Videos

Tamara Unroe

Tamara is an installation artist and puppeteer. She has created work for dance, theatre, community arts, and spectacle throughout Canada and internationally.

Live Arts Tamara Unroe biography: https://vimeo.com/109059013

Tara Mahoney is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Using practice-based research, her work examines how amateur cultural and media production operates as a form of participatory politics in contemporary society. She is also the creative director of Gen Why Media, a non-profit creative agency focused producing public art, media and events for social issues.

Website http://genwhymedia.ca/
https://creativepublicslab.wordpress.com/

Natalie is an independent dance artist specializing in improvisation and interdisciplinary collaboration. She lives and works on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Natalie has a double degree in Contemporary Dance and International Studies from Simon Fraser University. Natalie has worked with and performed for battery opera performance, Mutable Subject, MACHiNENOiSY Dance Theatre, Mascall Dance, Dancers’ Studio West (Calgary), fu-GEN Theatre (Toronto), La Pocha Nostra (San Francisco), Le Brothers (Vietnam), Amy O’Neal (Seattle), Daisy Thompson (UK), among others. Natalie pursues opportunities locally and internationally outside of dance contexts in an effort to hone a critical, decolonized practice. She is co-Artistic Director of Hong Kong Exile, who are this year’s Artists-in-Residence at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. She is a late sleeper, a late riser, a latecomer, a late bloomer, and a late-night snacker.

Website: www.hongkongexile.com

Jay White’s installations have exhibited internationally and his animated shorts have won awards internationally. As a father, a resident of Nex̱wlélex̱m / Bowen Island, and a mixed-blood Mi’kmaw, Jay is concerned with using stories to transmit land-based knowledge to future generations. Recent projects include animation work on Nettie Wild’s UNINTERRUPTED, a solo show at Modern Fuel in Kingston (2017), a Coyote Walk installation and performance in Amish Morell’s Outdoor School group exhibition (2016).

Website: http://www.draworbedrawn.com/

Genevieve Robertson’s drawing-based interdisciplinary practice explores the material around the body and under the feet: water, oil, wind, silt, flora, fauna and mineral. Her drawings map a visceral engagement with place and often occupy the edge: the interstice between micro and macro, biology and geology, stability and flow. Genevieve holds an MAA from Emily Carr University and a BFA from NSCAD University. She is presently the recipient of a British Columbia Arts Council mentorship grant framed by the shoreline as a site for encounter and inquiry, and works with River Relations: A Beholder’s Share of the Columbia River Dams, an interdisciplinary artistic research project that considers the presence and impact of hydroelectric power production on the Columbia River. Genevieve resides and works in Vancouver BC.

Website: http://www.genevieverobertson.com/

mia susan amir is a community-embedded writer, interdisciplinary performer, curator, and educator. Born in Israel/Occupied Palestine, mia is an anti-Zionist Jew of Sephardic and Ashkenazi descent. She has lived most of her life in Vancouver, BC, unceded and occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Tsleil-Waututh. For nearly two decades, she has used creative practice in grassroots efforts towards environmental and social justice.

Website: https://storywebe.wordpress.com/faculty/mia-s-amir/

Corin Browne is a videomaker and media educator who has been working as a community engaged artist for 15 years. With an academic background in critical media education (MA Communication, SFU) and digital media production, Corin works primarily in digital mediums with an interest in exploring notions of community, place, radical democracy, social justice, and memory.

Corin was a founding member of the nationally recognized Summer Visions Film Institute for Youth in Vancouver’s Eastside and co-artistic director of the Housing Matters Media Project, a multi-phased, large-scale community engaged art project exploring the impact of the housing crisis on youth. Many of the youth she has mentored in media production have gone on to national and international film schools, and careers in production and community-based work.

Corin additionally led a five-year digital storytelling residency with The Arts, Health, and Seniors Project and acted as Senior Media Artist in the in the Documenting Engagement Institute working with senior artists from across the country. Her most recent project, EMMA Talks, is a monologue series featuring women-identified writers, thinkers, artists, and makers.

Links and Publications

East Van Television: Creating a critical pedagogy to explore citizenship and community video (Master’s Thesis, 2007)

David Diamond is a founding member and current Artistic Director (since 1984) of Vancouver’s Headlines Theatre, which was renamed Theatre for Living in 2013. David has a BFA in Theatre, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Fraser Valley. He has directed over 550 community-specific projects on issues such as racism, civic engagement, violence, addiction, street youth, intergenerational conflict, and homelessness. His work has received multiple awards and international recognition, taking him around the world, and he pioneered the development of live, interactive Forum television and web casting.

David is the originator of Theatre for Living, a merging of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, and his own life-long interest in systems theory. Theatre for Living recognizes communities are complexly integrated living organisms and invites them to engage in constructive social change, moving from various forms of violence to respectful engagement.

David is also a Visiting Faculty Member at the Master of Arts Program in Peace, Development, Security and International Conflict Transformation at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and Visiting Theatre Director at the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta.

Links and Publications

Theatre for Living: The Art and Science of community-based dialogue (Book on Diamond’s inaugural Theatre for Living approach, 2007)

Flick Harrison is a writer, filmmaker, and media artist/educator. Starting out on the CBC youth series Road Movies as one of Canada’s first professional videographers, he’s since made video in Pakistan, the US, Mexico, and China. As part of Something Collective, he helped pilot the City of Vancouver’s Field House community-artist residencies.

His work includes teaching media production and literacy, designing projections for theatre and dance, making music video and consulting on media technology. He has worked with the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, Pacific Cinematheque, and Arts Umbrella.

Flick is working with ASC! Research Project to create videos, such as this series on community engaged artists, that document and share the project’s work to the public.

Steven Hill has worked as a writer, performer, and director across Canada. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from York University, and is an Associate Professor in theatre performance at the School for Contemporary Arts, SFU, where he has taught acting, directing, and devising since 2007.

He was the Artistic Director of Leaky Heaven Performance, an award-winning, experimental theatre company that created original devised works. In 2014, with Co-Artistic Alex Ferguson he launched Fight With a Stick, which premiered its first work Steppenwolf at the 2015 PuSH International Performing Arts Festival. The company has several new works in creation exploring performance installation and ‘non-human expressivity.’

His research includes ensemble collaboration, devising practices and emergent performance in contemporary theatre and is funded by private foundations, Canada Council, BC Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver.

Links

The Unnatural and Accidental Women at SFU Woodward’s. (Article on Remounting of Marie Clement’s play, 2015)

Steppenwolf (Excerpts Fight with a Stick’s contemporary performance Steppenwolf, at the 2015 PuSH Festival)

Terry Hunter is Executive Director of Vancouver Moving Theatre and Artistic Producer of the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, with whom he has produced numerous innovative community-engaged productions with residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Savannah Walling is a theatre artist, writer, and performer trained in dance, mime, and music. She collaborates with artists of many genres, traditions and cultures to create original repertoire: interweaving accessible storytelling, live music, and movement with localized content to celebrate the enduring power of the human spirit. She is the Artistic Director of Vancouver Moving Theatre, and the Associate Artistic Director of the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival.

Terry and Savannah founded Vancouver Moving Theatre in 1983. For over 15 years Vancouver Moving Theatre known as VMT has toured with original plays, concerts and interdisciplinary events, presenting over 4000 performances across four continents. VMT then shifted its focus to producing community-engaged festivals and community plays with, for, and about the Downtown Eastside Community, including In the Hart of a City (2003) and Storyweaving (2012).

VMT also co-produces the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival, a twelve-day festival featuring hundreds of artists and residents, in partnership with the Carnegie Centre/Association of United Ukrainian Canadians and over forty community partners is currently working on a book about community engaged performing arts practice titled; From the Heart of a City; Community engaged music and theatre productions from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside 2002 – 2013.

Vancouver Moving Theatre has been honoured with the Vancouver Cultural Harmony Award (2008), VMT Directors are recipients of the British Columbia Achievement Award (2008),  Vancouver Mayor’s Art Award for Community Engagement (2009), and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Award (2013).

 

Karen Jamieson is a dancer, beginning her career after receiving a BA in Philosophy and Anthropology, training extensively in dance in New York. She has created over 92 original dance works with original scores by over twenty respected Canadian composers, and performed in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States. She has received the Chalmers award, Canada’s principal choreographic award, and her work Sisyphus was named one of the ten Canadian choreographic masterworks of the 20th century

In 1983 she established Karen Jamieson Dance, whose vision is to reveal the power of dance as an art form with potential to transform, engage, captivate, heal, and to impart knowledge available only to the dancing body; believing the power of contemporary dance transcends cultures, languages, histories and traditions by connecting us all at a very primal level.

In 2002 she embarked on the Skidegate Project, a multi-year, cross-cultural dance project with with the Haida village of Skidegate, BC, to honour Percy Gladstone, a respected Haida elder. The project is featured in Letters to Skidegate, a short film created as part of the Documenting Engagement Project. She also leads the Dance in the Downtown Eastside Project, offering dance workshops to residents of all ages and abilities. The workshops have led to numerous performances by the Carnegie Dance Troupe that emerged from the project.

Links

“Sisyphus” (Video, Excerpt from Karen Jamieson’s acclaimed work, 1983)

The Vancouver Downtown Eastside Elder Dancers (A partnership between the Arts & Health Project and Karen

Jamieson Dance, bringing dance workshops to elders in the Downtown Eatsdide, 2015)

Karen Jamieson Dance for Heart of the City Festival 2013 (Video)

Paula Jardine is an artist with a background in dance, theatre, and writing with an emphasis on Canadian History and Folk Traditions in ritual and seasonal celebrations. She is interested in reviving and redefining community arts and the artist’s role in the community, exploring and cultivating forms that celebrate and connect us to each other, the land, and natural cycles.

She was the founding Artistic Director of the Public Dreams Society, where her work in outdoor spectacle theatre and celebration was the foundation for the Illuminares Evening Lantern Procession, and the Parade of the Lost Souls. She speaks of her work with Public Dreams Society in Public Dreamer, a short documentary created as part of the Documenting Engagement project.

Since 2005 Paula has been artist in residence at Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver, creating the annual Night for All Souls with long time collaborator Marina Szijarto. She is also artist in residence at Royal Oak Burial Park.

Now living on Vancouver Island, where she continues to explore her role as an artist in her community, Paula is committed to work that honours wild salmon, and is an active volunteer in her Victoria neighbourhood of James Bay.

Links

A Night for All Souls: An Interview with Paula Jardine (Daily Undertaker, 2010)

Paula Jardine speaks about All Souls Event (Video, 2013)

Justin A. Langlois is an artist, educator, and organizer working across media and social practices. His practice explores collaborative structures, critical pedagogy, and custodial frameworks as tools for gathering, learning, and making. He holds an MFA from the University of Windsor and his work has been presented across Canada and in the US.

He is the co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, an artist-led interdisciplinary research collective working to explore the complexities of locality, infrastructures, and participation in relation to civic engagement and social change. He is also the founder of The School for Eventual Vacancy, an ongoing exploration of education as creative practice and political subjectivity.

He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Culture + Community and Academic Coordinator of the Imagining Our Future initiative at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Links and Publications

Justin Langlois on Broken City Lab (Windsor-Essex) (Video, describing the work of Broken City Lab, 2011) 

Judith Marcuse is one of Canada’s senior artists/producers with a career that spans over 40 years of professional work as a dancer, choreographer, director, producer, teacher, writer and lecturer. Her repertory contemporary dance company toured nationally and internationally for more than 15 years, and she has created over 100 original works for live performance by dance, theatre, and opera companies; many projects for film and television; and has produced seven large-scale arts festivals.

Judith developed three multi-media productions with youth involving years of workshops, live touring and film productions, and extensive community outreach work. These included ICE: Beyond Cool (1997), focusing on teen suicide; FIRE…where there’s smoke (2001), exploring bullying, violence, and homophobia; and EARTH=home (2009) on environmental issues.

Judith teaches and presents in universities and other settings in Canada and abroad. She has been awarded with two national choreographic awards, the Chalmers and the Clifford E. Lee, and an honorary doctorate from Simon Fraser University.

Judith is the Founder and Co-Director of the International Centre of Art for Social Change, a partnership with Simon Fraser University, and is a Senior Fellow of Ashoka International. She is the Principal Investigator of the ASC! Research Project, a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded research project on arts for social change.

Links and Publications

Art for Social Change in Canada: A Call for Candour and Connection (Video, Keynote for Creative Catalyst: the Symposium on Art and Social Innovation, 2015)

Carrie MacLeod is a scholar, practitioner, and artist with 20+ years experience facilitating dialogue, enhancing creativity, and inspiring fresh response through active engagement with the arts. Working worldwide with NGOs, humanitarian agencies, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and for-profit enterprises, she specializes in intermodal arts-based approaches in conflict transformation, peacebuilding, refugee and immigrant resettlement, community arts, curriculum design and experiential pedagogy, leadership development, and social innovation. While at University of British Columbia School of Law, Carrie implemented and assessed several multi-year research projects funded by government grants that involved collaborations among diverse stakeholders and policy makers through community arts.  A doctoral candidate at The European Graduate School in Switzerland, she is author of several published chapters in arts-based research and praxis, also co-editor of a ground-breaking book, The Choreography of Resolution – Dance, Movement and Neuroscience, recently published by the American Bar Association.  Based in Vancouver, Carrie offers public and private workshops, intensive practitioner training, project consultation, and keynote speaking through her atelier, Intermodal Arts.  She designs and delivers academic courses for graduate and undergraduate level programs as adjunct or visiting faculty upon request.  For more information:  www.carriemacleod.com.

Aaron Nelson-Moody is a Squamish artist working in carving, engraving jewelry, and repousse. His Squamish name, Tawx’sin Yexwulla, translates as ‘Splashing Eagle,’ and he also carries the name, Poolxtun, from his adopted father Gerry Oleman, which he translates as, ‘the spreading ripples from a splash of water.’

Highlights of Aaron’s work include several large works for Olympic Venue sites for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler, Canada, and four house boards for the Squamish/Lil’wat Cultural Centre.

For 10 years he volunteered with the Uts’am/Witness Project, an arts and environment project that succeeded in saving part of the Squamish Nation Territory from logging. The project brought together 10,000 First Nations and non-First Nations people to experience the land, engage in dialogue, make art, and participate in ceremonies. It is a historic model for peaceful conflict resolution, mobilization, policy change, and land preservation through art.

He has worked extensively with youth teaching Squamish and Native cultural history and hands-on skills such as carving and drum making. In 2002 he was the lead cultural worker in the Chako Project, a health promotion and prevention initiative that combined traditional and cultural teachings with education around substance use, HIV, Hepatitis and STD’s.

Links and Publications

People of the Land: Legends of the Four Host First Nations (Anthology celebrating the four First Nations whose ancestral territories were the setting for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, 2009)

Renae Morriseau is an actor, writer, theatre director, and musician. She has worked across Canada and the United States in music, theatre, film, and television, and has toured internationally with her singing group, M’Girl. She has received cultural teachings through social and ceremonial songs with the Secwepemc, Okanagan, Nlaka’pamux, Moari, Cree and Ojibway peoples.

In theatre, she produced, wrote, directed, and acted in a variety of Aboriginal stories, contributing her music and dramaturgy, as well as teaching theatre to the next generation of thespians.

Renae works to cultivate social justice, inclusiveness, and community building through the power of theatre, film, and voice in professional and community engaged artistic creations. Renae’s most recent community building projects include the winter outdoor production Contest of the Winds with Caravan Farm Theatre and the Secwepemc community play Tuwitames with Splatsin Language Program and Runaway Moon Theatre.

Renae also worked on community plays co-produced by Vancouver Moving Theatre and their community partners, including the 2003 Downtown Eastside Community Play In the Heart of a City and the 2012 Storyweaving, exploring the experiences of the urban aboriginal community. She was a co-producer of the 2015 TRACKS: 7th Annual Canadian Community Play and Arts Symposium, and was awarded the 2015 Mayor’s Arts Award for Community Engaged Arts.

Links

Storyweaving brings the urban aboriginal experience to the stage (Article in the Straight, 2012)

Cultures connect at Tracks (Article in the Straight, 2015)

Haruko Okano is an installation and environmental artist whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Since the mid 1990’s Haruko changed the nature of her artistic practice and lifestyle to bring them into closer alignment with her concerns for the natural environment. Breaking away from her Eurocentric art education, she began to integrate methods and means that include elements from her Japanese ancestry and other holistic traditions common to many hunter-gatherer cultures around the world. She often seeks to use recycled and organic materials in her installations.

Collaboration is the earmark of her practice, whether that is in community-developed art, working in tandem with other artists, or in partnership with animals in their natural habitat. One of her community engaged art projects, the Mount Pleasant Fence Project, brought together diverse community members to build a picket fence around their community garden with pickets they designed and carved themselves. Working across six different languages, this award-wining project was an early example of community-engaged art in Vancouver. It is featured in artist Pat Beaton’s documentary 1001 Cups of Tea.

Links and Publications

Haruko Okano talks at Goddard Port Townsend (Video, Haurko Okano talks about her work as a guest in Goddard College’s Spring 2008 residency)

Haruko Okano: Hands of the Compassionate One (Article by Robin Laurence, as part of Open Book: A catalogue of artworks from the Surrey Art Gallery’s permanent collection) 

Vanessa Richards is an artist with a foundation in music, performance, creative writing, and socially-engaged practices. As a writer, she earned an MPhil in Creative Writing from Cardiff University, UK, with poetry and critical works anthologized internationally.

She is the founder and song leader of the Woodward’s Community Singers, a non-auditioned, free, drop-in choir established in 2009, in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. The choir runs 40 weeks of the year and is sponsored by the social housing provider PHS Community Services, in addition to Simon Fraser University’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement and private donor Bob Rennie in memory of housing activist Jim Green.

Vanessa also works as an arts-based community engagement professional, developing partnerships and projects that cultivate participatory processes, collaboration and the civic imagination. She is interested in the role of the arts and artists (professional and amateur) in place-making and social sustainability. Public celebrations and carnival arts have been a large part of her work in at Vancouver and London.

The newest iteration of her social music practice is Together Singing, a consultancy service providing progressive organizations with a customized communal singing experience to amplify their ideas, goals, and missions in a process appropriate for team-building, staff retreats, and conferences.

Links:

Woodwards Community Singers: An Invitation to Sing Together (Video, 2014)

Choir Facebook page

Vanessa Richards rediscovers music with Woodward’s community choir (CBC News, 2015)

Julie Salverson is a writer, producer, scholar, and community animator. She has written plays, essays, and opera and has published extensively about the artist as witness, historical memory, ethics, and the imagination. She is Associate Professor of Drama at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and Adjunct Professor at The Royal Military College of Canada.

Julie uses theatre as a vocabulary for analysis, education, activism, and healing with groups and communities who have suffered from violence and violation, such as refugees and people living in poverty. She has worked extensively developing curriculum and arts work in professional/community partnerships and gives workshops and presentations using creative arts methods to share stories, analyze community issues and address difficult dynamics within groups and organizations.

After a decade researching the uranium trail across Canada and the United States that led to the creation of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, Julie wrote the libretto for Shelter (2012) a chamber opera that uses the absurdist humour of the “clown” approach to poignantly explore uncomfortable truths about life. She further describes this journey in her nonfiction book Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (to be published in 2016).

Links and Publications

Julie Salverson: Storytelling and social justice (An interview with Julie Salverson, 2009)

Atomic Quest (Profile on Julie’s work around the atomic bomb, 2012)

Community Engaged Theatre (Editor, 2011)

Popular Political Theatre and Performance (Editor, 2010)

Shelter project: http://www.julietpalmer.ca/wp-content/gallery/shelter/shelter_japanesesea.jpg

Cathy Stubington is a community based artist and puppet maker. She is the Artistic Director of Runaway Moon Theatre, where she initiates large-scale theatrical performances exploring the water, land, farming, and birds in her home of Enderby, B.C. The Grandmothers of Splatsin have named her T’uctwes re S’t’l’calcw, “Flying Spirit”.

Cathy began creating puppet theatre with Picardi Marionette Theatre in Montreal. She came to B.C. in 1987 to the Caravan Farm Theatre where several of her puppet plays were produced. In 1997, Cathy initiated the Enderby and District Community Play Not the Way I Heard It, working with director Jimmy Tait and Rosalind Williams, whose Secwepemc name is “Tswum,” and is a storyteller and knowledge keeper of the Splatsin nation

Cathy documented her work in the Community Play in the short film Something from Nothing. Following the success of this production, Runaway Moon Theatre was incorporated in 2000. Their puppet theatre has a distinctive style involving puppets and actors together on stage, with a finely crafted grassroots aesthetic.

Cathy’s recent work includes developing cross-cultural curriculum with Rosalind Williams, spending time in schools with ArtsStarts Infusion, and finding arts-based ways to explore the sequence of events in nature.

Links and Publications

Cathy Stubington at the Salmon Arm Art Gallery (Okanagan Art Review, 2015)

Puppets, Peonies, and Community Plays (Video, Cathy Stubington describes some of her puppet work from her exhibition at the Salmon Arm Art Gallery, 2015)

Marina Szijarto is a visual and celebration artist with a diverse and eclectic arts practice working within the mediums of community-engaged rites and celebrations, site-specific installations, theatre, dance, and performance.

She is a Jessie Richardson Award-winning professional costume and set designer working with such companies as Leaky Heaven Circus, The Caravan Farm Theatre, Studio 58, and The Electric Company.

Marina has worked on numerous community engaged public art projects across the Lower Mainland of British Columbia creating mosaics, banners, murals, giant puppets, and lanterns and designing celebratory events such as the Harvest Full Moon Project in Richmond. She is the Creative Director of the Public Dreams A Midsummer Fete – a celebration of Art, Environment and Organic Gardening community event at Colony Farm Regional Park.

Alongside Paula Jardine, Marina is also the Art Director/Designer at Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemeteries annual Night For All Souls. She has been exploring the artist’s role in rites of passage (specifically death, funerals, and mourning) for the last 12 years and has pioneered the use of Shrines to honour the dead in Vancouver community based events.

Links

• Woman of the Month: Marina Szijarto (Interview with Marina Szijarto, 2011)

James Fagan Tait is a Jessie Award winning actor, playwright, and director. He trained and worked as an actor and director at Ryerson Theatre School and trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France. In addition to his extensive directing, acting, and playwrighting career within the professional theatre, James Tait has worked as a collaborator and creator in community engaged theatre projects.

He was co-artistic director of Dialogue Theatre Company in Cornwall, Ontario, a company dedicated to theatricalizing topical issues and local histories, and of Fly on the Wall Theatre Company in London, England. He then established himself as a regular actor/director at the Caravan Farm Theatre in Armstrong, B.C.

He has co-authored and directed several plays including Shadowland’s Lysistrata and the New Age on the Toronto Islands; In the Heart of the City with Vancouver Moving Theatre; Crime and Punishment and The Idiot with Neworld Theatre; and Tuwitames and Not the Way I Heard It in Enderby, B.C., with Runaway Moon Theatre.

Links and Publications

Crime and Punishment trailer (Neworld Theatre, 2012)

A Journey into the Downtown Eastside Community Play (Project report by Valerie Methot, including interviews with Jimmy Tait)

jil p. weaving is a site-specific artist, creating works for presentation in both galleries and unconventional spaces, and is the Coordinator of Arts and Culture for the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation. She has a BFA and an Interdisciplinary Master’s in the Humanities.

jil worked with the Canada Council for the Arts as a researcher for their pilot program supporting artists working with communities, and was a member of the BC Arts Council Community Arts Advisory Committee during the creation of the provincial ‘Arts Based Community Development Funding Program’.

She began her work in community-engaged arts in 1994 as the Artist in Residence at the Mount Pleasant Community Centre. Since then she has developed and managed numerous programs and projects for the Vancouver Park Board including the Arts, Health and Seniors Project, providing professionally led arts programs for vulnerable seniors in community and senior’s centers; and the Stanley Park Environmental Art Project, inviting local artists to create ephemeral art works that honored the park and re-envisioned our relationship to nature. She was also one of the producers of the 2015 TRACKS: 7th Annual Canadian Community Play and Arts Symposium that brought together community-engaged Indigenous and settler/immigrant artists to explore the work they do.

Links and Publications

jil p. weaving: to be continued… (Article by Randy Lee Cutler, as part of Open Book: A catalogue of artworks from the Surrey Art Gallery’s permanent collection)

Stanley Park Environmental Art Project (Video, describing the emergence of the Stanley Park Environmental Art Project, 2012

Tracy Williams (Sesemiya) is a fifth generation cedar weaver and member of the Squamish Nation. Tracy has had many teachers and is invested in sharing her knowledge with youth to continue the foraging and hand technology traditions of her culture.

Tracy has worked for 10 years with the Squamish Education Centre as a Secondary School counselor, and has developed numerous programs for connecting Squamish youth to traditional hand technologies and traditional living off the land programs including week-long survival camps with the Wilderness Living Project. Tracy Williams was also a participating artist in the Uts’am/Witness Project teaching Cedar weaving in the Elaho Valley to project participants. Tracy has worked teaching youth the traditions and protocol with traditional regalia and was recognized in 2006 as an Outstanding Supporter of Youth by the city of North Vancouver in recognition and appreciation of her work with Aboriginal Youth in the North Shore community.

Links

Squamish Weaver Shares her skills (North Shore News, 2015)