Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning is an interdisciplinary artist and Queen’s National Scholar in Anishinaabe Language, Knowledge, and Culture (ALKC) in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Manning has expertise in Anishinaabe ontology, mnidoo interrelationality, phenomenology, and art. A member of Kettle and Stoney Point First Nation, her primary philosophical influence and source of creativity is her early childhood grounding in Anishinaabe onto-epistemology. She is Principal Investigator of Earthdiver: Land-Based Worlding (MITACS), and Co-Investigator on Pluriversal Worlding with Extended Reality. Manning co-directs the cross-institutional Peripheral Visions Co-Lab (York and Queen’s). She is an affiliate of the Revision Centre for Art and Social Justice, a Fellow of The International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (IICSI), and a Member of Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society.

Mary Bunch is a media artist, Canada Research Chair, and Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University. Her research develops socio-political concepts through critical theory and media arts creation, informed by queer, disability justice, and decolonizing frameworks. Her four-year SSHRC-funded project Pluriveral Worlding with Extended Reality engages ‘world’ as a frame of reality, as well as being a narrative and aesthetic element of media artworks. She is co-editor of a special issue on Access Aesthetics in the journal Public and has a monograph-in-progress titled Ecstatic Ethics. Bunch co-Directs the Peripheral Visions CoLab, and is a member of Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, the Digital Justice Research Cluster, and Connected Minds: Neural and Machine Systems for a Healthy, Just Society.

Mariel Belanger is a Syilx mother, land-based artist and Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at Queens University. Belanger’s research is a portfolio of Digital Embodied Story Practice as an Indigenizing Research-Creation Methodology that explores digital story-making to subvert coloniality. Her research contributes to the growing body of interdisciplinary artistic scholarship that engages Indigenous community, language, and culture, as a bridge for society telling stories of our time.  She is a recipient of a CGS SSHRC Doctoral Scholarship and a Teyonkwayenawá:kon Graduate Scholarship.

Hodari Reuben “Newtown” Clarke is currently working on an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University creating a hip-hop children’s musical story series that utilizes decolonial theory, Afrofuturism, and abolitionist thought to expand the social imaginary beyond the neoliberal and colonial in the collective consciousness. Clarke has been active in community health and engagement and leadership programs for youth for over a decade.

Elder Mona Stonefish (Anishinaabe, Bear Clan) is a Doctor of Traditional Medicine, with an honorary Doctorate of Law from Guelph University.  Stonefish is a former Senator of the Anishinaabemowin Teg – language preservation, a Keeper of Wisdom, and a Grandmother Water Walker. She is a member of the Native American Museum of Washington D.C., a member of the Art Gallery of Windsor Board of Trustees, a traditional dancer, and a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2013). She received the Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Award for Excellence in Conservation, for the exhibition, Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario, Guelph Civic Museum, 2020.

Lydia Johnson was born and raised on Robinson-Superior Treaty territory, homelands of the Anishinabek and Fort William First Nation and has mixed settler and Cree ancestry (Lac La Ronge Indian Band). Her research — in partnership with Grand Council Treaty #3, the IISD-Experimental Lakes Area, and Environment and Climate Change Canada — focuses on weaving Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in ecotoxicology and wildlife health to promote collaborative and respectful science between Indigenous Peoples and Western-trained non-Indigenous scientists.