Meet Our Dedicated Leadership Team
Board of Directors
Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy and directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods.
Alena Buis, PhD is an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Surrey, BC). Alena is one of the founders of Open Art Histories (OAH) a SSHRC-funded collective, committed to building a generative and supportive national network for teaching Canadian art or art history in Canada and co-author of CanadARThistories: Reimagining the Canadian Art History Survey.
Yani Kong is a writer and scholar of contemporary art in Vancouver, Canada. Kong contributes to national publications such as Galleries West, and Le Sigh, and as well as texts for galleries such as The Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation, The Freedman Gallery, PA, and the Photographers Gallery, UK. Her research areas are reception aesthetics, contemporary art history, digital ecology and eco-aesthetics. Kong is a faculty member in the department of art history and religious studies at Langara College.
Keith Bresnahan (PhD, York U.) is Associate Professor of design history and theory at OCADU, University in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of Architecture and Armed Conflict: The Politics of Destruction (Routledge, 2014), and is the author of various works on the history of architecture and design. His research focuses on three key areas: histories of emotion in design architectural destruction and reconstruction; and symbols and visual signs in design history.
Representatives
Rachelle Sabourin is a PhD student in Communications, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University and has been an arts advocate and administrator in Toronto since 2012. She is a devoted feminist scholar and educator interested in contemporary art history, social justice, labour rights, and subcultural studies. Sabourin is on the executive committee of CUPE Local 3906 and currently works as the Research Program Coordinator at the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Anton Lee, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Philosophy at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Halifax. Lee specializes in the history and theory of photography, focusing primarily on the period from the early 20th century to the present from a global perspective. Lee is currently working on his first book, preliminarily titled New Wave of American Photography: The Rise of Photographic Sequence in the United State and France, 1968–1989, alongside co-editing a multi-authored volume on Michel Foucault, Ethics, and Art.
Natasha Bissonauth is Assistant Professor of Art History at Emily Carr University in Vancouver, BC. She received her Ph.D. in Art History at Cornell University in 2017 and her research centers queer aesthetics and archival logics across South Asia and Indian Ocean diasporas. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded book project on collage that sutures and severs across legacies of immigration and indenture. Threading ‘areas’ like South Asia, the Caribbean, and Mauritius, Black and brown seams emerge as interruptions within the bordered logics of the art historical discipline.
Tatiana Mellema holds a PhD in Art History from the University of British Columbia, and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. She works as Sessional Faculty at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Simon Fraser University, and as Curator of Outdoor Art at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. Mellema specializes in post-1960s art in North America and Marxist feminism, and is working on a book that looks at the indexing of socially reproductive labour in artistic practices as a critique of institutions. Mellema has a longstanding practice in curating and public art, and has contributed to publications both nationally and internationally.
Soheila K. Esfahani is a visual artist and Assistant Professor at Western University. She is a recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally and collected by various public and private institutions, including the Canada Council’s Art Bank.
Dr. Sandra Huber’s main areas of interest include interdisciplinary and creative pedagogies with a focus on writing; occulted practices and epistemologies; embodied research; and all these in combination.
Her research focuses on interdisciplinary practices and pedagogies as well as occulted areas of knowledge-making, such as witchcraft, magic, sleep, and dreams — what she terms night knowledge. Dr. Huber holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities (Concordia), an MA in Creative Writing (University of Toronto), and a BA in English (Hons., Simon Fraser University).
Erin Silver is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Chair of the Critical and Curatorial Studies MA Program at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Taking Place: Building Histories of Queer and Feminist Art in North America (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021), as well as co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016), and (with taisha paggett) the winter 2017 issue of C Magazine, “Force,” on intersectional feminisms and movement culture.
Administrative
Bachelor’s in Business Administration, with postgraduate studies in Technologies of Education (Harvard Univ.), International Development (UBC) and Social Innovation (UN University). Her areas of expertise are strategic foresight and planning, organizational change and design thinking. She provides consulting services to government, private sector and NGOs both in North and South America and collaborates with academic institutions as a researcher, professor, speaker and mentor.