Tsuneko Kokubo was born in Steveston BC and raised in Japan. Returning to Canada in her late teens, she studied Fine Arts for four years at Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University). She has worked extensively in theatre as a performer and costume designer, and continues to do so. For the past twenty- five years she has been a full-­time painter, working mainly in oils and acrylics.

She draws inspiration from her forest garden and mountain home. She has had numerous exhibitions, and has paintings in private collections in Canada, Europe, Japan, Mexico and the USA.

Dinka Pignon works with spatial video installation and ‘video sculpture’. Her practice is experimental, situated in the field of ‘mixed reality’. In her installations, large-scale video projections reshape the architecture of the space and create illusionary effects over objects. Operating on the borderline between the real and the virtual, the work is characterized by my strong affinity for the phenomenal, liminal, conceptual and minimal.

Lorna Boschman works with communities, informed by a digital literacy approach to making art, conducting arts-based research and exchanging knowledge through co-creation. Most recently, she was Project Manager and Faculty Associate for Cancer’s Margins, a research study of LGBT2Q people who have been diagnosed and treated for breast or gynecologic cancer (lgbtcancer.ca). After working as an arts administrator at Video In (now VIVO) for many years, she attended Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology. During the past decade, Lorna has contributed to a greater understanding of arts-and community-based research approaches. As an artist, she has written and directed multiple experimental and award-winning non-fiction productions with a social justice theme. As a teacher, she has guided hundreds in the critical and technical use of digital media. Lorna has collaborated with our revered Lady Justice (Margaret Dragu) on numerous occasions and has always learned so much.

Eileen Kage is primarily a performer/composer of Taiko. She has been active in Vancouver’s Taiko community for 17 years, initiating several Vancouver Taiko groups including Uzume Taiko, Sawagi Taiko and Reijingu Horumonzu. Kage has collaborated with a variety of artists as well as toured throughout Canada, the US and Europe. Currently, she composes and performs with LOUD, a trio composed of Taiko and electric guitar. She is also part of Sawagi Taiko, an all women’s Taiko group. Recently, Eileen has started to explore and incorporate digital media in her work. She has done soundtracks for video and was a technical intern at the Western Front from 1996 – 98.

Haruko Okano is a professional interdisciplinary artist with a practice that spans over 30 years. In her work Haruko integrates her concerns for the environment and our impact on the future of this planet, human rights and the notion of culture as an integral part of her lifestyle. Although her art education was Eurocentric, she has broken away from traditional genres and has started to integrate methods and means that include elements from her Japanese ancestry and holistic traditions common to many cultures in the world of hunters and gatherers. Haruko is a process-based artist and tends to use recycled materials, including organic matter and natural raw detritus, in her installations.

Robin Brass is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Regina and Peepeekisis First Nation, Saskatchewan. She completed her B.A. in Indigenous Fine Arts from the First Nations University of Canada. Robin is co-founder of Sakewewak Artists’ Collective, Circle Vision Arts Corp., Red Tattoo Theatre Ensemble, and the Sakewewak Storytellers Festival. In 2006, she was awarded the Lynch-Staunton Award for performance art. Robin has taught for the First Nations University of Canada, Indigenous Fine Arts Dept., teaching on several Saskatchewan reserves. She has most recently been creating new works based in the Nahkawe language, further pursuing her true love of Indigenous orality.

Heidi Nagtegaal is an artist, writer and facilitator living in Vancouver, BC. After receiving her BFA from ECUAD in 2005, Nagtegaal has gone on to found local arts initiatives such as the Hammock Residency and Headbands and Bracelets, parallel to her own practice. She has recently exhibited in the Tate Modern (London, UK) for the No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents, with the Western Front, Äkkigalleria (Jyväskylä, Finland), Vancouver Art Gallery, Burnaby Art Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery, CSA, Signal and Noise, and portable gallery spaces worldwide.

Lois Klassen is a Vancouver-based artist, writer, and multidisciplinarian. Her long-term projects, which include Renegade Library, Comforter Art Action and Slofemists (in collaboration with Lori Weidenhammer), combine collective creations with public dialogue and exchange. Her texts have appeared in Word Hoard, Fillip Magazine, Public Journal, Border Crossings, LIVE! Performance Art Biennale blog, and more. Her work has been hosted by Santa Fe Art Institute’s Emigration/Immigration Artists’ Residency, Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and Plug In Summer Institute in Winnipeg, Banff New Media Institute, SOMA Summer Institute in Mexico City, University of Salford in Greater Manchester, Glenbow Museum, the Western Front, Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba and more. Lois is as a Research Ethics Coordinator at Emily Carr University, and is currently a doctoral student of Cultural Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Victoria Singh is an artist, curator, teacher, and writer based in New Zealand. Her current performance/installation practice is durational and community-based with particular attention to the intersections of life and art and the liminal space that these experiences generate – allowing the exploration of conscious and unconscious relations between conceptual intent, time, location,  Self and Other.

prOphecy sun’s interdisciplinary performance practice threads together both conscious and unconscious choreographies, sound, and environment, to create exploratory works that invoke deep body memory and draw from an interior landscape of dreams. Over the last 9 years she has been self-releasing music and videos using smartphone technology as a capturing tool. She is a PhD student at the School of Interactive Arts + Technology at Simon Fraser University and the recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Award. She is a founding member of Dance Troupe Practice and current resident at the Pandora Park Fieldhouse. Her experimental performances, sound compositions, installations, videos, and collaborations have been exhibited at Unit/Pitt Gallery, inFlux at the Surrey Art Gallery, L’alternative: Festival de Cine Independiente de Barcelona, ISEA 2015, DIS 2014, FUSE at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, International Experimental Cinema Explosion (USA), Your Kontinent Festival: Art in Containers (Richmond), Festival des Musiques Creation (QB), Live! Performance Art Biennale, Soundasaurus Media Arts Festival (AB), Signal and Noise Media Festival, Exploding Cinema (UK), Square Waves Festival (UK), Dancing on the Edge Festival, Month of Performance Art (Berlin), 12 Min Max, and Low Lives 4 International Festival of Live Networked Performances. Check out more on the Moving Stories website.

Soledad Fátima Muñoz is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher born in Canada and raised in Rancagua, Chile. Her work seeks to highlight the historical materiality of textiles and their role in shaping our collective memory. Through her large-scale weavings, sound installations, and audiovisual projects, she hopes to create instances that contribute to the construction of a more equitable society and the production of new archives of resistance.

In addition to her material works, she utilizes different forms of cultural production as part of her practice. In 2014, she started Género, a record label focused on the distribution of women's work in the sound field. Then in 2017, she co-founded CURRENT Symposium, which is an ongoing interdisciplinary multi-day music and electronic art symposium featuring free events, panels, exhibitions, and workshops. More recently, in 2019, she co-created "La Parte de Atrás de la Arpillera'' a collection of interviews with Chilean arpilleristas and textile workers, whose experiences tell the history of resistance in this country.

Muñoz is currently working on her project Woven Memory / Memoria Entretejida, a series of site-specific installations and exhibitions planned around large-scale copper wire weavings, which commemorate the lives of those still missing and murdered during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile.

Soledad received a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduated from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, has a diploma in Textile Arts from Capilano University and studied Film at the ARCIS University of Santiago in Chile. She is the recipient of several awards, including the City of Vancouver Emerging Artist Award, the New Artists Society Merit Scholarship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Emily Carr University President's Award, and the Textile Society of America's Student and New Professional Award.

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Photo by Kati Jenson

Natalie Tin Yin Gan is a contemporary dance artist specializing in improvisation and interdisciplinary collaboration. She has the privilege of living and working on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish, land that is commonly referred to as Vancouver, British Columbia. She has also been known to return from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Lebanon, and Ghana. She has played rugby, played piano, played mind games, played mahjong, played brave, played white, played yellow, and played an iguana in her theatre stage debut in 2004. She is a late sleeper, a late riser, a late bloomer, a latecomer, and a late-night snacker. She is the co-Artistic Director of Hong Kong Exile.

Angelica Poversky is 5’3″ of vertically challenged creative passion who wants to use spoken words to create movements of thought. She’s always trying to think of new ways to use words and is perplexed by language. She is the founder and festival director of Richmond’s first youth-led outdoors arts festival, Arts in the Park and is always on the go when it comes to artistic event coordination. If you see Angelica in her natural habitat, she is probably reading her first poetry chapbook “She Is”, hosting a radio-show or fearing proper punctuation. Angelica is Vancouver’s Top 24 under 24, Richmond’s 30 under 30 and a Richmond Arts Award Winner. She’s been on the author panel at National Culture Days, a speaker at The Top 25 under 25 Canadian Environmentalists Awards and the feature performer at the CHIMO Violence Against Women Conference. She’s a member of the 2016 Vancouver Youth Slam Team.

Margaret Dragu aka Verb Woman, aka Lady Justice, is a renowned interdisciplinary performance artist living and working in Vancouver. She returns to NSL&G to present material from her ongoing How To Be Old How To Guide series, taking on thoughts and issues to do with aging, culture and society. 3 videos will be screened: Get Devices, Get Rolling and Get Group-y.

Sebnem Ozpeta is a Vancouver-based visual artist, video editor, and videographer. She studied graphic design in Turkey, where she was born and raised. She also completed the digital film program at The Art Institute of Vancouver. She has produced short films and video installations that have been screened and exhibited in festivals in Europe, Canada and Turkey.

For more than 10 years, she has collaborated with artists, performers, storytellers, dancers and filmmakers. More recently she has applied her video skills and her experience in storytelling by mentoring youth as part of the Digital Story Telling project (in collaboration with Lisa G. Nielsen and Lorna Boschman).

Sebnem curated Dinka Pignon’s retrospective exhibition "You are Invited" at VIVO Media Arts Centre and co-curated the Digital Carnival and Margaret Dragu’s M. DRAGU’s MUSEUM for the Your Kontinent Media Arts Festival.

Ying is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. As a migrant navigating between multiple cultures, Ying is fascinated by stories that reveal the geopolitical complexity of global migration. Following the 10-year journey of an elderly Chinese couple searching for the truth behind their son's death in Canada, her documentary The World is Bright is a tender portrait of family, mental health and migration, and an indictment of state bureaucracy. Ying received the Sea to Sky Award at the 38th Vancouver International Film Festival in 2019 and Emerging Canadian Filmmaker Award at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival in 2020.

Her credits as a filmmaker also include writing and directing Sisters, a 87-minute docudrama that exposed for the very first time the life of Chinese women who suffer from eating disorders.

Ying was also the Executive Producer of "Tricks on the Dead: The Story of Chinese Labour Corps in WWI", a Canada-China-France co-production that won two 2016 Canadian Screen Awards (Best Cinematography, Best Production Design), the 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival Audience Must See Award, and the 2015 Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival Best International Production award.

Working in the Arts, Lynn values how they strengthen personal identity, increase appreciation for other people and the world in new ways, and open up space for greater understanding and sensitivity. She is the Programming Assistant for the Institute of Asian Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery and a graphic designer. As co-founder and Program Director for Cinevolution, she has been essential in all aspects of organizing our numerous programs. Cinevolution’s vision of intercultural engagement through film and media arts has been a medium for Lynn to explore her immigrant identity and fascination with culturally anchored art forms.