research team

  • Principal Researcher

    Andrea Fatona is an independent curator and an associate professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. She is concerned with issues of equity within the sphere of the arts and the pedagogical possibilities of art works produced by ‘other’ Canadians in articulating broader perspectives of Canadian identities.  

    Her broader interest is in the ways in which art, ‘culture’ and ‘education’ can be employed by to illuminate complex issues that pertain to social justice, citizenship, belonging, and nationhood. She is the recipient of awards from Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and was the 2017/18 OCAD U-Massey Fellow. Fatona is a Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Canadian Black Diasporic Cultural Production. She has published scholarly articles, catalogue essays, and book chapters in a range of publications. 

  • Research Assistant

    Donica Willis is an interdisciplinary artist/designer based in Toronto, Ontario, but born and raised in Preston, Nova Scotia. She holds a Bachelor of Technology (BTech) degree in Graphic Communications Management and recently completed a Master of Design (MDes) degree in Interdisciplinary Arts, Media & Design. Her research work explores decolonization, speculative design and alternative ways of being inside classrooms. She is also the creator of The Blaqk Gold Project and the owner of DW Creativ - a creative studio specializing in branding, graphic design and consulting.

  • Madeline Collins (she/her) is a contemporary art writer, curator, and artist based in Tkarón:to/Toronto, Ontario. As a Black queer scholar, her practices principally explore identity-making and worldbuilding in queer-of-colour imaginaries, diasporic theory, and the visioning of “worlds otherwise” amid crisis. She holds a Master’s of Arts in contemporary art history from OCAD University, where her thesis research considered space and time as frameworks for the (un)making of Black diasporic identity. Her publications include the podcast Unboxing the Canon and articles in Journal of Curatorial Studies, Senses & Society, Economía Creativa, and RACAR. Madeline currently works as a research assistant at the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora.

    madelinecollins.com

  • Research Assistant

    Divine is a multidisciplinary designer based in Toronto. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Design (BDes) degree at OCAD University in the Graphic Design program. His design discipline explores a range of work in branding, typography, motion, creative coding, and user research and interaction.

  • Melinda Mollineaux is a strategic arts thinker with over 28 years of experience in Canada’s arts sector, including 25 years at the Canada Council for the Arts in roles such as Policy Officer, Program Officer, and Equity Office Coordinator. Her experience spans work as a visual artist, public arts funding, organizational strategy, and equity advocacy. Holding degrees in business and visual arts, Melinda has contributed to collaborative initiatives in funding, planning, and advancing equity.  She continues to develop her practice in arts, systems, environmental and social justice.

  • Research Assistant

    Ghislan Sutherland-Timm (they/she) is a multidisciplinary moving image artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto with a keen interest in storytelling through diverse ancestral knowledges engaged across the Caribbean diaspora. As a recent graduate of OCAD University's Integrated Media program, they are also excited to venture into the dynamic range of conversations and happenings occurring within the historical and contemporary arts and media communities.

  • Research Assistant

    Maira Cristina Castro Mina is an Afro-Colombian woman interested in social and environmental leadership, especially in marginalized areas. She collaborates with social leaders in Guachene, Cauca, Colombia, in projects such as Empowering Guacenecena Women and Ancestral Afro-Colombian Knowledge. This collaboration is blended (online and in-person) because Maira Cristina lives in Vancouver and studies Interactive Arts and Technology MA at SFU where she belongs to the Critical Media Arts Studio under the supervision of Dr. Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda.

  • Research Assistant

    Candice Clarke is an academic researcher, editor, and ESL instructor. Born in the Caribbean, she grew up in England and northern British Columbia, and has lived in Toronto, New York, Japan, and Vancouver. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Japanese Studies from the University of Toronto and has completed graduate-level coursework at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Now based in Toronto, Candice is a self-taught artist whose developing practices explores themes of identity, hybridity, and displacement. She works primarily with pastel, acrylic, and pencil on paper and recycled materials.

advisory committee

  • Since 1995, Dana Inkster has worked in the education and cultural sectors and is proud to recognize storytelling as a tool that shapes our communities. Dana has managed markets for Crown Corporations and major film studios in the United States. Dana has been profiled by numerous publications; and journalists and cultural theorists from around the world have lauded her documentary film work. Her documentary, 24 Days in Brooks was co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada and CBC Newsworld. She continues to make independent documentaries that explore personal and cultural histories.

    She has served as faculty and played key roles in development for several institutions and now engages in publishing. She is currently developing a documentary about the notion of home and belonging with the National Film Board of Canada.

  • Michelle Jacques is a curator, writer and educator who moved to Treaty 6 Territory and the Traditional Homeland of the Métis in February 2021 to begin her role as Head of Exhibitions and Collections/Chief Curator at Remai Modern. Prior to this move, she was Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) for 8 years, where she was responsible for guiding a curatorial and education program linking contemporary practices, ideas and issues to the Gallery's historical collections and legacies. Before she headed west, she held various roles in the Contemporary and Canadian departments of the Art Gallery of Ontario was the Director of Programming at the Centre for Art Tapes in Halifax, and taught at NSCAD University, University of Toronto Mississauga, and OCAD University.

    She is the Vice President, Inclusion and Outreach, Association of Art Museum Curators, and is a mentor with the Executive Leadership program of Business / Arts. Her other community engagement includes sitting on the board of Vtape (Toronto), and the advisory board of BLAC, a Black youth owned and operated art and performance space in Surrey.

  • dg morgan is a visual multimedia expressionist who is based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. His explorations take us on journeys across the politics of history language community family and the identities of selves.  appropriately re-using objects from past and present, dg offers a unique balance to which we can apply as we move forward.

    While his work can be found across the globe in private collections, he is also an invaluable community builder. he works within communities documenting and collaborating to create forward thinking and brilliant minds.

    most recently, his collaborating with ncbwf brought people together online for February black history month 2021 . from book cover art to special exhibits to social media, dg has especially sought to create a masterpiece of he(art) - his brilliant daughter. 

  • Rinaldo Walcott is an Associate Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the Director of Women and Gender Studies Institute; he is also a member of the Graduate Program in Cinema Studies of Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto. His teaching and research is in the area of black diaspora cultural studies and postcolonial studies with an emphasis on questions of sexuality, gender, nation, citizenship and multiculturalism. Rinaldo is the author of Black Like Who: Writing Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997 with a second revised edition in 2003), he is also the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac, 2000). As well, Rinaldo is the Co-editor with Roy Moodley of Counselling Across and Beyond Cultures: Exploring the Work of Clemment Vontress in Clinical Practice (University of Toronto Press, 2010).

    Currently, Rinaldo is completing The Long Emancipation: Moving Towards Freedom. Additionally Rinaldo is co-editor with Dina Georgis and Katherine McKittrick, No Language Is Neutral: Essays on Dionne Brand in Topia: The Journal of Canadian Cultural Studies. Rinaldo is the General Editor of Topia as well. He is also the author Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (Insomniac Press, 2016). As an interdisciplinary black studies scholar, Rinaldo has published in a wide range of venues. His articles have appeared in journals and books, as well as popular venues like newspapers and magazines. He often comments on black cultural life for radio and TV. Rinaldo received his PhD. from OISE the University of Toronto in 1996.

  • Sylvia D. Hamilton is a Nova Scotian filmmaker, writer, multi-media artist known for her award-winning documentary films and her publications, presentations, and extensive volunteer work with artistic, social, and cultural organizations at the local and national levels. Her films include Black Mother Black Daughter, Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia, Portia White: Think on Me, and The Little Black School House; they have been broadcast in Canada and screened at national and international festivals.

    She was the co-creator of New Initiatives in Film (NIF), a filmmaking program for Indigenous women and women of colour at the NFB’s Studio D. She has served on and chaired provincial and national arts juries and committees and has mentored and supported many emerging artists.

    Her 2014 poetry collection, And I Alone Escaped to Tell You, was a finalist for several awards. Excavation: A Site of Memory, a multi-media installation, has been shown in galleries and museums in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec. One adaptation titled Here We Are Here, gave its name to the 2018 Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) national group exhibition titled, Here We Are Here: Black Canadian Contemporary Art.

    Her recognitions include several honorary degrees, a Gemini Award, and the 2019 Governor General’s Award in History (Popular Media). She has a B.A. from Acadia University and an M.A. from Dalhousie University. She held Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax and has taught and given lectures at many universities in Canada, and at Middlebury College in Vermont, and the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. After her retirement from the University of King’s College in 2020, where she held the Rogers Chair in Communications in the School of Journalism, King’s named her an Inglis Professor and launched five annual awards in her name for African Canadian students.

  • Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto based independent curator, writer, and researcher. Wallen's practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, BIPOC alternative healing platforms. Her ongoing research focuses on the intersections of longevity and pleasure as contemplative spaces for care work in the arts.

    Her most recent curatorial projects include: Back in 20 minutes (2021) presented with the CFMDC, Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold (2020) presented at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, and Little Musings (2020) an online collective correspondence in partnership with MICE Magazine and co-facilitated with artist Eve Tagny. Wallen contributed essays for C magazine; the anthology Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada, edited by Deanna Bowen; and the anthology The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts, edited by Gregory Blair & Noa Bronstein.

    She is the Exhibition Coordinator at FOFA Gallery, she also part of the collective member of YTB (Younger than Beyoncé) Gallery, the co-initiator (with Marsya Maharani) of Souped Up, a thematic dinner series conceived to carve spaces for care and support building among BIPOC curators and cultural workers, a member of the Black Curators Forum, and an advisory committee member for the BLACK PORTRAITURE[S]: Toronto, Absent/ed Presence conference (BPTO) and the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora.

  • Melissa J. Nelson is an award-winning archivist, writer, and educator based in Toronto, Ontario. She is a leading voice in the field of archival studies on issues of race and racism. Her work and research interests are grounded in an ethics of care for the preservation of Black cultural heritage and anti-Black archival materials. Her work centers Black being and belonging in the archives to support collective healing and liberation movements. Melissa is the author of “Archiving Hate: Racist Materials in Archives.” This post has been referenced by collecting institutions in their commitment to equity practices, including Baker Library of Harvard Business School in “Guiding Principles for Conscious and Inclusive Description.” Melissa offers a range of consultation services and has worked with notable clients, such as Library and Archives Canada, Association of Canadian Archivists, University of Toronto, among others. Melissa is currently an Archivist for the Archives of Ontario. Melissa is committed to building community around Black archiving in Canada. She is the Founder and Creative Director of the Black Memory Collective. Melissa also produces and hosts the podcast, Archives & Things. Melissa holds a Master of Information Studies from McGill University. She received a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in History, with a minor in Sociology, from Carleton University.

  • Orla Garriques (she/her) is a multi-faceted professional working at the intersection of film, television, digital media, arts and education.

    Working with award-winning production companies in development, business affairs, marketing, digital content and audience engagement, her Film/TV credits include: Little Mosque on the Prairie,Designer Guys, Style Dept., Guns, Skin Deep, Jozi-H and Love Jacked.

    She has delivered initiatives promoting Canadian content and talent abroad for leading media institutions The National Film Board of Canada, South African Documentary Filmmakers’ Association, Revue Noire France and has programmed films and forums at Toronto International Film Festival, Hot Docs, Reelworld, and Durban FilmMart.

    A self-professed black-girl nerd, Garriques has produced / collaborated on several DM projects including DruMeBa developed at CFC Media Lab and MaRS Institute; NFB’s award-winning I Was Here and Street HealthSite+Sound DM series with Kat Cizek; Little Mosque’s first digital project. She is currently working with June Givanni and King’s College London on the Pan Africa Cinema digital archive.

    She co-founded the youth MIC Mentorship program providing in-field training and access, has facilitated the MaRS Future Leaders Kid’s Boot Camp, the StArt program for underserved youth and workshops for professionals.

    Orla is the Marketing Director for Inner City Films, overseeing marketing, exhibition and export strategy for film and tv properties. She sits on the board of The Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), the Advisory council of the Centre for Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, and the Advisory committee of CFC Media Lab Fifth Wave for female digital entrepreneurs.

fellows

  • Ésery Mondésir is a Haitian-born video artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. Before earning his MFA in cinema production from York University in 2017, he worked as a high school teacher and a labour organizer in the US and Canada. Mondésir's work draws on personal and collective memory, official archives, vernacular records, and the everyday to generate a reading of our societies from the margins.

    His recent projects, in collaboration with members of the Haitian diaspora in Havana, Cuba, and Tijuana, Mexico, have been exhibited at various art galleries and film festivals worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, the Norton Museum, and the Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami, FL, as well as the Open City Festival in London, UK.

    In 2021, Mondésir joined the Art faculty at OCAD University as an assistant professor, where he continues to research process cinema, artisanal/handmade moving images, and migratory movements in a “post-migration” context. With the support of a SEED grant from OCAD University in 2022, Mondésir is in the early stages of a transnational research-recreation project, which aims to bring together migrant and migrating communities with artists and artist-researchers from various disciplines to explore migration as a “social normality” and a constitutive phenomenon of contemporary social life.

previous members

  • Research Assisstant

    Nadine Valcin is a bilingual filmmaker and media artist whose practice spans, documentary, experimental and narrative film as well as installation and virtual reality. Her work explores questions of memory, identity and language. She holds a professional degree in architecture from McGill University and recently completed an MFA in Digital Futures at OCAD University.

  • Research Assistant

    Alex Gregory is an artist-researcher whose work combines the materiality of analog techniques with digital manipulation. Born and raised in Amiskwaciy-Wâskahikan (Edmonton, AB), since then Alex has lived across Turtle Island giving her a unique perspective on the impacts of cultural production in different arts communities. She recently completed an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices at OCAD University, in Tkaronto (Toronto, ON).

  • Research Assistant

    Nya Lewis is an Independent Curator, and a Graduate student in OCAD Criticism and Curatorial Practices. She sees her practice as a culmination of centuries of African resistance, love, actions, and study. Dedicated to restorative justice, her work is a continuation of a long lineage of Black artists, curators, writers, activists and thinkers who blaze(d) a trail of critical discourse surrounding the Afro diasporic experience.

  • Research Assistant

    Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa is an independent curator, emerging arts administrator and artist based in Tkaronto. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in Criticism and Curatorial Practices from OCAD University. Her writing engages Afro-diasporic archives of memory, transmitted through oral history, food, and acts of care. Her artistic practice emphasizes community building and support to build an understanding of the ways archives of physical and immaterial knowledge are constructed in the Black community.

  • Executive Assistant

    Anil Narine works in the Office of Graduate Studies at OCAD University coordinating research for The Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora. He was born in Edmonton (Amiskwaciy Waskahikan) and grew up in Kelowna (Syilx Okanagan Territory). His own research examines representations of historical trauma. He studied Literature (Victoria), Postcolonial Literature and Cinema (Montreal), and Psychoanalysis and Cinema with Laura Mulvey and Slavoj Zizek (London).

    As a member of the Applied Communication + Technology Lab (Vancouver) he worked to make connections between Network Analysis and Feminist Film Theory. He applied this approach to popular post-2000 cinema that arranged plots as networks (Traffic, Babel, Syriana) and found that these trauma narratives often presented a lone male struggling to navigate a global network, and assigned blame to women for much of the suffering. A second multi-year project examined ecological traumas, resulting in the book Eco-Trauma Cinema (Routledge). Other research has been published in journals such as Memory Studies (SAGE), Critical Studies in Media Communication (Routledge), Theory, Culture and Society (SAGE), Americana (Pepperdine), Ethos (North Carolina), The Journal of American Studies (Cambridge), Communication, Culture and Critique (Wiley), and in the popular press. He has received awards from SSHRCC, The Royal Institute for the Advancement of Learning, the Allardice Lancaster Foundation, and excellence in teaching honours from the Visual Studies Student Society (UTM).

  • Research Assistant

    Aisha Simpson is a Designer.

    She works as a Researcher at The Centre for The Study of Black Canadian Diaspora (CSBCD) and works in the public sector as a leader in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), planning impactful events and initiatives.

    Aisha is in her second year of graduate studies in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation Program - a Master of Design program at OCAD University.

    Before her graduate studies, Aisha worked in private and public art galleries and developed and taught visual art curriculum for grades 1-12.

    She has also facilitated workshops with a multi-service agency for at-risk, socially isolated women and trans people in Toronto who were homeless or precariously housed.

  • Research Assistant

    Based in Tkaronto, Dedra McDermott (she/her) is a new-generation Black artist-researcher, curator and movement dramaturg with a keen interest in performance and choreographic methodology, visual and digital arts, and divergent approaches to engaging with archival practices. The scope of her performance career includes the diverse worlds of theatre, film and television. She holds a B.F.A in Choreography and Performance (York University) and a Master of Arts from The Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (University of Toronto). Her current artistic research explores identity and memory, utilizing autoethnographic methodology to weave movement and literary choreographies to create live and filmed works. McDermott is an MFA candidate in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University.

  • Project Coordinator

    Abi is a facilitator, multidisciplinary visual artist and movement storyteller. Their visual art and dance focuses conversation with kin of all realms and time, through code that extends our common spoken languages. Their intention is to balance expression through our understanding of generational trauma, with generational knowledge and play. They are deeply motivated and are driven by their ever evolving decolonial praxis - factoring in disability justice, reframing of ideals productivity and rest as part of the ‘work’.

  • Research Assistant

    Abby Adjekum is a Hamilton-based artist and emerging curator, exploring themes of Black femininity, intimacy, and safety. Her artistic practice explores the way emotional vulnerability and tolerance are shaped by cultural identity and is currently attending OCAD University for Criticism & Curatorial Practice.