• A Festival of Ideas
  • January 26 - 29, 2023
  • Guelph

2021 Presenters

Dani d’Emilia is an artist and educator working in the fields of performance, visual art, devised theatre, radical pedagogy and social justice. She is particularly interested in embodied political-affective practices that merge artistic, activist and spiritual realms, and has been…

Dawit Petros received his MFA in Visual Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, a BFA in History from the University of Saskatchewan and completed the Whitney Independent Study…

Declan McLaughlin is an artist and community activist from Derry City in the north of Ireland. He works primarily as a songwriter and performer but also has a history in political art, designing and painting a number of the iconic…

Fred Moten works in the Department of Performance Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He is interested in social movement, aesthetic experiment, and the poetics of black study. Over the last thirty years, Moten has…

Laakkuluk, a Greenlandic Inuk, uses uaajeerneq (Greenlandic mask dancing), poetry, theatre and performance art to tackle topics ranging from colonization, sexuality, intergenerational strength, fear, boundaries, and love. Laakkuluk is currently long-listed for the 2021 Sobey Art Prize. Previously she was…

b. 1982, Laeïla Adjovi is a Beninese and French national. She grew up in Gabon and South Africa, studied political sciences and journalism in France, and then lived in India and New Caledonia, before moving back to the continent. A…

For over two decades, Polaris Prize longlisted downtempo soul saviours LAL, comprised of Rosina Kazi and Nicholas Murray, have built a catalogue of silvery, internationally-influenced electronica that insists that the dancefloor remain a place of resistance. In the process, they’ve…

Matthew Stadler is a novelist (Landscape: Memory, Allan Stein, Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha, and others) and essayist. He was the literary editor of Nest magazine and a co-founder of Publication Studio, where he now edits the Fellow Travelers Series. He…

Miguel Hilari (1985, Aymara/German) studied cinema in La Paz, Santiago de Chile and Barcelona. His films “El corral y el viento” (2014), “Compañía” (2019) and “Bocamina” (2019) deal with migration, colonial history, and indigenous identity. They have been screened and…

Sally Frater holds an Honours BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and an MA in Contemporary Art from The University of Manchester. Curatorially she is interested in decolonization, spatial theory, Black and Caribbean diasporas, photography, art of…

Sidd Joag is a visual artist, journalist, and community organizer working at the intersection of arts, culture, social justice, and human rights for over fifteen years. He is the Managing Editor at ArtsEverywhere.ca and a member of the public art collective Amber…

Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and…

Yevgeniy Fiks is a Moscow-born New York-based artist, author, and organizer of art exhibitions. Yevgeniy has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West. Fiks is the author of six books: Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary (Cicada Press, 2016), Lenin…

Zhao Rongjie is a Chinese painter, engraver and videographer who studied oil painting and copperplate at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Her copperplate artwork has been exhibited in China, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. Her “Breathing” series was…