PARTICIPANTS AND PRESENTERS
Hannah Burgé Luviano | Queen’s University & Humber College ITAL | Canada
Hannah Burgé (Métis Nation Ontario) is an artist and academic. In summer 2021, she collaborated with Juno-award winning artist, Jocelyn Gould, on several music tracks slated for a 2022 summer release. Hannah’s video “Serenity” was released by Jazziz Magazine in April 2020, which featured a collaboration with Justin Broadbent (Shad, Metric) and pianist, Robi Botos. Her debut album, Green River Sessions (2014) charted on US College Radio, and received sustained worldwide airplay on more than three hundred stations. She headlined the Polanco International Jazz Festival in México City with her band in 2016, and performed as a soloist at the National Library of Congress in Washington. During the pandemic, Hannah participated in fundraisers for Jazz FM 91.1 and was featured on the Stories from Home series by the TD Toronto Jazz Festival. Hannah is also a professor of performance, music history, and ethnomusicology at Humber College in Toronto, Ph.D. Candidate, and former Research Fellow at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is a clinician and adjudicator of vocal music.
Peter Burton | Arts in the Margins | Canada
I am a music programmer and arts administrator. I am currently in the process of incorporating Fire Arts Management, an artist management company for emerging and established creative musicians. I also recently co-founded Arts in the Margins (AIM), a Montreal-based non-profit organization dedicated to helping build healthy, self-sustaining communities via the creative arts. AIM’s activities range from the implementation of classes and workshops in the arts (including new media and digital arts), through the curation of performances and offering guidance and support to third-parties in the development of their own arts-based projects. Guided by a commitment to social justice, AIM focuses on working with historically marginalized communities and BIPOC artists and organizations. Between 2006 and 2021, I was the Executive Director of Montreal’s Suoni Per Il Popolo (Sounds of the People) music festival.
Jody Cripps | Clemson University | USA
Jody H. Cripps is an Assistant Professor of American Sign Language in the Department of Languages at Clemson University. Dr. Cripps obtained his doctorate in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program from the University of Arizona. Dr. Cripps’ research interests primarily focus on universal design, signed music, signed language pathology, ASL-English literacy, and pedagogical methods. Dr. Cripps’ latest grant allows for conducting ground-breaking ethnomusicological research in Canada on the creative process and production of a signed music showcase titled, “THE BLACK DRUM”, performed by a signing musical theater troupe, the sponsorship funded on the behalf of the Canadian Council of the Arts via Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf. This first of its kind musical incorporates Dr. Cripps’ signed music theories and was selected as one of ten acts entries chosen from more than 100 countries featured in a showcase at Clin d’Oeil Festival in Reims, France in July 2019. In addition to his teaching and research, he also serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Society for American Sign Language Journal and the Vice President of The Gloss Institute, a non-profit organization providing educators and parents the necessary tools and resources to overcome the habitually low literacy (English) rates in deaf children.
Chris Dodd | Sound Off Festival | Canada
Chris Dodd is an award-winning Deaf actor, playwright, accessibility advocate and Governor General Innovation Award finalist. He is the founder and artistic director of SOUND OFF, Canada’s national festival devoted to Deaf performance. Chris holds a degree from the University of Alberta’s Drama program and has been working within Edmonton’s theatre community, and across Canada, for over 25 years. His play, Deafy, recently toured Ontario and will be presented as part of the Citadel Theatre’s 2022/23 season. It was recently published by Playwrights Canada Press as part of the anthology, “Interdependent Magic: Disability Performance in Canada”. Notable performances include the role of Alphonse in Ultrasound at Theatre Passe Muraille. Recent film credits include the role of Odin in the upcoming feature film, Finality of Dusk. In 2019 he was the recipient of the Guy Laliberté Prize for innovation and creative leadership by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Sofia Doroshenko | Georgetown University | USA
Sofia Doroshenko is an undergraduate student in Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is majoring in Culture and Politics with a certificate in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies, specifically interested in the creation of national identity through the narratives in literature, performance, music, and mythology. She is also an Undergraduate Research Fellow at the Mortara Institute for International Studies, having been working with Professor Roda since the beginning of 2021. Sofia is of Russian and Ukrainian descent, being born Russia and growing up in Houston, Texas before coming to Georgetown.
Anaïs Fléchet | Université Paris-Saclay | France
Anaïs Fléchet is associate professor in modern history at Paris-Saclay University, and the associate director of the Research Team Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines. Her research focuses on music and international history, cultural globalization, and Latin American music. She has published several books and articles on these subjects, including: Cultural History in France: Local Debates, Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2019), Histoire culturelle du Brésil (IHEAL éditions, 2019); and Une Histoire des festivals xxe-xxie siècles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2013). She is currently completing a new book on Unesco and music during the Cold War.
Simon Frith | University of Edinburgh | UK
I became Emeritus Professor of Music in 2017 on retiring from the Tovey Chair of Music, which I had held since 2006 following quite an unusual academic career. My undergraduate degree (from Oxford) was in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. My Masters and PhD (from the University of California, Berkeley) were in Sociology. (My thesis topic was Education and the Working Class in Leeds, 1780-1870.) I initially taught in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick, before moving to Strathclyde University to become Director of the John Logie Baird Centre for Research in Film and Television and Professor of English Studies. In 1999 I moved to the University of Stirling and a chair in Film and Media.
For much of my career, as both an academic and journalist, I was engaged with the problems of taking popular music seriously. As an academic I was a founder member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and a founding editor of the journal, Popular Music, and the majority of my scholarly publications have been in this field. As I journalist I started out as an editor of the pioneering British rock magazine, Let It Rock, and became rock critic for both the Sunday Times and the Observer. I was a music columnist for the New York Village Voice from 1980-1995, and chaired the judges of the Mercury Music prize from 1992 (when it was founded) until 2016. I was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and awarded an OBE for services to higher education and popular music in 2017.
Ian Garrett | Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts | Canada
Ian Garrett is a designer, producer, educator, and researcher in the field of sustainability in arts and culture. He is the director of the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts and Associate Professor of Ecological Design for Performance at York University, where he is Graduate Program Director for Theatre and Performance Studies. He is also producer for Toasterlab, a mixed reality performance collective. He maintains a design practice focused on ecology, accessible technologies and scenography. Notable projects related to EcoScenography include the set and energy systems for Zata Omm’s Vox:Lumen at the Harbourfront Centre and Crimson Collective’s Ascension, a solar 150’ wide crane at Coachella. With Chantal Bilodeau, he co-directs the Climate Change Theatre Action. His writing includes Arts, the Environment, and Sustainability for Americans for the Arts; The Carbon Footprint of Theatrical Production in Readings in Performance and Ecology, and Theatre is No Place for a Plant in Landing Stages from the Ashden Directory. He serves on the Board of Directors for Associated Designers of Canada, was the Curator for the US for the 2019 Prague Quadrennial, and is co-chair for World Stage Design 2022 in Calgary.
Alan Greyeyes | Sākihiwē Festival | Canada
Alan Greyeyes runs an artist and project management company Ogichidaa Arts and produces the sākihiwē festival. His volunteer work includes positions on the board of directors for the Polaris Music Prize and the RBC Convention Centre; the Indigenous Music Advisory Committee for the National Music Centre; the Mayor’s Indigenous Advisory Circle for the City of Winnipeg; the Indigenous Advisory Committee for the Winnipeg Folk Festival; and, the Rap category screening committee for the JUNO Awards. He is a member of Peguis First Nation. He received the 2020 Manitoba Arts Award of Distinction from the Manitoba Arts Council and the 2020 Kevin Walters Legacy Award from Manitoba Music for his work with Indigenous artists and organizations in Canada.
Amitesh Grover | National School of Drama | India
Amitesh Grover (b.1980, India) is an award-winning director, artist, and writer. His work moves beyond theatre into visual art, film, installation, digital art, and text-based art. He also teaches and curates for performance.
Devon Hardy | Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts – CG Tools Canada | Canada
Devon Hardy is an environmental specialist with a background in environmental sciences and water resources management. After working in the environmental field for several years, she decided to pursue a career in the arts and began working on sustainability initiatives in partnership with different arts organizations across Canada. She managed the adaptation of Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Green Tools to the Canadian context, and is now the Program Director for the Creative Green Tools Canada program through the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts.
Jo Haynes | University of Bristol | UK
Jo Haynes is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the sociology of popular music, music festivals, ethnicity/race, diversities, cultural work and (digital) entrepreneurship. She has recently co-edited a volume called Remaking Culture and Music Spaces: Affects, Infrastructures, Futures which is the culmination of research from a funded project on ‘European Music Festivals, Public Spaces and Cultural Diversity’ and includes contributions from a range of international scholars. She has also published a research monograph called Music, Difference and the Residue of Race and has published in leading journals including British Journal of Sociology, Cultural Sociology, and New Media & Society.
Charmaine Headley | COBA, Collective Of Black Artists | Canada
Co-founding, Artistic Director of COBA, Collective Of Black Artists, Charmaine Headley’s focus is Creating Healing Spaces, artistically, academically, physically and spiritually. Headley integrates culturally relative resources/themes to develop programming promoting mental and emotional health intergenerationally. She uses her choreographic voice to address socio-political and cultural inequities. As an artist educator Headley works throughout school boards to empower and encourage creativity in students. Headley utilizes her artform and creativity to create space for all ages, building awareness of and in their bodies and sharing tools to balance and align everyone through her N2ìtv (Intuitive) Healìng program – promoting wellness throughout.
Candice Hopkins | Forge Project and Toronto Biennial of Art | USA
Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her writing and curatorial practice explores the intersections of history, contemporary art and indigeneity. She is Executive Director of Forge Project in Ancram, NY and Senior Curator of the 2022 edition of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Hopkins was part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma and co-curator of notable exhibitions including Art for New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years in Winnipeg, MB. Her essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” for the documenta 14 Reader, “Outlawed Social Life” for South as a State of Mind, and “The Appropriation Debates” (or The Gallows of History), for MIT Press.
Michael Kramer | State University of New York-Brockport | USA
Michael J. Kramer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at SUNY Brockport. He specializes in modern US cultural and intellectual history, transnational history, public and digital history, and cultural criticism. He is the author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013) and is currently writing a book about technology and tradition in the US folk music movement, This Machine Kills Fascists: What the Folk Music Revival Can Teach Us About the Digital Age. He is also at work on an ongoing digital public history project about the Berkeley Folk Music Festival and the Folk Music Revival on the US West Coast. Additionally, his research includes explorations of new digital humanities methods such as glitching, remixing, sonification, and remapping artifacts for historical inquiry. Beginning in 2023, he will serve as the editor of the US Intellectual History Review, a new open-source digital journal publishing fresh writing and multimedia features for both scholars and a general readership. Kramer has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woody Guthrie Center/BMI Foundation, the Music Library Association, and the Southern Folklife Collection at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has written for publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Salon, and the Society for US Intellectual History Book Review.
Michel Levasseur | Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville | Canada
Michel Levasseur is one of the pillars of the Quebec festival scene and an important actor on the North American experimental music circuit. He is the founding director of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), which will soon celebrate its 40th anniversary. He is also at the helm of Les Disques VICTO, an imprint established in 1987 to document and disseminate some of FIMAV’s most memorable onstage musical exchanges. Central to his curating approach is the idea of music as communication and collaboration.
Andrew Mall | Northeastern University | USA
Andrew Mall is Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University (Boston, MA, U.S.), where he teaches courses in ethnomusicology, music industry, and popular music studies. He is the author of God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2021), co-editor of Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2021), book review co-editor for the journal Ethnomusicology, and vice president of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch.
Alicia Marvan | Guapamacátaro Art & Ecology Centre | Mexico
Alicia Marván is an artist and educator with 25 years of experience in the arts, culture and ecology sectors. As an artist, she has participated in over 100 art exhibitions and projects, many of which have received support from cultural organizations and academic institutions in Mexico, USA, Canada, Chile, Uruguay, Brasil, Portugal, Germany, Czech Republic, Switzerland, The Netherlands and South Africa, such as the New York State Council on the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Breuninger Foundation, Goethe Institut, Stroom Den Haag, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and The Tree Museum, among others. As an educator, she has lectured and taught both in Mexico and the United States, in the subjects of art, art history, social science, art and sustainability, cultural development, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is the Founder and Director of Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology in Michoacán, Mexico.
George McKay | University of East Anglia | UK
George McKay is Professor of Media Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research interests are in popular music from jazz to punk, festivals, alternative culture and media, social movements and cultural politics, disability, and gardening. Among his books are Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (Verso, 1996), Glastonbury: A Very English Fair (Gollancz, 2000), Circular Breathing: The Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain (Duke UP, 2005), Shakin’ All Over: Popular Music and Disability (Michigan UP, 2013), ed. The Pop Festival: History, Media, Music, Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015), and, with Emma Webster, Music From Out There, In Here: 25 Years of London Jazz Festival (2017). He was a founding editor in 2002 of the Routledge journal Social Movement Studies. The 32-chapter The Oxford Handbook of Punk Rock (Oxford UP), which he has co-edited with Gina Arnold, is published in 2022.
Tes Miedema | DGTL Doughnut Festival | Netherlands
Tes is an enthusiastic and driven city engineer with a passion for the urban energy transition. With a background in urban planning and environmental studies I believe that nature and technology are the main pillars for a sustainable world of the future. Recently I have set up my own company that assists housing corporation in the energy transition by mapping their buildings and giving a neighbourhood perspective of sustainable heat sources. In my spare time I like to make illustrations.
Kristin Moriah | Queen’s University | Canada
Kristin Moriah is an Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and 2022 Visiting Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University Center for Black Digital Research and the Pennsylvania State Humanities Institute. She is the co-director of the Black Studies Summer Institute. Her academic work can be found in American Quarterly, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada and Canadian Theatre Review. Her research interests include Sound Studies and black feminist performance, particularly the circulation of African American performance within the black diaspora and its influence on the formation of national identity. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center.
Patricia Nicholson | Vision Fest – Arts for Art | USA
Patricia Nicholson is a dancer, poet, and organizer of movement, music, and causes. She has developed her work within the aesthetic of free jazz, and she founded Arts For Art and the Vision Festival to promote and advocate for free jazz. Beginning with the belief that dance is the visual manifestation of sound and energy, Ms. Nicholson has developed a singular practice, one drawing from both traditional and unconventional techniques to create an eclectic yet intuitive approach to movement and composition. This same aesthetic is manifest in all her work from writing to organizing to being present in each moment. Nicholson’s dance and poetry are featured in her active projects: What It Is Ensemble (co-led with William Parker and ft. James Brandon Lewis, Melanie Dyer, Devin Waldman and Gerald Cleaver); Revolution Resurrection (with art by William Mazza and music by TA Thompson and Jason Hwang); BLUE (with art by William Mazza and electronics by Val Jeanty); and Hope Cries for Justice, duos and trios with William Parker and Hamid Drake.
Melissa Noventa | Queen’s University | Canada
Melissa Noventa is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher originally from Guelph, Ontario. She has accumulated a wide range of training, performing, and teaching experience throughout her career. Melissa’s work has spanned commercial, academic and artistic settings allowing her to work alongside a formidable list of distinguished artists and institutions from Canada and abroad including some of Cuba’s premiere folkloric ensembles. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) and a Master’s degree (Dance) from York University. Currently, Melissa is entering her fourth year of the Ph.D. program in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University, where she is exploring cultural diplomacy between Canada and Cuba through music and dance. Since arriving in Kingston in 2019, she has also worked with Queen’s Afro-Caribbean Student Association dance team, The Grande Theatre, and the Movement market to share Afro-Cuban dance with the Kingston community.
Kevin Ormsby | KasheDance & Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario | Canada
Artistic Director of KasheDance and Program Manager at Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO), Kevin A. Ormsby has performed with companies in Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean. He has been featured in works by Marie-Josée Chartier, Allison Cummings, Patrick Parson, Ronald Taylor, Ron K. Brown, Menaka Thakkar, Mark Morris, Bill T. Jones, Garth Fagan, Liz Lerman, Bageshree Vaze, and Lemi Ponifasio, among others. A recipient of Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award and named an inaugural TAC Cultural Leaders Fellow, Kevin is on the faculty of Centennial College’s Dance Performance Program, and has been a Guest Artist in Residence at the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts at the University of the West Indies (Mona), University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Northwestern University. His research and creative practice through KasheDance’s technical approach exists in a space of constant interrogation and navigation of Caribbean cultural nuances towards a methodology of understanding space in creation, research, and presentation. Kevin is on the Boards of Dance Collection Danse and Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts, and has served on the Boards of Canadian Dance Assembly, Prologue to the Performing Arts, and Nia Centre for the Arts, where he was Chair of Canada’s first professional multi-disciplinary centre for African-Canadian art.
William Parker | Vision Fest – Arts for Art | USA
William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator from New York City, heralded by The Village Voice as, “the most consistently brilliant free jazz bassist of all time.” In addition to recording over 150 albums, he has published six books and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists. William Parker’s early collaborations with the dancer and choreographer Patricia Nicholson created a large repertoire of composed music for ensembles ranging from solo works to big band projects. Parker played in the Cecil Taylor Unit from 1980 through 1991. He has also performed with musicians from the AACM such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, Ernest Dawkins, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He has also played with David S. Ware, Don Cherry, Bill Dixon, Grachan Monchur III, Dave Burrell, Charles Tyler, Gunter Hampel, Jeanne Lee, Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, Andrew Cyrille, Matthew Shipp, and Steve Swell. His piece, “A Trail Of Tears,” music/dance/spoken word/film was presented at Roulette in January 2020. He is currently working on a piece about the Jewish holocaust called “Silhouette In The Dust.”
Chanel Prince | University of Massachusetts Amherst | USA
Chanel Prince completed her BA in Sociology at Buffalo State College, and her MA in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She is currently in the Sociology PhD program at UMass Amherst, focusing on the experiences, identities, and empowerment of members of the African diaspora.
Roxy Robinson | From the Fields | UK
Dr Roxy Robinson is the Creative Director of From the Fields Ltd, the company behind the multi award winning festivals Kendal Calling, Bluedot and a range of cultural events, including BCP Council-led Arts by the Sea. Roxy is also an author, speaker and festivals consultant, having published her book Music Festivals and the Politics of Participation with Routledge in 2015. Roxy has produced live events since 2004, starting out as the band booker in Leeds. During this time, she also pursued her research interests in events management, which were focused on audience participation and creative event design within the boutique festival sector. Roxy developed a specialism in the non-musical elements of festival programming and in 2009 launched the arts program at Kendal Calling Festival, which went on to win Best Small Festival at the UK Festival Awards in 2010. In 2012, she completed her interdisciplinary PhD on the evolution of boutique events and the influence of Nevada’s Burning Man on British festivals. Working with the Coastal Communities Fund, North East Lincolnshire Council and Arts Council England Roxy led the curation and production of the inaugural Festival of the Sky in 2019, winning Best New Festival and Best None Music Festival at the UK Festival Awards. Roxy continues to lead the artistic programming of Arts by the Sea, a National Portfolio Organisation which attracts over 100,000+ attendees to Bournemouth every September. Roxy continues to grow the creative department at From the Fields Ltd, which manages performance and installation artworks at the company’s portfolio of events.
Jessica Roda | Center for Jewish Civilization, Georgetown University | USA
Jessica Roda is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist whose research interests include religion, music festivals, the performing arts, cultural heritage, gender, and media. Roda’s articles on these topics have appeared in various scholarly journals and edited volumes in both French and English. She is the author of two books and was the editor of a special issue on music and tourism for MUSICultures. Her most recent book, Se réinventer au present (PUR 2018), was a finalist for the J. I. Segal Award (2020) and received the UQAM-Respatrimoni Prize in Heritage Studies. Her forthcoming monograph, Beyond the Sheytl. Jewish Women, Performances, and the Reshaping of Orthodoxy in the Digital Age (under contract with New York University Press, 2023), investigates how music, films, and media created by ultra-Orthodox and former ultra-Orthodox women allow them to act as agents of social, economic, and cultural change. For this research, she was awarded the Cashmere Award from the AJS Women’s Caucus (2021) and the Hadassah Brandeis Institute Research Award (2021). Roda has served as a visiting fellow and scholar at Université de Paris (Lab Urmis), McGill University, Columbia University (Heyman Center), UCLA (Department of Ethnomusicology), and the State University of Campinas in Brazil. Her public-facing work has appeared in The Conversation US, Times of Israel, La Presse, Radio Canada, France Culture, and numerous networks in Europe, the United States, and South America. Growing up in French Guiana, in a family of Algerian, French, Spanish, and Sephardic heritage, Roda is also a trained pianist, flutist, and modern jazz dancer.
Cheryl Thompson | Toronto Metropolitan University | Canada
Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor, Performance at The Creative School. She is author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019) and Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty. In 2021, Dr. Thompson was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists for her decades-long work on Black Canadian history and culture. Currently, is working on a project titled, “Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives Through Storytelling,” and funded through an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2021-26). This project aims to catalogue Ontario’s Black archival collections, and through ethnographic interviews with the province’s creative community, Dr. Thompson will collect stories about the collections that will culminate with a public exhibition curated by Dr. Thompson and her research team. Dr. Thompson is an avid collector of ’70s soul, funk, and dub records.
Steve Waksman | Smith College | USA
Steve Waksman is the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith College. His publications include the books Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (1999), and This Ain’t the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (2009). With Reebee Garofalo, he is the co-author of the sixth edition of the rock history textbook, Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. (2014), and with Andy Bennett, he co-edited the SAGE Handbook of Popular Music (2015). Currently, he is completing a book on the cultural history of live music and performance in the U.S. titled Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Katharine White | J & M Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies | USA
Katharine White is a staff scholar in the campus outreach division of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Katharine received her PhD in modern German history from George Washington University in 2018. She holds an MA in history from McGill University and a BA in history from Boston University. Katharine’s research interests include transnational German history; socialist youth culture and human rights; and the antecedents to and long-term impacts of Nazism globally. Katharine is currently completing a manuscript tentatively titled, East Berlin’s Red Youth: The Red Woodstock, International Solidarity, and Resistance behind the Wall. Her work has previously been published in Central European History and Humanity Journal. Katharine also regularly teaches a critical theories course to architecture students at the Boston Architectural College.
Jason Wilson | University of Guelph | Canada
Dr. Jason Wilson is an Adjunct-Professor and Sessional Lecturer at the Universities of Guelph and Guelph-Humber, and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship recipient. Wilson is also two-time Juno Awards nominee and bestselling Canadian author with six books to his name. Specializing in diverse fields of history, Wilson has been published on various topics including: Urban History of and Black Migration to Canada and The United Kingdom, Reggae Music, The First World War, Canadian History, Pop/Counter-Culture, Art across history from Antiquity to the Present, Oral History, Scottish History, Hockey and general Canadiana. Dr. Wilson is also expert in ‘performing history’, that is: bringing history to life through a blend of music, lecture, theatre and storytelling. In his professional touring and recording career, Wilson has performed over 2,500 performances, released nine albums and performed and recorded with, among others, UB40, Dave Swarbrick, Alanis Morissette and Pee Wee Ellis.
Marva Wisdom | Arts Everywhere | Canada
Marva Wisdom is a Senior Fellow at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy (U of T) with a focus on Equity, Inclusion and Women’s Study. She is also a Fellow of the Environics Institute for Survey Research. She has been the City of Guelph’s Community Plan external lead advisor since 2018, and in 2020, the Plan was recognized for excellence with the National Project of the Year award by the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2). The plan is currently in its second phase, with the goal of “setting the community standard for eliminating systemic racism.” She is also the director for Musagetes Foundation’s annual international Arts Everywhere Festival. Her more than 30-plus years of volunteerism, include past Canadian Museum for Human Rights campaign cabinet member; past 15-year YMCA/YWCA engaged leader in the positions of board director, vice-chair, and chair. Chair of two United Way record-breaking campaigns (2010/2011). Among Marva’s many recognitions are the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee medal, the YWCA’s Woman of Distinction award, Guelph Police and Toronto Police Services Leadership Award, and University of Guelph’s Lang Business College’s Alumni with Impact Award, where she earned a Master of Arts in Leadership. As a member of the Black Canadian Fundraisers Collective, Marva co-authored the critically acclaimed book – Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love, a book about anti-Black racism in the charitable sector. Marva is grounded in her heritage as the eldest of Edward and Eva Bailey’s five children. Sister Garvia and company produced “Strong and Free”, a six-part podcast for Historica Canada, which featured their mother Eva’s journey from their native Jamaica to that of a domestic worker in Canada.
Chris Worden | Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph | Canada
Chris Worden is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Guelph. His dissertation examines how arts programmers at publicly-funded arts organizations in Southern Ontario navigate equity concerns, with a focus on the underrepresentation of artists and arts workers from marginalized groups. He is a musician, former record label director, and has performed various other jobs in the culture industries. He was a co-founder and programmer of the Electric Eclectics Festival from 2006 to 2018, a board member with Kazoo! Fest from 2015 to 2022, and currently sits on the board of directors for the Guelph Jazz Festival.
Jonathan Wynn | University of Massachusetts Amherst | USA
Jonathan Wynn studies urban culture. His two major publications are The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York (University of Chicago Press) and Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport (University of Chicago Press). In addition to academic articles he’s also published in The Guardian, Salon, and The Washington Post.
Lucas Zarzoso | DGTL Doughnut Festival | Netherlands
Lucas Zarzoso is a Dutch-Spanish transdisciplinary Designer and Technologist working at the intersection of architecture, planning, and technology. He dedicates himself to exploring data driven and design-based solutions to tackle the many environmental and social challenges metropolitan areas face; and to communicating these in interactive and captivating forms. Consequently, he aims to contribute to renewed narratives and visions of urban sustainability. His work on achieving smart, ecological, and just cities has predominantly been grounded in spatial data analytics, visualisation, and simulation, urban design, and strategic planning.
Marie Zimmerman | Hillside Festival | Canada
Marie Zimmerman has worked in the realms of both theory and practice in cultural studies, having been both an academic and a festival director for over twenty years. She has also been the editor of a scholarly journal, the executive editor for a Canadian publisher, a creative writing teacher, and a freelance writer. She is currently the Executive Director of the Hillside Festival in which capacity she oversees outreach, finance, operations, risk management and HR, and teaches songwriting. She has worked for five Canadian arts festivals in music, dance, jazz, film and literature, acting as Artistic Director, publicist, HR consultant, emergency plan architect, strategic planner and Treasurer. She is a guest lecturer on arts, culture, and sustainability, and a founding member of the Guelph Fab 5, a collective of local arts festivals.
