Airs artists 2024/25

Kathy holds a Bachelor of Design Degree from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design and has fourteen years of experience as an Art Educator. Her practice includes working in acrylics, watercolours, oils, and fabric and her subject matter usually focuses on celebrating nature. As an Art Educator, Kathy believes that students should be able to explore art processes, and while being given guidance and inspiration, don’t have to be attached to a prescribed outcome, but instead be encouraged to express their own creative ideas. Her teaching experience includes currently being an Art Instructor for

several places here in the lower mainland and previously in Alberta, where she taught for various galleries and art centres, all of which has given her experience instructing in the classroom, as well as in the studio. She has also been an Arts Programmer for the Calgary After School Program, and recently volunteered for eight months at Inner City Arts in Los Angeles. She loves facilitating collaborative community art projects and has run several large scale school-wide projects for Calgary elementary schools and has also facilitated two large community mural projects for Anytx Community Arts in Calgary.

Mishel is a mixed media artist with a BFA from KPU. Mishel is the co-curator

with APTPOP and runs Arrieta Art Studio in New West. She primarily focuses on teaching and curating art. In her personal practice she uses abstract methods to create engaging paintings and installations with a focus on community engagement and interaction. She aims to create pieces that speaks to the audience aesthetically while also being able to express memories, concepts and emotions through it.

  Evaly is originally from Montreal, Quebec where she studied Visual Arts at Dawson College and Concordia University.  After journeying to British Columbia with an Art collective  she fell in love with the West Coast, its majestic nature and its people. She now lives in East Vancouver with her husband, young daughter and small crew of furry family members. 

Her work has been shown in group and solo shows in Montreal and Vancouver as well as Commercial galleries. Inspired by music, poetry and nature, her body of work has featured an evolving exploration of intuition, gestural expression and color symbolism and a recent return to figurative work. Alongside her artistic practice Evaly also devotes her time to teaching art and developing creative curricula for elementary and high school students

Monica Cheema is a filmmaker based out of Surrey, BC. 

She works as a researcher for the City of Vancouver, where she writes community-

engaged reports about Historical Discrimination Against People of South Asian descent. And as an artist-in-residence for AIRS, where she

invites young people to use storytelling as a tool to think about the past, present, and future. Her most recent short film is an experimental portrait of Paldi, a historic mill settlement often

described as a ghost town on the East Coast of Vancouver Island, now home to a rich community archive housing stories about labor, loss, discrimination, cultural memory, and resilience. She is most excited by films that transgress genre conventions, threading fiction and non-fiction to create something new and surreal in the process.

Allison Chow is an artist and writer based in the surrendered ancestral lands of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, known colonially as Vancouver. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, her practice draws from her studies of visual language, communications and a lifelong passion for immersing herself in literary worlds. Inspired by 4 years of working in a social innovation studio, she integrates tools such as ethnography and co-design into her practice, aiming toleverage curiosity and connection for systemic wellness and grassroots change. With a deep commitment to community-engaged art, Chow invites others to join her as fellow art makers, thinkers, and researchers through playful embodied practices. Her recent project, the "Communal Poetry Machine," examines different ways of uncovering the hidden narratives of familiar places through sensory exploration and documentation.

Whether it's in the classroom or her public works, Chow seeks to cultivate spaces that deepen our relationship with imagination and contribute to the creation of a more compassionate pluriverse where we all can belong.

Laura Cisneros is a mujer mestiza from the Caribbean Sea, born in Havana, Cuba. She is a practitioner of conscious dreaming, a community builder, and an art historian. Laura has studied dreaming and plant medicine practices under various traditional healers, and medicine women and men from the Amazon, Andes, Mexico, and Turtle Island. "I came to the unceded traditional lands of the Coast Salish people in search of freedom. I quickly learned that I was already free and that my true purpose here was to know my own roots. I like saying, 'I came to the North to learn about the South'." Through her conscious dreaming practice, medicinal plant teachings, connections with the Cosmos, and guidance from ancestors, these lands—where her children are growing up—have become an integral part of her daily life. Laura is the founder of Unfolding Senderos, Dreaming Circle (2019). In 2020-2021, together with Lori Snyder, she was an artist in residence at Hastings Community Centre, and they also co- created monthly moon circles and nature walks. Laura is currently part of a team of teachers

 with Earth Bites, a Vancouver-based School Gardens program. She is also a steward of the Native Welcoming Garden, Templeton Park & Pool, and Chenchenstway Garden (both in collaboration with Lori Snyder) in Vancouver. In 2024, she was Artist in Residence with AIRS at Mount Pleasant

Elementary School. Laura's art practices include eco-artistic and earth art projects that extend beyond traditional art- making forms, bringing together the realms of nature, community, creativity, and the de- commodification of art. She is interested in collective art-making to foster personal and regenerative expressions, embracing diversity and inclusivity within the community. Through inquiry, curiosity, and empathy, she invites exploration of the intricate relationship between art and nature. Much gratitude for being part of a circle of ensoñadoras y ensoñadores. It is an honour to do my work and to dwell in the unceded ancestral lands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people.

Nellie Gossen is an interdisciplinary artist based on the unceded territories of the Musqueum, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh first nations. Working through the media of fashion, costume, textiles and performance, Nellie uses clothing as a tool to think and feel through social systems. Considering the many truths of industrial labor and consumption, her work explores the material of mainstream fashion as a vehicle for study, spaciousness, social action, rigorous love practice and phenomenological inquiry. Drawing on one background in fashion design and another in religious studies, Nellie is particularly interested in the space that is created when clothing and contemplative practices meet.
Nellie has presented her work at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz (Berlin), Altes Finanzamt (Berlin) and Ku’damm Karree (Berlin). As a costume designer and textile collaborator, Nellie has worked with artists such as Nancy Tam, Steven Hill, Francesca Frewer, Erika Mitsuhashi, Alexa Mardon, Elissa Hanson and Lexi Vajda. Nellie holds degrees in Fashion Design from Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee, as well as in Religion, Literature and the Arts, from the University of British Columbia. She is currently studying contemplative end of life care with the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care.

Aibhlin Fowlie is a multimedia artist that specializes in illustration and

visual storytelling. They find the small moments that lead us through our daily lives enchanting and they focus on telling small stories. They

use their practice to notice how the world changes and to visualize how we are affected internally by our daily lives. They use digital and

traditional illustration and comic arts to tell these stories and their illustrations vary from straightforward and comedic to surreal and

expressive depending on what tells the story best. They would like to spread a message of community and awareness of each other and

also ourselves with each piece they create.

Kelsie Grazier is a Canadian visual artist whose practice engages with painting, drawing and installation art. Through her work, she communicates the complexities of Deaf identity and cultural histories. Kelsie grew up hard of hearing and lost her hearing in her twenties. With layers of gestural paintings and light reflection installation, she is addressing themes of disconnection and belonging within Deaf and

hearing worlds. The work comes from a desire to understand the contrast of the isolation and beauty in deafness through intuitive gestures that span across the large surface to take up space, both literally and metaphorically. Kelsie holds a degree in Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, a Bachelors of Education in Fine Art and a Masters in Deaf Education from the University of British Columbia. In her teaching, Kelsie’s passion is to share a process based art practice rooted in mindfulness. Through sharing her own story and

Deaf Culture, she strives to create a safe space for students to build self awareness, create and share their own perspectives through artmaking.

Zhuohan Yin, who usually goes by Grace, currently lives in Burnaby, BC. She was born in Shanghai, China, but moved to Canada shortly

after. Wherever she visits, she hopes to be a polite guest. She graduated in 2022 with an HBA from the University of Toronto, completing the Visual Studies Studio Specialist program as well as a minor in Art History.

Presently, Grace volunteers at Burnaby public elementary schools doing all sorts of odd jobs and fun things: leading lessons, helping

with large art projects, translating for students, and organizing a school-wide student art exhibition. Throughout the past year of volunteering, she has noticed that there is a severe lack of support for all things art in elementary schools—especially visual art. Students didn’t have a safe space to create, and there were never enough opportunities for kids to contribute and express themselves through

art. Despite having barely any sort of plan, she decided to try to bring art back into elementary experiences, with the student exhibition as one of the first steps. Grace likes to draw. Although most of her drawings are pencil on paper, she also uses acrylic paint on scrap plywood, digital art programs, video editing software, and words (incorrectly) to draw. These drawings are about everything and nothing, but mostly have to do with herself, and having fun.

Rebecca is a community-engaged artist, author and educator. She received a MFA from the Tufts University/SMFA program in Boston. She has taught photography and photojournalism courses at several universities. After completing an undergraduate degree in Psychology, Rebecca studied documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in NYC.  She began working as a newspaper photographer in the 1990s and continues to do freelance work. However, in recent years Rebecca has become involved in the use of photography for pedagogical documentation in early childhood and primary school settings. She is currently engaged in graduate work with the Faculty of Education at SFU.  Rebecca has been working with AIRS since 2017, bringing experiences with nature and wonder into Vancouver public schools. In both her own art practice as well as her studio work with children, she seeks to create spaces in which dialogue and artistic modes of expression can flourish.

in an act of rebellion, fanny walked away from nearly a decade as a social worker and headed west to pursue lifelong dreams. fanny fuses her experience as a social worker and lived experiences as a marginalized human to express her artivism through means of poetry, storytelling and community advocacy. in 2021 fanny won the Harold Green theatre monologue competition. they sit on the Curtain Razors arts board. her first book, umi's prayer was released June 2023. fanny is a Black, Sapphic, Jewish settler working towards land & relational justice.

Christine Mackenzie, Kwakiutl Nation, a First Nation Artist and Facilitator. Her mother was born in Bella Coola BC is a part of the Eagle clan. Her mother was part of the Sixties Scoop and because of that Christine hard time trying to find her culture and identity, but through resilient and training she found a way back to her indigenous roots. She find’s inspiration in the natural world and in the eyes of people willing to learn and share cultural ideas. Christine works with traditional/contemporary design and with multiple mediums. She been doing art all her life, but as a professional Artist and Facilitator since 2009 and mentored by Anastasia Hendry, Haida elder, she was an Artist and Facilitator for 30 plus years and has since retired. Christine now helps others in their journey to self-identity and educating others about Indigenous culture, artwork and protocols. Speaking to only my teachings and life experience to support others in better understanding of empathy when learning about Indigenous culture. 

With her second Master's degree in Art Education from the University of British Columbia, complementing her BA in Visual Communication and MA in illustration, Sholeh is passionate about the ways in which we can situate ourselves as active participants living in the world aesthetically and take action to uncouple from the familiar to activate the potentialities of learning and growth. Sholeh explores working with materials as lingering in generative spaces that can inspire wonder and meaning making. Composing the studio practice, Sholeh invites students to explore how their unique ways of making can be shared, borrowed, transformed, and cultivated through reflective participation and also experience the infinite capacities of their attentive presence for thinking, making, and acting differently. Her research interest focuses on the experience of being a maker with a special emphasis on upholding the traditions of craftsmanship. 

Master printmaker, Julie McIntyre studied at the Banff Centre and holds a BFA from Queen's University.  She has had solo shows in over 22 public galleries in Canada and participated in over 60 juried exhibitions, including 25 international credits.  Julie has taught workshops across Canada for over 30 years and has been a popular Artist in Residence with the Vancouver School Board and ArtStarts for over a decade. Julie’s passion is to revel the magic of printmaking and its serendipitous nature that encourages experimentation. She uses ordinary materials and a wide range of transfer techniques to create professional results.  Her goal is to have students delight in the playfulness of the repeated image, develop a greater appreciation for qualities of paper, deepen their appreciation for surface treatment, and above all, surprise themselves.

Maggie Milne Martens is a community engaged artist and long-time art educator. She has a BFA in printmaking, and an MA in Art History.  She and has taught both studio art and theory at the post-secondary level and is currently working on a PhD in Arts Education at SFU. 

Her passion for art making with children began 30 years ago in Camden New Jersey, running arts programming for risk kids in the inner city.   Since then she has created community engaged art projects for elementary schools across the lower mainland and other community groups. Maggie's practice interweaves material expressions with collaborative and embodied processes to create multilayered works that allow students into felt connect with themselves, the stories of other and the beauty and complexity of the natural world.  Maggie is co-founder of the Artist in Residence Studio program and continues to  support, mentor and  hold space for artists to share their art practice with children in schools. 

Marzieh is a doctoral candidate in art education at The University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on artful and pedagogical ways of Making-Place and cultivating a sense of place through art making and walking. Holding both an MFA and BFA in visual arts, her artistic practice entangles material and digital engagements as modes of visual and textual storytelling. Marzieh is curious about how places influence one's ways of art-making and how one can make (a) place(s) through the art-making process. In her teaching and making

practices, she prioritizes care-oriented, slow, intentional, and invitational ways of thinking through art-making and meaning- making. Marzieh seeks to create conditions for co learning and collective creativity, valuing each learner's lived experience while encouraging collaborative exploration.

Yasaman Moussavi is an artist and educator. She holds an MFA and a BFA and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art Education at the University of British Columbia. Yasaman has lived and worked in various countries, including Iran, the United States, and Canada. Her diverse lived experiences and teaching in different art programs have shaped her artistic vision and pedagogical approach. Yasaman is fascinated by how the immersive and embodied experiences of public spaces and site-specific art can inspire the imagination to overcome the alienation caused by precarity. Through her art-based research project, she aims to reclaim the embodied practices of mapping and placemaking as a means of fostering social bonding. Yasaman is passionate about community art and its potential to raise social awareness. Through her papermaking art practices, she uses recycled paper as a medium for collaborative and creative expression of identities, stories, and values. Her artwork has been exhibited in various venues across the world.

Tami Murray studied Fine Arts at both Red Deer College’s Fine Arts  Department and at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design where she  received her Bachelors degree in Photography.  Tami’s personal work is an ever evolving exploration of techniques and  fanciful ideas. Her Art has roots in personal narrative that lean into  flights of whimsy and visual poetics
 

She has exhibited in various groups shows over the last two decades,  participated in several Living Room Art in the Heights events in Burnaby  and Vancouver as well as the innaugural Stride Art Festival. She has  work in a number of private collections.

I am an interdisciplinary artist with a background in puppetry, originally from

New York City and currency completing my MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at SFU. Working within an expanded and queered definition of puppetry, my practice orbits around the animation of objects, materials, sites, and situations. I create sculptures, drawings, puppets, installations, video, books, and performances. I am passionate about building with cardboard, newspaper, and paper mache – techniques I learned from my community of giant puppet makers back east. I am interested in how seeing things through the lens of puppetry can shift our awareness and attention, opening us up to perceive possibility, ask questions, and enact transformation. I hope to generate wonder around everyday experience – by defamiliarizing and celebrating what we take for granted, but also by questioning and challenging norms and expectations. One of my ongoing fascinations is with clouds, both as material and metaphor. A current project involves developing large-scale rope and pulley animation systems that are used to animate and compose hanging drawings of clouds. When working with students and in workshop settings, I value collaborative hands-on making and problem-solving, and hope to create the space for students to dream and build as a group, perhaps in the form of giant puppets, processional art, or site-specific installation. In the studio I aim to foster playfulness, silliness, seeing the potential in everyday materials, an appreciation for messiness and “mistakes”, and becoming okay with not knowing exactly what will happen.

Originally from Mexico City, filmmaker and digital media artist Yunuen Perez Vertti has over 20yrs of experience in the film and television industry. She has worked in various roles and projects and produced films for many public, private and non-profit organizations. Her short documentary "Aparajita" The undefeated was successfully screened at Tasveer Seattle South Asian Film Festival, Topanga Film Festival and Gulf Coast Film & Video Festival. She has been working as an artist in residency in the schools for the past five years. She is passionate about education through the arts and the importance of the arts as a fundamental tool for education. She believes teaching and introducing kids to all art disciplines as early as possible is essential to a healthy society.

Hân Phạm (Phạm Thụy Mai Hân) is an emerging artist and filmmaker from Sài Gòn, Việt Nam. Experimenting with video and film, photography, and soundscape compositions, Hân’s works think through the ephemerality of memory, language, and history in relation to the constantly changing and dislocated landscapes, rooted in the in-betweenness of distance as space for reflection.

Alex is a visual artist born in Guatemala who immigrated to Canada as a political refugee with their family at a young age. In these challenging early years, Alex found art to be a valuable and transformative creative outlet. Later, they pursued a degree in Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The principle themes of Alex’s work revolve around cultural identity, the natural world, and the struggle between competing Canadian and Mayan cultural beliefs. As such, their work is often exploratory, revolving around reconciliation between Western and Indigenous cultures. Their work extends into musical performance, photography, traditional Mayan dance, gardening, ceramics, textiles, watercolours, and community-based initiatives. Central to their practice is their desire to communicate introspective lessons through traditional storytelling, and support a sense of interconnectedness for all.

Erin Ross is a stop motion animation filmmaker and artist. She studied visual arts at Concordia University and received her BFA in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts. Her work has screened at international film festivals. She has worked at stop motion animation studios and and is currently working freelance and on her own creative projects. Erin loves creating characters and worlds from interesting and unexpected materials and loves the magic of bringing the inanimate alive under the camera. She draws inspiration from the tiny and big moments in life and from the interesting materials and textures all around her. Erin has been working with children and youth for 20+ years through enrichment programs, schools, NGO’s and her own private studio. She believes art and creativity are powerful tools to connect us with our truest selves. When working with children and youth she wants to encourage and empower them to experiment, play and stretch themselves and to trust in their innate creativity.

Shamina Senaratne is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, born into mixed cultural realities each asserting particular perspectives, the importance 

of identity, and finding

a way to feel rooted as a foundation of well being. Throughout her art practice she has been interested in how we tread the space between us, find connection and understanding, find opportunities to share personal realities. Working with textiles and collage, mark-making and found/collected natural materials, allows her to consider encoding texture and form with metaphor and meaning rather than creating linear narratives using full sentences and prose to relate to place, questions of belonging and “notes” on personal observations of beauty.  She looks forward to working with students to find new ways of seeing and talking about their experiences of where they live and who they are, through writing and experimenting with a variety of visual art techniques. An interdisciplinary artist, Shamina's textile-based contemporary art has been shown in curated and juried exhibitions in Canada, the US and Europe. She has also written and published poetry and short fiction. Shamina’s approach as a contemporary artist is informed by her BA in Communications, Publishing and History, and Certificate in Public History (SFU).

Alysha Seriani is a settler media artist and inter-generational learner who has been making participatory projects using school iPads with AIRS since 2020. Over the past decade, she's led film, video art and

animation creation with many local artists and community organizations including artist-run centres, indoor and outdoor schools, and city museums. Al's style of facilitation and artmaking with children

weaves together strategies for social emotional learning, popular education, intersectional feminism, decolonial animism, somatic awareness, secure attachment and disability justice. She is committed to listening and showing up to each particular place in ways that honours its past and future flourishing.

I am a visual artist who believes passionately in the personal and social transformative power of art. I am deeply committed to creating opportunities for people to discover this for themselves, particularly young people and marginalized people. I nurture students’ innate curiosities and stories– their unique creative processes, their life experiences, and how they perceive the world – and help them express themselves creatively. Anyone can participate just by being themselves. Students discover things about themselves in the process and others discover them. I provide Trauma-Informed Art Programming in Alternative High Schools (VASS/VSB), via ArtStarts grant funding (BC Arts Council), and at Big Top Art Tent, a free, low-barrier program in Vancouver’s DTES parks. In the classroom I combine a decade of professional experience supporting underhoused and under resourced youth, and over 20 years’ experience exhibiting art

internationally (BFA Emily Carr University, 2003). I developed my approach to art facilitation while working for the Urban Native Youth Association as a Youth Care Counsellor at Cedar Walk Alternative High

School. I have since brought 12 programs to 6 Alt-Schools (as of spring semester, 2024). I am of settler-descent.

Kathryn Wadel is an interdisciplinary mixed media artist who works and resides on the traditional and unceded territories of the Katzie First Nation and Kwantlen First Nation peoples. She holds a BFA degree from Emily Carr University, with a major in Visual Arts and a minor in Social Practice and Community Engagement. Her work explores environmental, cultural and social practices that connect communities across disciplines. She utilizes mixed media techniques in her painting, drawing, and sculptural practices that often explore the human condition as it exists within the Anthropocene. In the studio, she facilitates and encourages art-making as a creative process through socially-engaged material play. Kathryn believes that art is an essential human practice that builds meaningful connections across cultures and communities. 

Nova is an Anishinaabe OjibweTwo-Spirit and transgender interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, educator and storyteller. Nova is a proud enrolled member of the Pinaymootang First Nation locatedin Treaty 2 territory and is a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at EmilyCarr University of Art + Design. As an interdisciplinary artist, they weave together a multiplicity of digital and traditional mediums such as video, photography, sound,illustration, beading, performance, and storytelling in exploring/experimenting with new modes of representation through the lens of their Anishinaabe Ojibwe lived and felt experiences. They are a collaborator, producer and video mentor with Access to Media Education Society, and their work has screened at festivals such as imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (2021) and Vancouver Queer Film Festival (2022). As storytellers, they take pride in sharing their personal journey, knowledge and teachings to all ages and have performed storytelling events across Turtle Island. Nova also teaches at Emily Carr University of Art + Design as a sessional professor.