Biba Bell is a writer, dancer, and choreographer based in Detroit. Her performance work has been presented in France, Russia, Germany, Italy, Canada, and across the United States. Her research interests include contemporary choreography, site-specificity, domesticity, artistic labor, architecture and performance, and dance in the museum. Her writing has been published in Dance Research Journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Pastelegram, Performance Research Journal, Sound American Journal, Critical Correspondence, and FRONT. Bell is on the editorial board of Detroit Research Journal and recently self-published a book on the performance collective Modern Garage Movement (2005-2011, 2021) of which she was a founding member. She has performed with choreographers Maria Hassabi and Walter Dundervill and of her dancing the New York Times writes “It’s invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild.” Bell earned her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and is currently an Assistant Professor in Dance at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at transmediale (Berlin), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tate Modern (London), and Haus der Kunst (Munich). She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.

k.g. Guttman is a settler Canadian researcher, artist, and mother based in Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal. She is a graduate of the PhD Arts program of Leiden University and the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (Netherlands). She has received funding through SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) for artistic research that considers territoriality discourse, choreographic practice, and site-specific interventions.

Diverse invitations that bridge dance and visual art contexts include exhibitions at Gallery TPW and Blackwood Gallery (Toronto), VIVA! Art Action, RIPA, and La Centrale (Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal), Musée d’art de Joliette, Klupko (Amsterdam), Espace Khiasma, Palais de Tokyo and Point Éphémère (Paris). Her choreographic residencies and commissions include l’Agora de la danse and Tangente (Tiohtiá:ke/ Montréal), the Canada Dance Festival and Dancemakers (Toronto), the University of Sonora (Hermosillo), Kunstencentrum BUDA (Kortrijk).

k.g. Guttman’s role as educator is intertwined with her artistic practices. From 2008 to 2013. Guttman was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance at Concordia University, and in 2015 she taught in the photography department at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (Netherlands). k.g. Guttman worked as a professional dancer with the company Le Groupe Dance Lab under the direction of Peter Boneham from 1999 to 2005, and freelanced with Lynda Gaudreau, Louise Bédard, Antonija Livingstone, among others.

Mika Hannula is a writer, curator, teacher and art critic. He was a professor for artistic research at the faculty of applied and performing art at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) from 2005 to 2012. Previously, he was the director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland, and was also the chairman of KUNO, Nordic network of Art Academies. Hannula currently lives and works in Berlin.

Mika Hannula holds a PhD in Political Science and is the author of numerous texts and of several books on contemporary art, including Artistic Research Methodology. Narrative, Power and the Public (2014), Tell It Like It Is — Contemporary Photography and the Lure of the Real (2011), Politics, Identity and Public Space — Critical Reflections In and Through the Practices of Contemporary Art (2009), and many more. He was the curator for the Estonian Pavilion at Venice Biennial 2007 and curated the show, Situated Self – Confused, Compassionate and Conflictual with Branko Dimitrijević in Belgrade and in Helsinki in 2005. He also curated Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Something — Four Perspectives into Artistic Research in 2008. In 2012, again with Branko Dimitrijević, he curated GOOD LIFE, the 53rd October Salon in Belgrade.

Laura Huertas Millán is a French-Colombian filmmaker and visual artist, whose practice stands at the intersection between cinema, contemporary art and research. She holds a practice-based PhD on “Ethnographic Fictions,” blending anthropological evidence with elements of creative storytelling. Her work deals with themes of imperialism, the post-colonial Other, and objectification of non-Western bodies.

Her films have been shown at the Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival and Cinéma du Réel (Paris), and have earned prizes at the Locarno Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Doclisboa and Videobrasil, among others. Her latest solo exhibitions were held at the MASP São Paulo, Maison des Arts de Malakoff and Medellín’s Modern Art Museum. Her films have also been shown in art institutions and biennials, including Centre Pompidou and Jeu de Paume (Paris), Guggenheim (New York), Times Art Center Berlin, Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, FRONT International (Cleveland), Videobrasil and Videonale (Bonn). Her works are part of private and public collections, including KADIST, CNAP, Banco de la República de Colombia, CIFO, and FRAC Lorraine, among others.

Catherine Lescarbeau is currently pursuing a PhD in Études et pratiques des arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She has participated in several solo and group exhibitions and presented various performances in Québec and France (Galerie UQO, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, La Mirage, Fonderie Darling, FRAC Lorraine). As a multidisciplinary artist, she is interested in the relationship between conceptual art and institutional criticism, as well as the relevance of these approaches today. Her most recent research focuses on the houseplant. By focusing her research on this object, Lescarbeau aims to develop an interface that allows her to reflect on the relationship between culture and nature within corporate and institutional spaces.

Thérèse Mastroiacovo’s work is about art as an idea, artistic process as methodology. It is about the precarious relationship art has to its own definition, open, half open, or slightly open for re-classification at any given time. The varying degrees of openness create space in-between, a space that gives way to meanderings, processes and procedures. Her work is situated here, in a space of potential created in the middle of preexisting structures. It is this — this large, large thing stated so, so plainly — that makes her work both familiar and unknowable.

Sarah Turcotte is an author and researcher whose studies focus on art museums’ current functioning and communication strategies, as well as their mediation and mediatization devices. After working as a member of the PHI Foundation team from 2018 to 2022, she founded Projet commun, an organization that experiments with the collaborative development of arts and culture. Sarah Turcotte is currently a PhD candidate in museology, mediation, and heritage at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), and a research assistant at the ARTENSO Center. In the past, her master’s research at UQAM, which focused on the use of digital technologies in the mediation of contemporary art in Montréal, led her to be a finalist for the 2019 Roland- Arpin prize. Recently, her writings have been published in Revue internationale Animation, territoires et pratiques socioculturelles and R2LMM: Revue de recherches en littératie médiatique multimodale.