Past ARTISTS IN residence

 Nura Ali is a visual artist, community organizer and social activist, living and working in Vancouver,  British Columbia. Her multidisciplinary practise engages issues of memory, place building, displacement and power. Nura is committed to community oriented organising and for this reason became one of the founding members of the Vancouver Artists Labour Union,  a unionized workers cooperative with a mission to transform labour practices within the arts and cultural sector.

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

Augusta Lutynski has recently completed her bachelor's degree in Industrial Design at Emily Carr University. She currently works in design research and has a background in textiles and traditional shoemaking. In her design practice, she uses making as a means for inquiry, seeking to better understand the objects and systems people engage with. Her work responds to these unique relationships people have to space, whether that is around the dinner table, a neighbourhood, or to the body. Focusing on the contextual narratives within a space has been an important part of her process and final design outcomes. Augusta hopes to prompt dialogues and new perspectives in her work by engaging herself and others in design that is situated, responsive, and experiential.

Heather Lamoureux is a community organizer, artist, and facilitator living on Musqueam, Squamish and Tsliel-Waututh territories. She is the Artistic Director at Vines, and has grown with the festival since it’s beginning over the past seven years. Heather is  grateful to have been learning with the community of artists who percolate the work Vines does. She is committed to her responsibility to imagine and co-create nurturing creative spaces for artists. Outside of Vines Heather utilizes her Somatic Education training from Tamalpa Institute to facilitate movement and expressive arts classes. In the past I have worked for Raven Spirit Dance, PuSh International Arts Festival, Dancing on the Edge and the Firehall. She loves to garden at Harmony garden, X̱wemelch’stn pen̓em̓áy, hang out by a river and eat good food with community. I can sometimes be found performing in unexpected outdoor spaces with the collective Pressed Paradise.

Pia Massie is a multi-media artist whose work has been exhibited in festivals, museums and galleries throughout North America and Europe, including The Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne; and the grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC.  Her teaching career includes universities, elementary schools and community programs. 

Sculpture was the first art practice that I took seriously. When I started to work on site specific, large scale installations in a mono-no-aware approach my sculpture became more about experiencing a moment in time and less about material objects. 

Although now I am known for my films, writing and performances. I also practice tea, take care of bees and help start gardens, in a continuing commitment to engage art in the service of activism. 

I anticipate creating a studio space where community can expand and create, finding their own voices, and working with the materials that come naturally to them.

Andrew Phillips is a community organizer, designer, educator and emerging social practice artist. His interdisciplinary research-based projects explore the entangled relations of human and natural systems through the diverse sites, situations, forms and experiences of everyday life. Experimenting with playful and sometimes eccentric methods and tactics for public engagement and participation, Andrew constructs spaces and processes for conversations, relationship building, and collaborative inquiry about eco-social matters. As a pedagogical process, his works encourage people to ask critical questions to attend more widely and deeply to the plurality of human and more-than-human ways of knowing and being that coproduce everyday life. 

Andrew holds a BA in Political Science from Queen’s University, and is a graduate of the Institute without Boundaries’ postgraduate program in Interdisciplinary Design Strategy.  He is currently completing a Masters of Educational Studies (EDST) at UBC that centres on critical public pedagogies for future ecologies; alternative ways of being/learning together in/through place. 

Guná, also known as Megan Jensen is from the Carcross, Tagish First Nation, located in southern Yukon. Guná grew up witnessing the cultural practices of her community including dance, song, language, potlatching annual harvesting on her traditional territory. she was fortunate to learn and grow surrounded by the practises of her ancestors, and this has inevitably informed her practise as a dancer, composer, writer and the dominant part of her practise - painting. Guná has been a student of formalize for ten years and has previously been apprenticed by Nisga'a artist  Mike Dangeli and William Wasden of Alert Bay. She is now in her final year of attaining her Bachelor of visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. 

Guná's mandate is to foster culturally safe and inclusive spaces for students to enable students to  experiment and feel comfortable inquiring into the unknown. Guná firmly believes that all students have an innate capacity to be creative, and that their unique gifts must be nurtured. Guná always aspires to find ways to integrate teachings from her community in order to create spaces of cultural understanding. 

Maggie has been serving the community with inspired programs and workshops for all ages for over 30 years. She is a full-time artist who teaches across Canada and whose.practice is influenced by the Reggio Emilia philosophy.  She is a founding member of the Arts and Play Society, an organization launched as a non-traditional art education consulting practice.

Maggie encourages a strong bond between parents, community, and children as what forges  quality, well-rounded learning experiences. This strong foundation will support our children as they continue moving forward in their education to become future citizens. Maggie believes Art is essential to life in our communities. She is passionate about art education and strives to support and share her values. 

Maggie uses Art to promote well-being and create a space for social connection. She is an active member of the Expressive Arts Therapy Association and Holistic Arts Based Program facilitator. In addition, Maggie recently joined Nature Kids BC to promote eco-literacy and an inspired appreciation of the natural world. She is also a contributor to a book: Beautiful Stuff 2nd Edition: Beautiful stuff from Nature (Edited by Cathy W. Topal and Lella Gandini).

Tim Bauer is an illustrator, comic book creator, and educator based in Vancouver. Before settling up in Vancouver, Tim lived in the state of Kansas where he got his first degree in East Asian Languages and Culture. This prompted him move to S.Korea where he was afforded the chance to travel around Asia and teach English for five years. Eventually Tim would move to Vancouver to get a degree from Emily Carr in Illustration in 2015. Since then, he has taught courses in graphic design while self-publishing his own comics. Most of Tim’s work focuses on detailed drawings that create a strong narrative while creating an immersive setting. Tim creates comics that contain queer content and is a proponent of LGBTQ2A+ comic creators and is in the works to create a Queer comic and zine fair in Vancouver. He hopes for all of his students to feel free enough to explore and to tell their story in creative ways, but mostly to have fun while doing it. 

Originally from Vancouver Island, Kirsten Hatfield holds a Fine Arts Diploma from North Island College and a BFA  from Emily Carr University. She is heavily involved in the local arts community as a practicing artist, curator, art director and art educator. Her personal practice fluctuates between a wide variety of materials but is always centred around painting and colour theory. Her work has been featured on CBCarts, BBC, Huffpostarts, Seventeen Magazine, New York Magazine and locally in Sad Mag and Discorder Magazine. She currently resides in Vancouver where she shows locally and internationally.

My abstract paintings are a combination of memory and dream imagery  exploring the contradictions of the artificial and the natural, the digital and the physical, organization and chaos, flatness and depth, synthetic and natural colours, the sublime and the banal, nostalgia and progression. The intention is to explore the physical and cultural environment of a post-internet and technologically progressive society that is obsessed with nostalgia and tradition; simultaneously existing in the past and future.

Fiana Kawane is a performance artist and researcher of biracial Japanese-Punjabi descent working on unceded xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Skwxwú7mesh, Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh territories. She specializes in movement practices rooted in Kathak, a South Asian classical dance form known for its powerful storytelling and intimate relationship to rhythm. Fiana has performed independently and with dance companies across India, Pakistan, Canada, Japan, and France. She has an MA in English literature from the University of Toronto and is currently working towards a PhD on lyric poetry and ecology at the University of British Columbia. Her artistic practice informs and is informed by her interdisciplinary research engagements as a fellow with the UBC Centre for Migration and affiliate with the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Through performance as a mode of inquiry and site-specific sensibilities,

Fiana prioritizes art-research connections and public access to art. To facilitate critical vocabularies of embodied and imaginative relationships between self and the world, her student engagement centres relational, experiential, everyday-life, and process pedagogies. Her commitment to community engaged art, accessibility, and intercultural awareness draws on her formative experience volunteering in Kachchh (India) and dance outreach in Ōfunato (Japan), two disaster affected communities that asked for practices of listening to climate grief as much as hopes for reparative planetary futures.

Amanda begins with the haptic process of exploring materials. In her practice the path is as important as the destination.  Her work is concerned with unseen structures and patterns.  Documentation as a way of starting conversations and witnessing inter-connectedness.  Amanda’s primary medium is weaving. Using traditional weaving techniques and tools within a contemporary framework she pushes the boundaries of her chosen materials.  Amanda has a BA in Communications from SFU and a diploma in Textile Art from Capilano University. She is a member of the Canadian Guild of Weavers and the Craft Council of BC. Her work has been shown across Canada and published in multiple publications. Amanda lives and works in Vancouver, BC. 

Adiba Muzaffar is a filmmaker from New Delhi, India. In recent years, her practice has evolved into media art and installation work, inspecting film as a body and skin as an interface. Through video narratives led by personal accounts and experiments with materials, moving images and sound she perseveres to yank at invisible stigmas. Ongoing work includes 360 video tours and branded content for a VR art staging platform.  
Muzaffar has worked as an educator in varied roles since 2018. While working as an ECE at Frog Hollow in 2019 she came across the Reggio Emilia approach in a Reggio inspired program with 5-12 year olds. Her teaching methodology has hence evolved to include emergent learning and pedagogical documentation (making thinking learning visible).  

Susan is an educator with over 20 years of experience (Canada, USA, Switzerland).At the UN School in New York Susan was inspired  to develop integrated arts programs that encourage dialogue. At York University (Toronto), Susan worked as a course director with teacher candidates in the Faculty of Education. 

Susan’s most recent workshops are designed to address the important work of teaching visual literacy.  Students engage in creating photos with the use of DSLR cameras. Through dialogue Students consider the relevance of responsible publishing and the role students play in shaping online culture. Central to the learning experience is the notion of perspective taking both through the lens and in discussion. Through her teaching, Susan encourages  students to take time to see through a lens and discover beauty in the ordinary.

Reed Jackson (BFA Film Hons 2017, SFU) is a queer filmmaker/soundmaker/educator on stolen, occupied, unceded səl̓ilwətaɁɬ, Skwxwú7mesh, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm lands. Their work is generated from an endless stream of hungry questions. Recurring themes include ecological intersubjectivity, myth & magic, and the trouble of having and sharing a body. 

Kellen takes an experimental approach to materials, drawing from experimental analogue film traditions and a childhood of making potions in the mud. In their teaching, they are working toward models of collaboration that embrace vulnerability, passion, and curiosity, as opposed to emphasizing technical proficiency. 

Kellen’s approach to facilitation comes from a background in theatre, nurtured by liberatory problem-solving pedagogy. They fully embrace clown logic -- non-linearity, non-rationality, and taking the art of play very seriously! Kellen works to enable and encourage kids to engage with big questions from exactly where they’re at, emphasizing that there are no “right answers” -- only generative thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations that we can all keep learning from and building on together.

Alanna Ho is an educator, community engaged artist (sound-focused) and cultural producer based in New Westminster, BC. Her research is on deep play, female representation and feminist activism in the arts, and accessible art programming in early education. The Rainbow

Forecast Project, founded in 2016, an initiative created to examine the critical connection between radical pedagogy in the arts, and empowering children and young womxn beyond the classroom. She is dedicated to integrating child-led play; inquiry and process based learning; and 21st century learning skills into classrooms. Using storytelling, games and play as the main momentum, she introduces sound and new media technology as a creative tool in combination with traditional materials to aid in the unravelling and discussion of sensitive topics such as diversity in representation and environmental awareness.