is a shape to grief. There is a shape to joy, love, care, and laughter. 

Featuring: Ambihai Akilan, Evelyn Ascencio, Kat Bell, Vidhya Elango, Manvinder Gill, Janany Jeyasundaram, Hazel Hayoung Ki, Yasietha Krishnakulasingham, Nyda Kwasowsky,  Gowthaman Naguleswaran, Yasmeen Nematt Alla, Nirali Patel, Shanki Ratnanesan, Archana Ravichandradeva, Vasuki Shanmuganathan, Jennifer Su, Maneesa Veeravel, Renee Vettivelu, and Vanessa Vigneswaramoorthy.

Mo Phùng • Migration & (RE)Emergence
Mixed media

Through this work I dream worlds to honour my Vietnamese queer and trans ancestors, building them magical spaces of possibilities and freedom. Textural and visual storytelling creates space for intergenerational conversations – leaving marks and hints for ancestors of past and future, inviting them towards my current self.

 My multiple identities have led me here, from the South China Sea to the North Atlantic Ocean. Saltwater is a means of travel, a piece of home, unhealed wounds, a marker of distance – expanding beyond the constraints of borders, and who we are allowed to become. A vessel of queerness allows these stories to be revealed and accessed.