Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. She directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and qualitative research methodologies.

Aubyn O’Grady is the Program Director of the Yukon School of Visual Arts in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Territory, Dawson City, Yukon. Aubyn’s research-creation practice is concerned with artist-led art schools, the ethics of site-specific artworks, and artist engagements with rural places. She is a frequent and enthusiastic collaborator and rarely takes sole credit for any project she organizes. However, Aubyn can be credited with conceptualizing the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers (2013-2017) (book forthcoming), the Swimming Lessons Aquatic Lecture series (2017-2018), Local Field School (2020+), and Drawlidays (2019, 2020), a Dawson City-wide portrait exchange.

Dr. Leah Decter is an inter-media/performance artist and scholar based in Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 Territory. Working from a critical white settler perspective, her research, writing and artwork/research-creation contend with the ways artistic production can subvert colonial ideations embedded in the settler imaginary and contribute to decolonial and non-colonial paradigms. Decter holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queens University and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute. In 2019-20 she was an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design/Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, and in 2017 she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales’ National Institute for Experimental Arts. Decter has exhibited, presented and screened her artwork widely in Canada including at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Dunlop Art Gallery, McKenzie Art Gallery, Plug In ICA, Images Festival, the Institute of Performance and Politics’ Hemispheric Enquentro and Trinity Square Video, and internationally including in the US, UK, Germany, Malta, Netherlands, India and Australia. Her artwork has been featured in The Journal of Canadian Art History, Craft and Design in Canada, Journal of Canadian Heritage, Fuse Magazine and Border Crossing, and her writing has been published in the Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies and Canadian Theatre Review. Her co-authored writing (with Carla Taunton, Ayumi Goto and Jaimie Isaac, respectively) has been published in Fuse Magazine’s Decolonizing Aesthetics Issue, The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation and West Coast Line’s Reconcile This! Issue. Decter’s upcoming publications include a co-edited Special Issue of PUBLIC Journal and several book chapters. Her current research-creation/art projects address social-spatial politics consequent to settler colonial formation and consider the ethics of being-in-relation in spaces of Indigenous sovereignty.

Alana Bartol (she/they) comes from a long line of water witches. Their site-responsive artworks explore divination and dreaming as ways of understanding across places, species, and bodies. Through collaborative and individual works, Bartol examines our relationships with the Earth, the elements, and what are colonially known as "natural resources".

Bartol holds a BFA from the University of Windsor (Canada) and an MFA from Wayne State University (USA). In 2019 and 2021, they were long-listed for Canada’s Sobey Art Award representing Prairies and North. Bartol's work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals across Canada, including PlugIn Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), Access Gallery (Vancouver), Art Windsor Essex (Windsor), InterAccess (Toronto), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Dunlop Art Gallery (Regina), Eastern Edge Gallery (St. John's), as well as in the U.S. and Mexico. Their video work has been presented in film festivals in Germany, Hong Kong, Belgium, Romania, Argentina, Turkey, Colombia, the U.S., and across Canada.

Spanning drawing, moving image, performance art, sculpture, socially-engaged art, public art, installation and curatorial work, Bartol's artwork has been featured in esse, Canadian Art, Sculpture Magazine, Blackflash Expanded, and C Magazine. They have been an artist-in-residence with Eastern Edge Gallery, Santa Fe Art Institute, Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, Alberta Public Art Network/the City of Calgary, Empire of Dirt, and the Canadian Forces Artist Program.

Of mixed-Northern European ancestry, Bartol is a white settler Canadian currently based in Treaty 7 Territory in Mohkínstsis (Calgary, Alberta), where they teach at the Alberta University of the Arts.

Matthew Cardinal is an amiskwacîwâskahikan-based musician, composer, and sound designer, known for his work with Polaris Short List nominee group nêhiyawak. Cardinal’s music moves from delicate, minimalist pieces to vast drones and sparkling, modular synthesizer beats. He has been performing music across the country for the last few years in various groups, as well as doing soundtrack work in film and sound for art installations. Matthew also works in photography, primarily using film, capturing dreamy moments in time and space, evoking a similar feel to his music.