Critical Distance Keywords culture

Noor Alé is an independent curator, art historian, and writer. She is the Associate Curator at The Power Plant, Toronto. Her curatorial practice examines the intersections of contemporary art with geopolitics, decolonization, and social justice in the Global South. Alé has contributed to curatorial research, exhibition management, and public programmes at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Bowmanville; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; and Art Dubai. She holds an MA in Art History from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and a BA in Art History from the University of Guelph.

Aislinn Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, performance, installation and text-based work. She culls material from everyday experiences and relationships, exploring themes of vulnerability, empathy, possibility and failure.

Emma Steen is a freelance curator and writer, as well as the Director of Membership for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective. Her area of interest lies in art that explores intimacies, bodies, and gathering with anti-colonial intention. Her background also includes extensive work in community arts organizing, arts administration, and supporting methods of institutional accountability. 

As a writer Emma has contributed to many arts & culture publications and art galleries. In 2020 she was awarded OCAD’s Outstanding Master’s Thesis/MRP Writing Awards for her paper, “Why the 90s Were so Sexy: locating sexuality, pleasure and desire in work produced by Indigenous women identified artists during the 1990s and early 2000s in Canada.”

Žana Kozomora works across curatorial and visual practice. She has curated exhibitions with Cambridge Art Galleries and Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, and sits on the Program Committee and Board of CAFKA (Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener + Area). Her writing has been published in ASAP/Journal and C Magazine. Born in Sarajevo, BiH, she grew up in Kitchener, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples.

Zoë Chan lives in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. She works as Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Presented across Canada, her curatorial projects have delved into a range of subject matter including storytelling, documentary practices, youth, food, and discourse around representation. She was a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Joan Lowndes Award in recognition of excellence in critical and curatorial writing in 2015. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University.