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Curating the Village: Open Sessions

June 26, 2026 - June 27, 2026

Curating the Village: Open Sessions is a two-day gathering of artists, curators, and cultural workers exploring caregiving as both a lived experience and a working condition. Spanning rest, performance, workshops, and conversation, the program brings together perspectives on caring for children, parents, elders, neighbours, the dying, and broader communities.

Developed through an ongoing research-creation initiative, Curating the Village approaches care not only as a subject, but as a force that reshapes how artistic and curatorial work is organized, timed, and sustained. Marked by interruption, exhaustion, and relational obligation, caregiving challenges dominant expectations of productivity, availability, and coherence in cultural labour.

While “care” circulates widely in contemporary arts discourse, it is still rarely accommodated structurally within programming or institutional time. Through short offerings, shared food, and collective discussion, Open Sessions considers what shifts when care is approached not simply as a trending theme, but as a method—one that foregrounds interdependence, negotiation, and the conditions that make work possible.

Curated by
Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan

Program Dates / Times / Locations

FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 2026
Evening sessions from 6:15 — 9:00 pm at Theatre Direct (Studio H)
Download detailed directions to Studio H HERE

SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 2026
Full day from 10:00 am — 6:00 pm at Critical Distance Centre for Curators
Please note: Saturday programming includes FREE onsite childcare, a shared meal, and hybrid participation options to support caregiver access.

If you are attending the hybrid sessions please email info@criticaldistance.ca for the link. 

Program Schedule & Registration

View full program schedule BELOW (scroll down to image gallery) and/or download a printable pdf HERE

—> REGISTER HERE 

As space is limited, registration is required. Admission is free to both Friday and Saturday sessions. Once all spaces are reserved, additional registrants will be added to a waitlist and notified if space becomes available.

Program Contributors

Indu Vashist
Mark Reinhart
Michelle Wilson
44.4 Mother/Artist Collective
Shira Leuchter
Maryna Salagub
Janet Hinkle
Ebru Winegard
Rahaf’s Kitchen
Jeneen Frei Njootli
Una Janicijevic
Ragamalika Mohanraj
Tender Again
Zoë Heyn-Jones & Amanda White
Margaret Evans  (Balancing Act)
Heather Frise
Renée Anne Bouffard-McManus
Yanaminah Thullah
Regatu Asefa
Sandra Dusabe
Delilah Edouard Williams
Sasha Singer-Wilson

Thank you to our partners and funders

                 

 

Curatorial

Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan

Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan, PhD is an independent curator, educator, and writer. Curating the Village emerges from a larger research-creation project supported by Balancing Act Canada’s Level UP! initiative, exploring caregiving as a condition that shapes artistic and curatorial labour.

Find out more

Program Contributors

Indu Vashist
Indu Vashist braids together body and land based practices into the various aspects of her life. She is a cultural worker, a Somatic Movement Educator in the tradition of Thomas and Eleanor Hanna, a yoga and rest practices teacher.
Find out more

Yanaminah Thullah
Yanaminah Thullah is an award-winning community builder and curator with a rich background in public speaking, policy, writing, and strategic consulting. She was born and raised in Toronto and is of Liberian and Sierra Leonean descent. Her work centres marginalized voices through immersive and interdisciplinary exhibits such as the award-winning…Find out more

Delilah Edouard Williams
Delilah Edouard Williams is an art and cultural curator dedicated to elevating contemporary emerging BIPOC artists and fostering inclusive, community-engaged arts programming. With a background in Social Sciences and a specialization in Anthropology, her practice is deeply rooted in cultural community work and its intersection with the creative arts. Through her experience in creative workshop programming, she actively works to amplify collective narratives and ensure that underrepresented voices have the space to shape and tell their own stories. Her recent curatorial projects include How I Love You (Ottawa Art Gallery) where she served as the inaugural Community Guest Curator Fellow, and A Journey of Dreams (Head & Hands), developed following her creative workshop facilitation. She is pursuing an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, beginning Fall 2026.
Find out more

Ebru Winegard
Ebru Winegard, is a multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, photographer, and filmmaker dedicated to celebrating diversity and unity.
Find out more

Ragamalika Mohanraj
Ragamalika Mohanraj is a Canada-based IT engineer, Indian classical dancer, choreographer, and mother. She began her training in Indian classical dance at the age of four and has over 25 years of experience in performance and training. Her practice spans Bharatanatyam and Odissi, alongside studies in the Natyashastra and Karanas.…Find out more

44.4 Mother/Artist Collective
The 44.4 Mother/Artist Collective, founded in 2019 by artists Sarah Jane Estabrooks and Elizabeth Raymer Griffin, is a group of women artists working on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Positioned at the intersection of motherhood and art, our Collective shares knowledge, encourages creative self-actualisation, empowers professional…Find out more

Heather Frise
Heather Frise is a Toronto-based filmmaker,  visual artist and educator. Her experimental films and animations have screened internationally. She has also worked on a range of community-based media and digital storytelling projects including the Emmy-Award winning, Highrise. She currently teaches at OCAD University.Find out more

Janet Hinkle
Janet Hinkle is a multidisciplinary artist with a practice rooted in both contemporary fine art and craft. With a fondness for mixing juxtaposing materials and a practice rooted in sustainability, biodiversity and conservation, she is driven to explore concepts involving the natural world and related interventions. Pulling inspiration from the…Find out more

Jeneen Frei Njootli
Jeneen Frei Njootli is an award winning artist and na’aa (mom) of two, living in Old Crow, Yukon. They are Vuntut Gwitchin with Czech and Dutch ancestry and are currently part of BUSH gallery, The ISHI Collective and helped form the ReMatriate Collective in 2014. With a love of the…Find out more

Margaret Evans

Margaret Evans is a Dora nominated actor and producer.

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Mark Reinhart
Mark Reinhart moves through the world as an artist: a dancer listening for rhythm, a curator tracing connections, an educator interested in relationships, and a translator wandering through languages.  He chases constellations as a way of knowing—one that invites curiosity, compassion, embodiment, and collective meaning-making. Through arts-based and queer ways of seeing, he cultivates spaces and architectures where people and momentums can encounter complexity with sensitivity and wonder. Whether in studios, classrooms, conversations, public spaces or community places, he seeks to create the conditions for connection, where stories, bodies, and ideas gather into new constellations, ecosystems, and galaxies of possibility.
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Maryna Salagub

Maryna Salagub is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, and community arts facilitator based in Oakville. Working primarily in watercolor and mixed media, her practice explores themes of community, caregiving, ecology, and storytelling through participatory art projects, workshops, and exhibitions.

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Michelle Wilson

Michelle Wilson is a queer, neurodivergent artist and mother living as an uninvited guest in Guelph, Ontario. She is a founding member of the Coves Collective and the Unsettling Conservation Collective.

Find out more

Renée Anne Bouffard-McManus
Renée Anne Bouffard-McManus is an artist, curator, art worker and researcher who is currently based in Toronto.
Find out more

Sasha Singer-Wilson
Sasha Singer-Wilson (she/her) is a multidisciplinary performing artist, scholar and facilitator of Lithuanian, Italian, British, and Irish ancestry. Her work explores climate justice, climate emotions, decolonization, caregiving, ritual, land connection, intergenerational relationships, and the voice. Sasha has made performances in basements, alleyways, schools, theatres, lofts and online, and has worked…Find out more

Shira Leuchter
Shira Leuchter (she/her) is a performance creator, actor, and researcher. She makes performances that invite audiences to imagine and rehearse new ways for us to be together. Shira is currently a PhD student in York University’s department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. She is a parent to two very…Find out more

Tender Again
Tender Again is a mutual-aid, abolitionist, decolonial care initiative providing monthly drop-in bodywork, food, and community support for neighbors facing barriers to healthcare — prioritizing unhoused, frontline workers, low-income, Indigenous, Black, trans, and migrant community members Find out more

Una Janicijevic

Una is a Toronto-based Serbian-Canadian artist, designer, and mother whose work is informed by principles of inclusivity, sustainability, and collaboration. Working across publishing, media, arts, and education, Una develops interdisciplinary projects grounded in a tactile, handcrafted approach to visual storytelling.

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Regatu Asefa
Regatu Asefa (she/her) is a curator and art historian based in Toronto and Oxford, where she is completing her MPhil in Islamic Art and Architecture. Her practice prioritizes non-visual sensory experiences and body engagement in the formations of place and identity, with a particular focus on arts of the Islamic…Find out more

Sandra Ngenge Dusabe
Sandra Ngenge Dusabe (gen-geh doo-sa-beh) is a painter, curator and cultural creator based in Ottawa, Canada. After completing her BFA at the University of Ottawa, she’s taken the knowledge and passion cultivated from her time in school and transferred that dedication and care to program conceptually coherent and authentic experiences…Find out more

Zoë Heyn-Jones

Zoë Heyn-Jones is a researcher-artist and cultural worker who grew up on Saugeen Ojibway land in Ontario, Canada and on Tz’utujil/Kaqchikel Maya land in Guatemala. Zoë uses artistic research and curatorial practice as tools for communal abundance, and convenes groups in order to weather the collapse of capitalism together.

She works with agroecology and food systems, convivial cooking and eating, compost and waste, vernacular architecture and embodied practices of solidarity in the service of decomposition and regeneration. Zoë lives and works in Tenochtitlan/Mexico City and Tkaronto/Toronto.

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Amanda White
Amanda White (she/her) is an artist and researcher, living on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territories. She is Canada Research Chair in Sustainability, Ecological Justice, and Climate action in Creative Practices (Tier II) at Emily Carr University, where she is currently building a kitchen-lab to support environmentally engaged work with…Find out more