Martin Bartlett (1939–1993) was a musician, composer, performer, writer, and educator who lived in Vancouver, Canada. He was the co-founder of Western Front, the Electronic Music Studio at Simon Fraser University, and the founder of the Vancouver Community Gamelan. A pioneer of electroacoustic music, Bartlett’s compositions frequently featured aleatoric elements and his performances were often collaborative in nature.

Bartlett joined the faculty at Simon Fraser University's then-titled Centre for the Arts (now School for the Contemporary Arts) in 1983. At SFU, he played a key role in shaping the early development of experimental and interdisciplinary arts education, helping to establish approaches that integrated composition, performance, technology, and cross-cultural practice.  Bartlett was instrumental in embedding electronic and electroacoustic music within SFU’s curriculum. His teaching emphasized open-ended, collaborative, community- and process-based practices, reflecting influences from figures such as John Cage and Pauline Oliveros, and helping to cultivate a distinctly interdisciplinary ethos within the School. Equally significant was his role in expanding the cultural and conceptual scope of the program. Bartlett brought non-Western musical traditions directly into the academic environment, encouraging a model of learning grounded in embodied practice, cross-cultural exchange, and community participation.

Luke Fowler lives and works in Glasgow. Fowler questions the style and political implications of conventional modes of documentary through a varied practice which encompasses film, sound, installation and photography. He is concerned with finding new ways to meaningfully engage with marginal cultural figures as well as spaces and archive materials through the medium of 16mm film. His moving image works have charted an alternative history of Britain as well as considering significant international musicians and artists – revisiting the work of Margaret Tait, R. D. Laing, Patrick Cowley, and Brunhild Ferrari, amongst others. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012 and received the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in 2008. In 2014, MACK published Fowler’s first monograph of his Photo Archive. Fowler’s ‘Mum’s Cards’ was awarded the 2019 Scottish Short Film Award at Glasgow Short Film Festival and the prize for Best Short at Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarre, Spain. And his ‘Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait’ was awarded the La Scam International Award 2023 at Cinéma du Réel. 

Raymond Boisjoly lives and works in Vancouver. His work has been exhibited in Vancouver at Presentation House Gallery, Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Centre A and Vancouver Art Gallery, as well as at Toronto's The Power Plant and Western Bridge in Seattle.

Steven Brekelmans received a Diploma in Media Art from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in 1998, and an MFA from the University of Victoria in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include Half Hours with the Stars, Monica Reyes Gallery, 2024; New Drawings of Bottles, Cans, Hats, Cheese, Sculptures, Posters, Casseroles, Azaleas, Canes, Flags, Trash Bins, Cacti, Glasses, Lighters, Mirrors, Chernoff Fine Art (2019); One Man Band, Dynamo Art Gallery, 2018; Flesh & Blood, Or Gallery, 2015. His recent group exhibitions include, We Do Not Work Alone, Nanaimo Art Gallery, 2021; The Artist’s Studio is Her Bedroom, Contemporary Art Gallery, 2020; Ionic Bonds, Kamloops Art Gallery, 2019. He has also completed several major works of public sculpture installed in Vancouver (Hinge Park at Olympic Village), Burnaby (Metrotown Skytrain Station), and Port Moody.  

Amber Frid-Jimenez is an artist who situates her work at the intersection of art, culture and technology through installations, video, printmaking, code and artist’s books. According to curator Emily Butler, Frid-Jimenez “translates radical moments across art and cultural histories through the lens of contemporary technology, exploring the evolving nature of meaning through algorithmic translation.” Recent exhibitions include Underneath every picture there is always another picture (2024), curated by Denise Oleksijczuk at The Cabinet at Simon Fraser University and Something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage (2023), a solo exhibition curated by T’ai Smith at Mónica Reyes Gallery in Vancouver. Her work has been included in The Imitation Game (2022) and MashUp (2016) at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which has acquired her work for its permanent collection, and in Mel Chin’s All Over the Place (2018) at the Queens Museum, New York, as well as a large-scale video commission for the Washington, DC Metro. She has exhibited at Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver; Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; Casco Projects, Utrecht; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; A Foundation, Liverpool; Medialab Prado, Madrid; and Ars Electronica, Linz, among other venues. She has collaborated with curators and artists including Ute Meta Bauer, Emily Butler, Joan Jonas and Lucy Orta. Frid-Jimenez is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University, where she served as Canada Research Chair in art and design technology (2014–24) and directs the Studio for Extensive Aesthetics. She has taught at MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University and Bergen Academy of Art and Design. She holds an MSc in media arts and sciences from MIT and a BA (Hons) in painting and philosophy from Wesleyan University. 

For fifty years, Rodney Graham pulled at the threads of cultural and intellectual history through photography, film, music, performance and painting.  Graham was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949 and died in Vancouver, Canada in 2022. He had solo exhibitions at the Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä, Finland (2020); Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2017); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2017); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); Le Constortium, Dijon, France (2016); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2015); Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (2014); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2012); Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2011); Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2010); Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA, USA (2004); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (2002); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2001); and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (1999). He participated in group exhibitions such as the Carnegie International (2013), the 13th, 14th and 17th Sydney Biennales, Australia (2002, 2006, 2010), the Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (2006) and the Biennale d’Art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997) and among awards he received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, Toronto, Canada (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis, Niedersächsiche Sparkassenstiftung, Germany (2006), and the Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in visual arts, British Columbia, Canada (2011). Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2016 for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art. 

An interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and filmmaker, Carole Itter was born in Vancouver and has lived on the West Coast for most of her life. She began her studies at the University of British Columbia (1958, 1963), and continued at the Vancouver School of Art (1959 – 1963), where she learned from Don Jarvis, Bruce Boyd, and, most notably for Itter, Roy Kenzie Kiyooka. She studied theatre design and drawing at Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome (1964). Throughout her studies, Itter supported herself by working in Vancouver’s only professional theatrical scene shop for several months of each year. This experience made a permanent impression on her artistic practice.

Itter has held solo exhibitions at Western Front (1984), the Vancouver Art Gallery (1991), Or Gallery (1995), grunt gallery (2000, 2007), and the Georgia Art Studio (2022). Her work has been presented in many group exhibitions, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2008, which exhibited photographic enlargements from her publication The Log’s Log (1973).

Itter collaborated with poet and novelist Daphne Marlatt to compile Opening Doors: Vancouver’s East End: Strathcona (1979), an archive of oral history of Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood, where Itter and Marlatt continue to live and work. She has also produced a book of short stories, Whistle Daughter Whistle (1982); and three artist books: The Log’s Log (1973); Location: Shack (1986); and Western Blue Rampage (1990). Itter’s films include The Float (1993) with cinematographers Trudy Rubenfeld and Luke Blackstone; A Fish Film (2003), with cinematographer and co-director Bo Myers; Tarpaulin Pull (2006), with cinematographer Krista Lomax; Inlet (2009), with editor Krista Lomax; Please Meet the Geese Who Have Lived Here Forever (2019), with cinematographer and editor Allison Hrabluik; and 400 Miniature Geese on a Moving Inlet (2022), with emerging cinematographer Esther Rausenberg and additional support from Allison Hrabluik. Itter collaborated extensively with composer, pianist, and multi-media artist Al Neil from 1979 until he was in his 80s. Neil died in 2017 at age 93.

Itter was honoured with the VIVA Award in 1989 and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in 2017.

Khan Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, and lives and works in Vancouver, BC. He studied architecture at Hongik University, before immigrating to Canada to study fine art at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design; in 2023, he received his MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Lee works in sculpture, installation, performance, media, drawing and painting, with permanent public artworks in Vancouver and the lower mainland. His practice involves experimentation with form and process in order to express inherent relationships between material and immaterial content. He is a founding member of the Vancouver-based artist collective Intermission and is presently a member of Instant Coffee artist collective. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is included in the permanent collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. 

Lauraine Mak is an artist based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Her multidisciplinary practice engages philosophical questions through painting, sculpture, moving image, and installation. Drawing on systems of measurement, repetition, language, and commodity culture, her work examines how structures of logic and value shape contemporary visual experience. Mak holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA from Simon Fraser University. She was a guest student at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Rita McBride. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Austria, Germany, Korea, Hong Kong, and Canada. In 2026, she presented a solo exhibition at Medrar for Contemporary Art in Cairo and will present a solo exhibition at Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver in October.

Kathy Slade is a Vancouver-based artist, writer, curator, editor, and publisher. Slade’s solo exhibitions include Famille Rose, Cabinet Gallery, London (2026); As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintops, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2023); Wherever You Go, Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver (2020); and This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018). Her work has recently been exhibited in group exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as The Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver (2026); Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin, IE (2020); and Kunstverein Braunschweig, DE (2020). Slade was the curator of the 2019 Vancouver Art Book Fair and was the Founding Editor of the Emily Carr University Press (2005-2018). Together with Kay Higgins, Slade runs Publication Studio Vancouver. In 2009, Slade was awarded the VIVA Award from the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts. She currently teaches at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.