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Adriene Jenik is an artist, educator, scholar/activist and end-of-life doula who has recently relocated from the Mojave desert to Vancouver, BC. In her work, she develops and shares creative systems and processes that support personal introspection, social critique, community building and cultural transformation. Her work has been presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Creative Time's SummitX in NYC, EarthX in Dallas, TX and supported through the Baltic Sea Lab, and CREATures, an EU funded research group investigating cultural production and climate change. She is Creative Producer of The Artists' Grief Deck, the Children and Youth Artists' Grief Deck, and the UNESCO supported global climate advocacy project Turn It Around! Flashcards for Education Futures.
Jenik is Professor Emeritus in Expanded Arts at the School of Art and a PhD Candidate in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. Instagram: @ecotarot |
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Asma Sultana is an interdisciplinary artist who employs her hair and thumbprints as mediums to investigate her identity within the frameworks of time and space and conceptualises her autobiographical work through these distinctive forms of expression. Sultana has organised and curated numerous solo art exhibitions and has participated in various group exhibitions across several countries. Her work has received attention in both print and digital media and is part of numerous private collections. As a Bangladeshi-British artist, Sultana currently practices as a South Asian diasporic artist in Toronto. She is trained in Fine Arts and Art History in Bangladesh, England, and Canada, and presently is an SSHRC-funded MFA candidate in York University’s Art History and Visual Culture program.
Instagram: @meetasultana |
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Bruce TharpBelieved to be the first industrial designer to receive a PhD in anthropology (University of Chicago), in 1998 Bruce began researching the material culture of Indiana's Old Order Amish. He first earned a BS in mechanical engineering and a in industrial design from Pratt Institute. In between his schooling, he served as a US Army nuclear weapons officer (Captain) in Germany.
Over the last twenty years he has been a tenured professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently at the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. His and wife Stephanie's award-winning design studio has exhibited internationally, licensed designs for local and global companies, and self-produced commercial, experimental, and discursive products. They are also co-authors of Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things. |
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Claudia Chagoya is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and based in Mohkinstsis (Calgary). She holds an MFA degree from the University of Calgary. Her artistic practice explores topics related to gender violence and her socio-political background, using materials rooted in Mexican culture and tied to various rituals through process driven methods of creation. Her practice also incorporates the use of rose petals, salt, textiles, and most recently, human hair.
Chagoya is the recipient of the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society’s New Canadian Artist Award 2022. Her artwork is featured in ARCHIVO, an archival digital platform focused on showcasing Latin American Artists living in Canada. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico and in Canada, including the group show Reimagining Mourning at Sur Gallery in Toronto (2021). Furthermore, her work forms part of the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (2023). Instagram: @claudiachagoya.art |
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Designed with Care is a design-led, research-driven organisation that creates meaningful products and resources for people living with dementia, older adults, and those who support them.
Co-led by Professor Claire Craig and Helen Fisher, their work combines design expertise, occupational therapy insight, and real user involvement to produce resources that genuinely improve communication, independence, comfort, and wellbeing. Every product is co-designed and tested in real care settings, and refined based on feedback, resulting in beautifully made, practical materials that help people share what matters to them, plan for the future, and feel more connected in daily life. |
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The Health Design Studio works to bring an inclusive and interdisciplinary design approach to healthcare design challenges. Drawing upon long-standing collaborative partnerships with healthcare partners, the Health Design Studio supports researchers to develop designs to support health transitions, supportive and inclusive design techniques, and exemplary design with an emphasis on knowledge dissemination and mobilization. Much of our work focuses on design for safety critical and high sensitivity topics, including communication at end of life, harm reduction tools, building capacity and resilience for co-design in health, and inclusive COVID-19 information.
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Kate SellenDr Kate Sellen is the George Soulis Chair in Design at University of Waterloo, and Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada where she held a Canada Research Chair in Design for Health from 2017-2025. She leads the Health Design Studio - a team of design researchers and collaborators using design to create new tools and experiences for healthcare. Kate spent her early career as an interaction designer leading design research, digital strategy, and interaction design in the private sector. She now works on bringing an inclusive and interdisciplinary design approach to healthcare design challenges. She has been recognized internationally for her work on COVID public health communication tools, translating theory for design to support integration of different perspectives into health innovation, and for using public interactive installations to explore temporal dynamics in end of life.
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Mahsa Alikhani (b. 1981, Tehran) is an Iranian-Canadian visual artist based in Toronto. She studied architecture and photography at Azad University in Tehran. Her photographs and installations focus on critical social and cultural concerns, often addressing themes of isolation, migration, seclusion, and belonging. Combining imaginative and real structures, she incorporates irony, allegory, and references to contemporary life, culture, and art history to build a distinct visual language.
Alikhani has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Iran, Europe, and North America. Now living in Canada, she continues to develop projects that transform personal and collective stories into staged compositions, generating dialogue around feminist and diasporic experiences. Instagram: @mahsaalikhani60 |
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Mary Calarco is a Guelph based visual artist who graduated from the Interdisciplinary Studies program at OCAD University (1995) with a focus on experimental painting. After an accomplished career in arts administration (One of a Kind Show, Craft Ontario, City of Guelph) Calarco’s creative practice now focuses on her studio work. Her most recent series combines painting, printmaking, and hand dyed fabric techniques to gently expose the vulnerabilities of the materials she works with. Reclaimed cotton yardage is dyed, dismantled and rebuilt to highlight raw edges and visible seams, opening the door to conversations about
impermanence. Through repetition, deconstruction and collage, Calarco reflects on our own fragility and resilience, creating pieces that are approachable and tactile. In 2025, she participated in group shows with DesignTO, Propeller Art Gallery (Toronto), Gather in the County (Picton), Art on the Street and N/A Gallery (Guelph). Instagram: @mary.calarco |
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Naomi Harris (b. 1973, Toronto, Canada) seeks out interesting cultural trends to investigate through her subjects. Accolades include a Canada Council for the Arts’ “New Chapter’” Grant in 2017, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 2013, and a Long-Term Career Advancement Grant from the Canada Council in 2012.
Photo books are integral to her practice, monographs include “Haddon Hall” (Void/Masa Books, 2021); “EUSA” (Kehrer Verlag, 2018; and “America Swings” (TASCHEN, 2008). In 2018 Naomi moved back to her childhood home to assist her parents, both undergoing cancer treatment. This experience informs her current ongoing project “The Indecency of Mourning,” and was also the topic of her MFA in Studio Art thesis which she received from the University at Buffalo in 2022. Currently she’s managing burnout, exploring pottery, discovering the joys of being an executor and figuring out where to live and what life after caregiving looks like. Instagram: @mapledipped |
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Raha Fard is an Iranian Canadian multidisciplinary artist holding an MFA and BFA from OCAD University, and a master’s degree and 14 years of experience in Telecommunication Engineering. As a first-generation immigrant of the Iranian diaspora and a cancer survivor, she works across disciplines to explore the intersection of body, psychoanalysis, politics, and art.
Raha was selected as one of the three artist-researchers for AGO X RBC Emerging Artist Exchange Program in 2024. She exhibited her works in Iran, Canada, Italy, and Korea. Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council Project Grants, Full Ontario Graduate Scholarship, Graduate Studies Research Grant, First Year Graduate Award, OCAD U President’s Award, Patricia Joy Alpert Memorial Award, Art Gallery of Mississauga’s 4th Annual Juried Show Second Prize, are some of her awards. Additionally, she has published a novel in Farsi, “محوشدگی, “with Mehri Publication, based in the UK, which was included in the list of ten Farsi books published outside Iran in 2023 by BBC Farsi. Instagram: @raha_fard |
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Ramune Luminaire works in her studio in the woods north of Peterborough, Ontario. Her subject matter usually revolves around creating space for emotions and experiences which are often hidden or suppressed. She attended both Central St Martins School of Art and Design and Camberwell College of Art in London, England and has a joint honours degree in sculpture and ceramics. Her current chosen media are drawing, sculpture, installation and writing. She has shown her art in galleries and museums in Toronto and all over Southern Ontario, as well as Montreal, England and Norway. She understands the power of personal expression and has taught creativity workshops at Harbourfront, Haliburton School of the Arts, and the McMichael, Robert McLaughlin, McLaren and Peterborough galleries of art. Her first novel, Coming of Age … Again, was published earlier this year.
Instagram: @ramune_luminaire |
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Jocelyn BrownJocelyn Brown, RN, MN, completed both her undergraduate and graduate nursing degrees at the University of Toronto and now works as a pain and palliative care clinical nurse specialist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
She provides expert consultation, assessment and support to patients and families living with cancer, and is involved with leadership, research and education initiatives. She developed and facilitates a course for the de Souza Institute on empathy fatigue and grief for healthcare professionals. She has volunteered with Camp Erin, Campfire Circle, Young Adult Cancer Canada, Dr Jay’s Children’s Grief Centre and is a facilitator at the Brooksong Retreat and Cancer Support Centre. Jocelyn believes in the power of creativity to provide opportunities for reflection and self-awareness, as well as process grief and develop compassion. Instagram: @jocelyntuil |
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Tricia Wasney’s work celebrates the ordinary and is informed by forgotten or hidden histories, the specificity of place and the materials she discovers. Local, organic, recycled and waste materials are incorporated into her work as they arrive with their own layers of embedded meaning. Wasney’s studies in landscape architecture, film and literature impact her art work which aims to tell stories through diverse methods including narrative jewellery, craft-based practices and installations. Artist residencies in Belfast, NI; Athens, Greece; Riding Mountain National Park, MB; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, MB; Victoria Beach at Lake Winnipeg; Churchill MB; and the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island have further expanded her thinking and art practice. She has received numerous grants for her art work and writing from the Winnipeg Arts Council, the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Instagram: @tricia.wasney.jewellery.art |
