Panels

Constanza Camelo-Suarez is interested in the creation, theorization and promotion of experimental art. Her artistic practice revolves around the elaboration of per­formative and in situ devices. She is co-founder of We are not Speedy Gonzales, a collective of migrant artists working on interculturality and its representations in the contemporary art world. As an independent curator, C. Camelo-Suarez has organized theoretical meetings and artistic exchanges between Canada and Latin America. She works as a professor in the Départe­ment des arts et des lettres at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and has published texts that question the practice of action art and contextual art. She is a member of CÉLAT (Centre de recherches cultures-arts-sociétés) and co-founder of the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Transmission among First Peoples.

Stanley Février holds a Master degree in Visual and media Arts from the Uni­versité du Québec à Montréal. His artistic vision revolves around human relationships; and takes a sharp look at the social dynamics taking place in Western societies. As a result, he sees art as a vector of social change and transformation. Motivated by the desire to activate collective and individual consciousness, the artist appropriates and alters the archives, images, videos, and photographs of these dramatic events, captured on the Internet. Through his installations, performances and participatory art projects, the artist attempts to create a meeting space where the participants are at the center of the work, bringing them to repoliticize themselves through a mobilization and awareness of the “I”, of the “Us”, and its political power. The participatory works that Février produces represent a form of socio-political resistance anchored in denunci­ation, reparation, equality of the right to live and freedom. His recent artistic and conceptual concerns are based on institutional critique, on identity issues, violence and the inequalities generated by it.

Dramatist, bold artist, committed humanist, Angèle Séguin has been the founder and artistic director of the Théâtre des Petites Lanternes for 22 years. Her projects, which have been recognized internationally, have earned her numerous awards. In 2006, she designed the creative process for the Grande Cueillette des Mots (GCM) and has initiated a series of collabora­tions on national and international stages (Canada, Hong Kong, Brazil, Haiti, Democratic Republic of Congo, France) in addition to numerous workshops and conferences on various continents. She regularly participates in juries and working committees on arts and culture. Since 2018, she has been leading the Monarchs Project, a pan-Canadian theatre creation using the GCM process that gives a voice to veterans and military families about their post-traumatic stress injuries and the countless repercussions on themselves and those around them.

Cindy Schwartz holds a Master’s degree in Psychology and Education and has an impressive background as a dancer and dance teacher. She is a passionate humanist as well as a skilled manager. Her determination as well as her natural ability to bring people together around innovative and daring projects led her to found Les Muses in 1997. Fighting with heart and con­viction for the recognition, inclusion and social participation of atypical artists within the arts community, Cindy Schwartz chaired the Table de concertation des organismes oeuvrant dans le domaine culturel auprès des personnes handicapées in 2011. Her involvement and contribution to this community has been recognized more than once through various awards, including the Janine-Sutto Award (which she received twice) and the prestigious À part entière award from the Office des personnes handicapées du Québec.

Dr. Patricia Garel completed her medical studies in Paris, France. First re­cruited as a clinical assistant professor by McGill University, she worked at the Douglas Mental Health Institute from 1986 to 1990. She then joined the Department of Psychiatry at Sainte-Jus­tine Hospital. She was responsible for academic activities and teaching from 1994 to 2002, and was head of the Department of Psychiatry at CHU Sainte-Justine from 2002 to 2012. Since 2009, she has developed a social rehabilitation project through art and creativity, Espace Transition, in partnership with institutions such as Cirque du Soleil, Jeunesses Musicales Canada, the Opéra de Montréal and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (www.etpsy.ca).

Integrated arts as a gateway, from appreciation to personal expression, as well as a promise of fulfillment and intercommunication, in school and in society: this is what mobilizes Emmanuelle Allard among her Montreal students. Graduated with a Mas­ter’s degree in visual and media arts teaching (2002), she has carried out numerous pedagogical and artistic projects at schools and in various cultur­al venues: murals, exhibitions, websites. Her work integrates plastic, visual and media arts, drama, music and TIC in a multicultural and interdisciplinary perspective. She is the author of numerous communications and publications. Her interactive activity book Passep’Art received the award for best artistic digital book at the iBook Author Conference in Nashville (Tennessee) in 2015 and she collaborates with baobabeducation.com. In 2020, she was awarded the Prix novateur en enseignement des arts by the Graduate Council of the Faculty of Arts at UQAM.

A socially engaged artist and researcher, Véro Leduc is a professor in the Depart­ment of Social and Public Communication at UQAM, where she teaches in the Bachelor’s degree program in Cultural Action and in the short graduate program Disability and Deafness: Rights and Citizenship. She currently holds the Canada Research Chair on Cultural Citizenship of the Deaf and Cultural Equity Practices. Her current work focuses on the artistic practices of deaf and disabled people in Canada, deaf music and cultural accessibility and equity practices. As a researcher associated with various research networks (CELAT – Centre de recherches Cul­tures-Arts-Sociétés, OMEC – Observatoire des médiations culturelles, Partnership Ageing + Com­munication + Technologies, Partnership Hemispheric Encounters: Developing Transborder Re­search-Creation Practices, Critical Disability Studies Working Group, Cultures du témoignage, Réseau interuniversitaire québécois en équité, diversité et inclusion), her approach is based on critical, intersectional, feminist, queer, decolonial, crip (disabled) and deaf perspectives.

Émilie Fortier is Director of Services at the Old Brewery Mission’s Saint-Laurent Campus, whose purpose is to provide concrete and sustainable solutions to end homelessness. She joined the Old Brewery Mission in 2012 as Assistant to the Head of Support Programs and Emergency Services and in 2015 became the head of emergency services at the Saint-Laurent Campus. She is responsible for the development of projects in intervention with the homeless population and in urban health, and is the liaison with the Mission’s various partners. With a solutions-oriented vision and aware that the art of intervention requires creativity, she accepted without hesitation the invitation to contribute to the implementation of visual arts workshops within the organization, allowing several homeless people to get involved in a different way in their efforts to find a way out of homelessness.

Rhodnie Désir’s mother was from Gonaïves and her father from Port-au-Prince. A graduate in communications and marketing from the Université de Montréal and HEC Montréal as well as in business start-up (SAJE Montréal Métro), she also received training in dance. In 2008, she founded Dêzam, an organization that has designed more than 2500 cultural actions in 10 years. In 2017, she set up her dance company RD Créations. Rhodnie Désir is a frequent guest speaker and jury member for the Arts Councils of Montreal, Quebec and Canada. She is the re­cipient of numerous awards, including the Grand Prix de la danse de Montréal 2020, presented by Québecor and the City of Montréal, and the Envol prize for cultural diversity and inclusive practices in dance, awarded by the Conseil des arts de Montréal. With her project BOW’T TRAIL, the artist was able to rally forty international partners and gain recognition from UNESCO’s pro­ject Slave Route: Resistance, Liberty, Heritage.

Danièle Racine is Commissioner of Cultural Mediation at the Service de la culture de la Ville de Montréal, in charge of supporting and assisting Montreal’s cultural community and districts in the implementation of cultural and artistic projects that are inclusive with the population. In accordance with Montreal’s cultural development policy, she develops an ap­proach based on citizen participation in the network of cultural centres and in the development of Montreal’s cultural districts. Since 2006, she has been actively contributing to the development of practices by initiating and participating in partnership research, including Les effets de la médiation culturelle : participation, expression, changement and Mutations des pratiques artis­tiques et participation, which have been the subject of scientific publications and international conferences. Her current work addresses the issue of urban communal spaces and shared gov­ernance in a context of cultural development. She promotes the transfer of practices and know­ledge to the public through the publication of the website: montreal.mediationculturelle.org.

Hélène Lévesque is an educational consultant in music at the Centre de services scolaires de Montréal (CSSDM). For more than ten years, she has been building relationships between schools and the world of music. Through pedagogical partnerships with the Orchestre Métropolitain, the Opéra de Montréal and the SMCQ, she is able to develop customized material and put numerous events into action each year. Co-founder of the Réseau des conseillers péda­gogiques et des répondants en musique du Québec (RCRMQ), she is also actively involved in the new Réseau choral des écoles québécoises.

Louise Poissant, Ph.D. in Philosophy, is Scientific Director of the Fonds de recher­che du Québec – Société et culture. She was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) from 2006 to 2015. She was professor of aesthetics and theory at the School of Visual and Media Arts from 1989 to 2006 where she directed the Media Arts Research Group (GRAM). She is the author of numerous books and articles in the field of media arts pub­lished in various journals in Canada, France, Brazil and the United States.

Hannah Claus is a transdisciplinary artist of Kanien’kehá:ka / English heritage who engages Onkwehon:we epistemology to highlight ways of understanding and being in relation with the world. A 2019 Eiteljorg Fellow and 2020 recipient of the Prix Giverny, recent group exhibitions include Des horizons d’attentes (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal), Cadrer la nature (Centre d’exposition de l’Université de Montréal) and Written on the Earth (Western Uni­versity). She currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Conseil des arts de Montréal since 2018 and she is one of the co-founders of Daphne Artcentre, a new Indigenous contemporary arts centre based in Tiohtià:ke [Montreal]. Claus is curating Teharlihuan Michel Savard’s work for daphne’s first exhibition. She is a member of the Tyendinag