Guest Host Ayumi Goto is a performance artist, currently based in Toronto, traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabeg, and Missisaugas of the Credit. Ayumi often draws upon her Japanese heritage and language to creatively challenge nation-building, cultural belonging, and activism. Frequently collaborating, she explores land-human interrelationality, impermanence, gender fluidities, and spatial-temporal play. She has performed in London, Berlin, Naha, Kyoto, Nuuk and across this land currently called Canada. Ayumi is experimenting with becoming a diasporic scholar. The mentors foundational to her thinking and practices are: Shirley Bear, Roy Miki, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Sandra Semchuk, Andrea Fatona, Kyoko and Tiger Goto.  

Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artwork and research highlights cross-ancestral collaboration and deeply considers the impact zones that occur between Indigenous ways of knowing and Western Settler Colonialism. Morin’s practice has spanned twenty years so far, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Singapore, New Zealand, and Greenland, as well as across Canada and the United States. Morin holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and the Graduate Program Director for the Interdisciplinary Master’s in Art, Media, and Design at OCADU. 

Abedar Kamgari is an artist, independent curator, and arts worker based in Hamilton and Toronto. In her art practice, Abedar traces diasporic archives and body memory through embodied and relational approaches to video, performance, sound, and text. She is concerned with how the politics of assimilation and belonging unfold in intimate and public social settings. Abedar has performed, screened, and exhibited in a range of institutional contexts across Southern Ontario since 2015. She is currently an MFA candidate at OCAD University. www.abedarkamgari.com  

Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at the OCAD University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by ‘other’ Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities. Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, ‘culture’ and ‘education’ can be employed by to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging, and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Fatona is a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Canadian Black Diasporic Cultural Production.