Participants
Christina Battle (Edmonton, Canada) has a B.Sc. with specialization in Environmental Biology from the University of Alberta, a certificate in Film Studies from Ryerson University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a PhD in Art & Visual Culture from the University of Western Ontario. She collaborates with Serena Lee as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE and has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries as both artist and curator, most recently at: The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (Brandon), The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Latitude 53 (Edmonton), The John & Maggie Mitchell Gallery (Edmonton), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver); Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (Berlin), Blackwood Gallery (Mississagua), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), and Untitled Art Society (Calgary).
Adriana Contreras Correal was born in Bogotá, Colombia and moved to BC with her family in 1998, at the age of fifteen. Artistic expression has always been a central part of her life but became an essential tool for navigating the world as a first-generation immigrant. Adriana completed her BFA at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in 2006 and has worked and volunteered in numerous local Arts and Community organizations for 20 years. Between 2007 and 2013 Adriana held various administrative roles at the SFU Galleries, assisting with exhibition installation, publication design, communications and caring for the University's permanent collection. In 2013 Adriana made a shift to work supporting Dance Artists as part of the team at New Performance Works Society where she co-curated and produced four dance seasons. The programming included free and pay-what-you-can performances, free workshops and forums, and a successful dance on film program co-curated with Sonia Medel and presented in partnership with the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival.
In 2018 Adriana was selected as one of two Community Scholars with the organization Drawing Change. This an opportunity that allowed her to bring together her knowledge and passion for visual language and communication, her trajectory in migrant justice, health and community building and her desire to expand her artistic practice. In March 2020 Adriana leapt to work as a Graphic Recorder and Facilitator, Illustrator and Designer, independently and as a proud member of the Drawing Change and Fuselight Creative teams.
Cheryl Foggo is a multiple award winning author, playwright and filmmaker, whose work over the last 30 years has focused on the lives of Western Canadians of African descent. Her full length National Film Board documentary John Ware Reclaimed will have its World Premiere at CIFF on September 24th. The 30th anniversary edition of her book Pourin’ Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West, has just been released by Brush Education Press. She also recently directed the short film Kicking Up a Fuss: The Charles Daniels Story. Her play, John Ware Reimagined, won the 2015 Writers Guild of Alberta Award for Drama and was produced most recently at Workshop West Theatre Company in November, 2017. Also in 2017 she was recognized by the YWCA as one of 150 outstanding Calgary women. She is a past recipient of the Sondra Kelly Screenplay Award from the Writers Guild of Canada. In 2014 she co-produced Alberta’s first Black Canadian Theatre Series with Ellipsis Tree Collective Theatre Company.
Braxton Garneau is a multimedia Canadian artist living in Edmonton, Alberta. He received a diploma in Fine Art from MacEwan University in 2017 and will be graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art from the University of Alberta in 2020.
Through research-based practice, Garneau’s work responds to his ever-evolving relationship with his Caribbean culture. His practice engages with the Caribbean’s dynamic mix of cultures, its diasporas, and its socio-political realities, all of which are constantly transforming themselves. Informed by personal experience, ethnography, and structural anthropology, Garneau’s practice translates his own analyses into paintings, prints, and installations.
Mpoe Mogale is a Black Queer person that reigns from Lebowakgomo, South Africa. They are a recent University of Alberta Political Science graduate, where their honours thesis explored the representation of Blackness in Edmonton's Arts community (co-supervised by Dr. Fiona Nicoll and Dr. Malinda S Smith). In the past year, they committed to honouring their talent and love for dance by pursuing it full-time. Alongside being an Arts Administrator for a couple theatre companies in Calgary, Mpoe currently teaches various dance styles, and trains with Decidedly Jazz Dance's Professional Training Program and Woezo Africa Music & Dance Theatre's Company.
One of the things they enjoy is bringing together Black artists to present multidisciplinary works that explore Black life in Canada. The result of this includes projects such as "What (Black) Life Requires" (produced by Mile Zero Dance and Azimuth Theatre) and "Reclaiming Black Dance" (produced by Black Arts Matter).
Michèle Moss is a dancer, choreographer, researcher and educator. She is a co-founder of DJD (Decidedly Jazz Danceworks) 1984 through to 1999. She continues to collaborate with DJD on many teaching projects, most recent choreography presented in 2008 and most recent performance, the 30th anniversary concert, in 2014. She finds great pleasure in exploring the nature of jazz, through performance-creation and arts-based educational research. She enjoys a diverse career in dance; at this mid-point she is celebrating 15 years of academic service and scholarship. Her professional training has her seek out many experiences including swing, salsa, house dance as well as educational and current training practices to enhance her studio practice.
Her research mostly takes the form of creation projects but also includes textual projects, recently co-authoring chapters, with Dr. Jill Crosby, on the history of jazz in a Feb 2014 publication from the University Press of Florida called Jazz Dance: Roots and Branches. She greatly enjoys her U of C teaching assignments and finds the studio a vibrant place to be. During recent years she has been happy to have funded performance-creation projects take the stage working with small and large casts and often with live music. These collaborations with musicians are always especially satisfying and dynamic. She is fortunate to be the recipient of choreographic commissions and international teaching assignments.
Publishing her research in journals, magazines as well working on book chapter assignments have been very rewarding. She has conducted ethnographic research in field sites such as Italy, Jamaica, Poland, India, Japan, Sénégal and The Gambia, West Africa as well as New York City, New Orleans, Winnipeg, Toronto, Victoria, Paris and Monréal to name a few locales. Her most significant ethnographic field sites are Guinée, West Africa and Cuba. She considers herself a citizen of the world; born in the UK of Jamaican and British parents, raised in Montréal, resident of Calgary and frequent flyer in search of the best vantage point from which to consider dance and dancing. Onward Weltanschauung-ers!
Preston Pavlis is an artist based in Edmonton, Alberta. Pavlis completed his Diploma of Fine Arts at MacEwan University in 2019. Pavlis was selected as the winner of the BMO 1st Art! prize for the province of Alberta in 2019, for his painting, your skin behind the lattice. Currently, he is interested in the fusion of painting and textiles as a means to explore narrative, form and colour. His work is an attempt at traversing liminal bridges by way of poetic association and metaphor. The resulting works become charts for time, memory and feeling.
Ashley Perez is a dancer, choreographer, and artist making waves in the Canadian dance scene. Training in funk styles and hip-hop, she later specialized in waacking, voguing, and house with mentors Jose Xtravaganza (New York), Archie Burnett (New York), Caleaf Sellers (New York), Jojo Zolina (Vancouver) and Kaiti Dangerkat (Calgary/New York). With a love of street dance, Ashley continues to share, educate, and research these underrepresented dance styles and the individuals that help create them.
Ashley is Co-artistic director of Mix Mix Dance Collective with whom she has co-created two full-length works and recently represented Canada at the 2017 Jeux de la Francophonie in Abidjan. Mix Mix has completed an artist residency at York Woods Library and presented new work at Fall For Dance North in 2017. Mix Mix developed new work for Contemporaneity 3.0 (Toronto, Ontario) for April 2019. Ashley was awarded the 2018 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance, Ensemble in the Dance Division for Floor’d presented by Holla Jazz in 2018. She recently worked with Holla Jazz on Dances with Trance which has been postponed due to COVID-19.
Her most recent teaching enterprise has been Class with Colours, to share the essence of Waacking/whacking and social dance - the glam, sass, and punk - with people of all backgrounds. These workshops have popped up at spaces such as Sketch Studio (Artscape Youngplace), Meridian Hall, School for the Movement of the Technicolo(u)r People (2019) and Parks N’ Wreck 2016-2019
Ashley is Co-artistic director of Mix Mix Dance Collective with whom she has co-created two full-length works and represented Canada at the 2017 Jeux de la Francophonie in Abidjan. Mix Mix has completed an artist residency at York Woods Library and presented new work at Fall For Dance North in 2017 and Contemporaneity 3.0 (Toronto, Ontario) 2019. Ashley was awarded the 2018 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Performance, Ensemble in the Dance Division for Floor’d presented by Holla Jazz in 2018. Ashley was a resident choreographer and performer with the artist collective House of Dangerkat. Developing works that allowed her to travel and perform in places such as New York, London & Paris. Her most recent teaching enterprise has been Class with Colours, to share the essence of Whacking - the glam, sass, and punk - with people of all backgrounds. These workshops have popped up at spaces such as Sketch Studio (Artscape Youngplace), and Parks N’ Wreck, Guelph Youth Dance and Meridian Hall.
Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Creative Industries at Ryerson University. She is the author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada's Black Beauty Culture. In her forthcoming book, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Loyalty (Coach House Books), she traces Uncle Tom’s journey from literary character to racial trope. In addition to her academic writing, Cheryl's work has appeared in the New York Times, Toronto Star, Spacing, and The Conversation, among others. Her current SSHRC-funded research aims to examine Canada's history of blackface performance at the theatre, in the community, and as advertised in the newspapers. She resides in Toronto.
Ivan Touko was born and raised in Cameroon and moved to Edmonton, Alberta in 2012. Ivan is an avid Community Builder, Social Innovator and Entrepreneur who uses the power of community, dance and culture to bring together people from all walks of life. With over 6 years of combined experience working in project management, recruitment, sustainability, and community development for the University of Alberta, Ribbon Rouge Foundation and other major organizations both in the non-profit and for-profit sectors, Ivan truly knows what it takes to intentionally build bridges and co-create with vibrant and resilient communities.
Ivan is a recipient of Alberta’s Top 30 under 30 award and has spoken at prestigious events such as TEDx UAlberta, Creative Mornings, the Student Sustainability Summit and the PACE Resiliency Panel. Ivan has also landed coverages in online-prints and broadcast outlets, including Radio Canada (CBC), the Edmonton Journal, Narcity Calgary, The Gateway, ACGC’s blog and Prokonnect. In addition to his extensive work in the community, Ivan regularly holds fun and entertaining open-level Afro Dance workshops and loves flying his mini-drone around Edmonton (You wouldn’t believe how amazing Edmonton & everything looks from above!).
Ivan is the CEO of La Connexional Inc and holds a Bilingual BSc in Environmental Sciences and Conservation with a Certificate in Sustainability from the University of Alberta/Campus Saint-Jean.