Since 1986, Marie Côté has had solo, group, and multidisciplinary exhibitions across Canada. Through clay, she has explored and articulated the North and its territories during two residencies in Nunavik and the Yukon. Her works are represented in the public collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montréal, Québec), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec City, Québec), Institut culturel Avataq (Westmount, Québec), Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey, British Columbia), and the Raphael Yu Centre of Canadian Ceramics at the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Ontario). Marie lives in Montréal, Québec.

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. Peter is the son of Janelle Creyke (Crow Clan, Tahltan Nation) and Pierre Morin (French Canadian). Initially trained in lithography, Morin’s artistic practice moves from Printmaking to Poetry to Beadwork to Installation to Drum Making to Performance Art. Peter Morin is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, and is currently the Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media and Design program at OCADU.

Ziya Tabassian began playing the tombak (Iranian drum) at the age of ten. After a brief initiation period in Iran, he continued his training in Quebec, his adopted homeland. As a percussionist, Ziya Tabassian is professionally active in early music, as well as contemporary, current and world music. He performs with several other musical groups, including Regard Persan and Ensemble Caprice. He has performed in more than 40 countries in prestigious festivals and concert halls. He has many albums to his credit on some major labels. He has also performed in recordings with the Kronos Quartet, Kayhan Kalhor, Mercan Dede, Hossein Omoumi, EnChordais and Lo’Jo. Recently, Tabassian released “Remembrances”, an album featuring his original compositions for instrumental ensembles. His compositions are characterized by a rich tapestry of sounds, seamlessly weaving together traditional and modern influences. His artistry continues to captivate audiences, offering a captivating blend of tradition and innovation.

Olivier Girouard is a producer and experienced designer. He directs Ekumen, a public art and digital arts production organization. He acts as an artistic advisor on projects of a diverse nature: installations, scenographies, design, sound design for the performing arts and cinema. A graduate of the University of Montreal and the Montreal Conservatory of Music, his work revolves around the environmental scope of art and the work’s relationship with the public. He creates and produces works to beautify and transform public space by trying to define what it means to live together.

Navid Navab is recognized as a media alchemist, tabletop cosmologist, and antidisciplinary composer. The investigative artscience practice associated with Navab is characterized by sculpturous engagement with transductive structures of liveliness. Recent creations meticulously stage and exhibit emergent, uncanny forms of order, born from the excitable dynamics of matter. Navab has dedicated the past decade to orchestrating multi-sensory experiences that entwine bodies, machines, and materialities both in-situ and in concert. Their diverse artworks, spanning gestural sound performances to participatory environments, circulate globally at sites such as KIKK (BE), Ars Electronica (AT), NEMO (FR), Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston US; Zagreb SL), ISEA (SP, CA), and HKW (DE).

Melanie McKay-Cody is a Cherokee Deaf and earned her doctoral degree in linguistic and socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. She has studied critically-endangered Indigenous Sign Languages in North America since 1994 and helps different tribes preserve their tribal signs. She also specialized in Indigenous Deaf studies and interpreter training incorporating Native culture, North American Indian Sign Language and ASL. She is also an educator and advocate for Indigenous interpreters and students in educational settings. Besides, North American Indian Sign Language research, she had taught ASL classes in several universities, schools and community for over 42 years. She is one of eight founders of Turtle Island Hand Talk, a new group focused on Indigenous Deaf/Hard of Hearing/DeafBlind and Hearing people.