BIPOC Arts Leaders Lab (September 2023 – February 2024)
Chiara Lucchetta is a dance artist, writer, movement instructor, and arts organizer. She merges her experience in both the arts and wellness worlds to facilitate programming that provides supportive/empowering spaces for emerging artists. Chiara believes that existing is a creative act and lives, works, and plays from this ethos.
Diane Hau Yu Wong (She/Her) is a curator based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish First Nations. She is the Interim Artistic Director at Centre A and has curated exhibitions at espace pop, Art Matters Festival, Nuit Blanche, articule, and canton-sardine.
Franz Seachel is a multidisciplinary artist. Franz is doing her best to put more colour into the world. She means this both in the sense of brightening up the mundane with creation, as well as in her mission to uplift the truths of marginalized bodies. Follow her on Instagram, @franz_seachel.
Harpo is a visionary, thought leader, community builder, storyteller, and cultural producer. She is the Executive Director of 5X, a charity serving young, hybrid South Asians in Metro Vancouver. She’s a proud kid from Surrey who loves conversations, creating space, taking space, and cultivating space.
Karen Thảo La (she/her/hers) is a Vietnamese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist and cultural producer—Her work centres connectivity and amplifying underrepresented voices. She has diverse experience collaborating with teams worldwide to actualize visions from community-engaged art festivals to short films. La holds a BFA in Visual Art from UBC and is perpetually un/learning.
Keimi is a Disabled, bilingual, learner, worker and artist. Her art practice incorporates creative access, reading, writing, weaving, printmaking, and more. His work and worldview have been shaped through his learning of Disability Justice, and Black Feminist theory. They are interested in anti-colonial research, accessible spaces, and liberated futures.
Kelsey Lee (she/her) is a 4th generation racialized settler of Han Chinese descent living and working on the occupied traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-waututh. She is currently completing her Masters of Literacy Education at UBC and has a background in secondary humanities education and non-profit educational programming.
Nhylar (she/they/he) is a queer media artist, and community event producer, weaving vibrant inclusive spaces for 2SLGBTQ+ communities. Born in India, settled on MST territories, Nhylar crafts immersive experiences showcasing emerging QTBIPOC artists and works in Communications and Marketing at the Indian Summer Festival.
Pia Yona Massie is a multi-media artist, environmental activist, and teacher. Massie’s work has been seen in galleries, museums, and film festivals throughout North America and Europe. VIVO Media Arts is creating an archive of four decades of Pia’s work. Massie is currently collaborating on – Time Travellers Testimony.
A Playback Top 10 Talent, Renuka is a Vancouver-based screenwriter with roots in Kitimat, B.C. who has contributed to TV series projects with companies like Netflix, Syfy, and CBC. Renuka is also a PSP Scripted Series Lab alum, a fellow of the BIPOC TV & Film Showrunner Training Bootcamp, and serves on the PSP board.
Shadi Shadbahr’s academic background in arts, biology, and nursing has given her a unique approach towards seeing, understanding, and interpretation of art and a sensitivity towards social and cultural representation in art. Her current practice is concerned with curating contemporary Iranian visual art with original yet deeply rooted cultural, historical, and social concepts that gives meaning to the contemporary experience of living with an Iranian identity.
Shanna Cheng (she/her) is a Hard of Hearing printmaker and emerging curator. Shanna obtained her BFA from ECUAD and Cultural Resources Management certification at UVIC. She has collaborated with marginalized artists in inclusive exhibition design, planning, and public programming; driving her to create equitable access for underrepresented artists.
Shristi Uprety (she/her) is a Nepali writer and editor, living and working in Vancouver BC. She is the Managing Editor of Room Magazine, Canada’s oldest feminist literary journal, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.
My name is Sophia Mai Wolfe (she/her/hers), I am a queer, Japanese-Canadian independent artist whose practice is ever-changing. Currently, I am currently the founder and Organizational Director of Recorded Movement Society, which hosts the annual F-O-R-M (Festival of Recorded Movement), and my creative practice moves and connects me to live performance, video documentation, curation, festival programming, editing, filmmaking, and directing.