Katherine Chan

Katherine is an earnest interlocutor and a fierce thinker who is endlessly interested in the conversation of art and impact, topics surrounding gender and sexuality.

Her writing focuses on poetry, prose, and art reviews. Having lived abroad in Berlin for the last two years pursuing a master’s degree in English Literature, she is currently researching for her thesis project specializing in temporality and queer studies. Connected to the independent art scene in Vancouver, she is the Gallery Associate at Untitled Art Space located in the DTES, where she assists in curation, public relations, and install processes for art shows. She is also a regular contributing writer at Sad Mag, a print and online publication on Vancouver’s independent arts and culture.

A fan of collaboration and meaning­making, she is constantly in the pursuit of meaningful work with artists, creatives, to generate impact. 

Nebal Maysaud

Nebal Maysaud was born in 1995 in Alexandria, Virginia. Born son of two Lebanese bakers, he did not grow up in a musical family but has found music on his own. His music is a convergence of Lebanese tradition, faith, queer liberation, and contemplation of our current society. He is not afraid to portray the suffering of those who are often silenced and firmly believes in the power of music to express the voices and needs of the oppressed, particularly among those with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations. His music is influenced by many different artists of various traditions, including Vaughan Williams, Khalil Gibran, Arvo Part, Walt Whitman, Mahmoud Darwish, Guillaume de Machaut and J.S. Bach.

Nebal also has a huge interest in Religious Studies and is usually not afraid to integrate that into his music. Finding multiple ways to speak the mysticism of the universe to his audience. He emphasizes openness in his religious works, asserting that everyone, regardless of sexual or gender identity, class standing, or religious belief or lack thereof (including those outside the Abrahamic tradition), are open to the grace and mercy of the divine.

Nebal Maysaud has composed for a number of ensembles and won numerous awards, including the Alexandria Choral Society Carol Competition, where the Alexandria Choral Society performed his A Capella work, Winter Dusk in concert. Nebal was also a recipient of the first Kluge Young Composer’s Competition, in which his work, O Great Mystery, was performed in concert by the Alexandria Symphony. Nebal has was taught under famed Wind Band composer Mark Camphouse during high school before entering the studios of Joanne Metcalf and Asha Srinivasan. He is currently a composition student in the studio of Prof. Andrew Cole at the Lawrence Conservatory of Music in Appleton, WI. 

Graham A. Smith

Graham A. Smith recently completed his PhD in composition at York University in Toronto.  He was awarded a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship for his dissertation research which focuses on the requiem mass.  His dissertation was supervised by Michael Coghlan and includes an original requiem mass composition for large orchestra and chorus that has a duration of sixty minutes.  Graham also holds an MA in composition from York and a BMus from Queen’s University in Kingston.  While at Queen’s, Graham had the privilege of studying composition with John Burge and Marjan Mozetich. 

As a musician, Graham is active as a versatile freelance double bassist and electric bassist with more than a decade of professional performance experience in settings that include orchestral, jazz, chamber, singer-songwriter, musical theatre, folk, rock, and world.  Graham also maintains a private teaching studio in Toronto’s Christie Pits neighbourhood where he lives with his wife, professional cellist Erika Nielsen.

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is the author of Paper Pavilion, recipient of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Notes from a Missing Person (Essay Press 2015); and Song of a Mirror, finalist for the Tupelo Snowbound Chapbook Award. Her work has appeared recently in Blackbird, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, and Poetry International. She has received grants from the Daesan Foundation, Intermedia Arts, and Minnesota State Arts Board. Currently, Jennifer is associate professor of English and program director of Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Sandro Manzon

Sandro Manzon (born April 2, 1991) is a Canadian musician/composer.  His music spans a variety of realms, focusing on forms of experimental, chamber and psychedelic soft-rock music.  His music has been performed in North America, Europe and Asia.  Sandro is also the frontman and contributing songwriter for the acclaimed psychedelic soft-rock band, f r o m h e r e.  

Sandro studied composition in Canada with notable composers such as Peter Hatch, Allison Cameron, Linda Catlin Smith, and James Harley.  Sandro has also attended composition workshops/lectures by renowned international composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki and Pierluigi Billone.   

In 2010, Sandro formed the band Edges, which features some of Toronto's renowned improvising and experimental musicians.  Sandro has also taught composition and improvisation workshops in Canada, and Vietnam.  

Sandro is currently situated in Montreal, Quebec but has spent time living and working as a musician in Spain, Vietnam and Canada.

Jude Neale

Jude Neale was shortlisted for the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize (Ireland), TheInternational Poetic Republic Poetry Prize (U.K),The Mary Chalmers Smith Poetry Prize(UK), The Wenlock International Poetry Prize (UK), finalist for Pandora's Poetry competition (Canada) and  finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award (Canada), and was nominated twice for an Internationally renowned Pushcart award for her third book, A Quiet Coming of Light.

She is an opera singer and poet who enjoys performing with other genres as diverse as dance, tabla or viola. Thomas Beckman and Jude have just released a collaborative EP (Places Beyond) a blend of viola and the spoken word.

She recently contributed to the League of Canadian Poets, Women's Caucus, a chapter on collaboration for their upcoming anthology of essays on this subject. She was one of the jurors of this year’s Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

When she is not writing, she is singing in underground parking lots.

Emily Joy Sullivan

Emily Joy Sullivan is a composer, choir director, and educator from Buffalo, NY. She holds a B.A. in Music, Magna Cum Laude, from Amherst College and an M.S. in Early Childhood and Childhood General Education from the Bank Street College of Education. Ms. Sullivan is currently working towards a Master's Degree in Music Composition at SUNY Fredonia, where she studies with Paul Coleman; she has also studied with Eric Sawyer, Peter Klatzow, and Robert Deemer. Ms. Sullivan’s music is characterized by lyricism and lush expressivity, and is deeply influenced by folk, pop, and world music. Ms. Sullivan loves writing musical theater, and is especially interested in writing for the female voice. She strives to incorporate her feminist principles into her compositions, writing songs that give characters agency and expressivity. 

Ms. Sullivan continues to teach, and has been active in directing and/or founding singing groups for the last ten years. She received a 2012 Davis Projects for Peace grant to bring together South African youths of different backgrounds through community choral singing. She also fundraised for and founded a youth choir in Queens, NY.  Her community choir in New York touched the lives of adults from dozens of countries, and continues to perform six years on. She is currently “spreading seeds” through her role designing and teaching Chorus and Music Theory curricula at the Buffalo Center for Arts and Technology.

Glenn Sutherland

Glenn Sutherland, composer of vocal, choral, and instrumental works, has studied composition with Michael Trew, Lane Price, and Jocelyn Morlock. His vocal, chamber and orchestral works have been performed by soloists and ensembles in Canada and in Europe. Performers include Melanie Adams (soprano), Heidi Krutzen (harp), the Grand River Chorus, Erato Ensemble, the McGregor-Nesselroad-Barnes Trio, the Vancouver Brass Project, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (Jean Coulthard Readings), and recently by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra as part of their 25th anniversary New Music Festival concert series. Winnipeg’s award-winning Esprit de Choeur featured their commission of three pieces in their June 2016 concert, as well as during the 2015 Tapestry International Festival for Women’s Voices. He has been published by Mayfair Music and Avondale Press. He is the 2016 winner of the Canadian Music Centre (Prairie Region) Emerging Composer competition.

When not composing, he is a conservation biologist, primarily focussed on issues involving endangered species.

Sammy Shatner

Sammy Shatner moved to Canada in 2011 from North Africa to pursue a post-secondary education in music. Having had no prior formal musical training, he completed the one-year Basic Musicianship Program at Douglas College and subsequently the two-year University Transfer Program. At Douglas College he studied classical guitar with renown performer and professor Michael Strutt, and composition with renown Vancouver-based composer and music professor Doug Smith. In 2015 he transfered to the University of British Columbia to continue his undergraduate degree in composition, studying with Stephen Chatman and Dorothy Chang. He has composed for various solo instrumentalists and chamber ensembles and has had works performed at Douglas College, the Vancouver Academy of Music, and the School of Music at UBC. He has also worked with UBC singers and poets from the Vancouver Thursdays Writing Collective to create new art songs under collaborative pianist and professor Rena Sharon, founder of the Vancouver International Song Institute. 

Sammy is currently completing the last year of his Bachelor of Music at UBC.

Sajia Sultana Kabir

Sajia Sultana Kabir is a dancing songwriter, theatrical bellydancer, and singing actress based in Vancouver BC. She is passionate about classical and folk art forms, science fiction and fantasy, avant-garde and DIY performance, and social justice. She wishes to share her sometimes disturbing, always compassionate visions of the world with a wide audience.

Zachary Kenefick

Zachary Kenefick is an artist usually located around Long Beach, California. He has studied poetry, sculpture, and composition at CSU Long Beach. His artistic output is often centered around the tension between virtuosity and amateurism and the role the institution and canon has on both. He enjoys working with technology and collaborative processes. He often works with dancers and visual artists, and enjoys large scale collaborations— recently taking up curation of eclectic concerts and gatherings as an element of his artistic practice. He plays the saxophone decently well and the banjo endearingly poorly.

Roisin Adams

Roisin Adams is a Vancouver based composer/arranger/pianist/educator. Upon completing her studies at Vancouver Community College, she was named the winner of the 2013 Contemporary Composition Competition, Chris Gage Memorial Award, Fred Bass Scholarship, and the Andres Espinoza Memorial Scholarship. In association with NOW Society, she curates a monthly series called, "Here and NOW" which is dedicated to fostering community within the improvised music genre. Recent highlights include participating in SFU'S LAUNCH! 2015 showcase of emerging artist and performing with contemporary Flamenco/Tap dancer Dayna Szyndrowski and harpist Elisa Thorn in their interdisciplinary project, Written on the Body. While not composing, Adams performs regularly as a soloist and in her independent project, Hildegard's Ghost. Roisin Adams is the recipient of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. She currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Michel Beaudry

A freelance writer for the last thirty-five years, Michel Beaudry has roamed the world in search of great and unique stories to tell. He has eaten whale with Greenland Inuit, hiked above the clouds with Inca descendants, retraced the Silk Route with Kyrgyz horsemen and followed Morocco’s hashish trail with Berber friends. And his thirst for adventure is far from quenched. Inspired by the classical edict mens sana in corpore sano, the sexagenarian continues to push the performance envelope, whether he’s setting first ski tracks on a remote peak in northern Alaska or performing a live storytelling gig for a gaggle of graduate art students. His award-winning tales have appeared in GQ, Reader’s Digest, Outside, Sports Illustrated, The Globe & Mail, Canadian Business, the much lamented Equinox Magazine, Britain’s Daily Mail, France’s Le Monde and dozens of other publications. The widowed father of two amazingly talented daughters, Beaudry is currently enrolled at SFU’s The Writer’s Workshop, where he is hard at work on his first novel.

James Coomber

James Coomber is a composer, sound designer and musician based in Vancouver.  His artistic interests lie heavily in collaborative work, where the intermingling of disciplines pushes the boundary of audio-visual forms.  He is a graduate of music composition and theatre collaboration from the School of Contemporary Arts at SFU.  Recent highlights include composing for and performing in Noam Gagnon’s This Crazy Show (coming to to the Dance Centre this Fall), doing copyist work for Veda Hille and Amiel Gladstone’s Onegin, creating the music and sound for rice and beans theatre’s Mis Papás, and presenting work at the Prague Quadrennial, one of the world's largest scenography festivals.  Next up you can hear his music at Dancing on the Edge in Joshua Beamish/Move: the company’s fighting chance.

Maren Lisac

Maren Lisac is a composer and musician currently based in Vancouver.

Donato Mancini

The interdisciplinary practice of Donato Mancini focuses mainly on poetry, bookworks, text-based visual art and cultural criticism. He is the author of four books of poetry: Ligatures (New Star 2005) Æthel (New Star 2007), Buffet World (2011) and Fact 'n' Value (2011). He is also the author of the critical work You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (2012) . His current book, Loitersack (2014), is a book-length poetics essay in the form of poetry, poetics, theory, theory theatre, questions and laugh particles. He is a PhD candidate in English at the University of British Columbia.