Ligia Lewis
Through her performance practice, Ligia Lewis engages affect, empathy and the sensate, her choreography considers the social implications of the body while evoking its potentiality. In 2017, Lewis was awarded a Bessie for Outstanding Production for her work, “minor matter” and the Prix Jardin d’Europe for “Sorrow Swag.”
Dr. Tina Post
Tina Post’s work is preoccupied with racial performativity, especially (though not exclusively) the ways that black Americans perform racial identity. What modes of embodiment assert belonging or dis-belonging, and how? When do racialized subjects confirm and when do they subvert the expectations of their identitarian positions, and to what end? How do other factors of embodiment (gender, dis/ability, hybridity and so forth) color these performances? She approaches such questions primarily through the lenses of affect and performance studies, using literature, visual culture, fine art, theater and movement as examples and objects of study.
Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson
Joshua Chambers-Letson is a writer and performance theorist who researches and teaches courses in performance studies, critical race theory, political theory and queer of color critique. His work places performance studies in conversation with a diverse set of fields including black studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, art history, legal studies and Marxist theory to ask two central questions: How do black, brown, Asian, queer and trans people (alongside other minoritarian subjects) use performance both to survive the destruction and devaluation of their (our) lives and lifeworlds? And how does performance become a means for rehearsing and enacting new worlds and new ways of being in the world together?
keyon gaskin
keyon gaskin’s artist statement reads “keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials.”
Their practice develops gesture and embodiment as a means of entangling space, audience, artist, curator, gallery and sites beyond.
Laura U. Marks
Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus. Her most recent books are Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (MIT, 2015) and Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (MIT, 2010). She programs experimental media for venues around the world and is Grant Strate University Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
Phanuel Antwi
Phanuel Antwi is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He writes, researches and teaches critical black studies; settler colonial studies; black Atlantic and diaspora studies; Canadian literature and culture since 1830; critical race, gender and sexuality studies; and material cultures. He has published articles in Interventions, Affinities and Studies in Canadian Literature, and he is completing a book-length project titled “Currencies of Blackness: Faithfulness, Cheerfulness and Politeness in Settler Writing.”
Paper presentations by Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson and Tina Post, followed by a...