Dr. Ulrike Al-Khamis has over 20 years of experience as a curator and senior advisor for museum and cultural projects, working with institutions including the National Museums of Scotland and Glasgow. More recently Ulrike served as Co-Director at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization as well as Senior Strategic Advisor to the Sharjah Museums Department in the United Arab Emirates.

Amira Elghawaby, a journalist and human rights advocate, became Canada’s Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia in January 2023.

Prior to her appointment, she was a contributing columnist at the Toronto Star, offering frequent media commentary on equity and inclusion. Amira, with a background in strategic communications and campaigns, previously worked at the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and held roles in Canada’s labour movement and the National Council of Canadian Muslims.

Amira has been actively involved in initiatives countering hate and promoting inclusion, including as a founding board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. She has served two terms as a Commissioner on the Public Policy Forum’s Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression and currently sits on the National Security Transparency Advisory Group.

Amira’s 2019 TedX Ottawa talk is titled “Multiculturalism: Worth Defending.”

Sashar Zarif is a transdisciplinary performing artist-scholar whose work explores movement as a living archive of memory, sound, and story. For over three decades, he has worked across more than 40 countries, engaging dance not as a fixed tradition but as an evolving, responsive practice. His research moves between ritual, performance, and scholarship, drawing from Sufi and shamanic traditions of Central and Western Asia alongside contemporary choreographic inquiry. Over the years, he has developed Living Stories, an embodied practice weaving movement, sound, narrative, and ritual into a framework for artistic creation, research, and mentorship, as well as Dance of Mugham, a movement language shaped by improvisational musical structures. A Fulbright Award recipient, Zarif’s work bridges embodied knowledge with artistic and academic exchange worldwide.

Soheila Esfahani grew up in Tehran, Iran, and moved to Canada in 1992. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Western University and her BA in Fine Arts from the University of Waterloo. She is an award-winning visual artist and the recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund. She is a recipient of the Waterloo Region Arts Awards 2016 and was nominated for the Jameel Prize at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, in 2015. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, the Doris McCarthy Gallery, and Cambridge Art Galleries, as well as collected by various public and private institutions, including the Canada Council Art Bank. She is an Assistant Professor at Western University and is a member of the Red Head Gallery in Toronto.