Critical Distance Media dance / movement-based practices

In spring of 2022, Dena Davida — along with Tawny Andersen, Barbara Scales, Victoria Carrasco, Barbara Scales, and Yves Sheriff — initiated the biannual publication TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation. a seminal journal for the study, theory, and praxis of curatorial strategies in live arts. TURBA offers a platform for the exploration of ideas, concepts, constraints, expectations, and contingencies which guide and drive curatorial practices in these artistic fields. This collection of essays and conversations, by and for live arts curators, fosters a community of critical discourse about curation across traditions, genres, communities, generations, cultures, disciplines, artistic expressions and aesthetics.

Dena Davida, an artivist curator living in Montreal, is also an ethnographic researcher, dance teacher, dancer, editor and indexer. She completed her doctorate at the Université de Québec (2006) where she taught improvisation, composition, creative dance pedagogy, dance aesthetics and anthropology. She co-founded and curated the Tangente dance presenting space (1980-2019) and the Festival international de la nouvelle danse (1985+). Her writings on dance and culture are widely published. In 2022, she initiated the biannual TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation. a seminal publication for the study, theory, and praxis of curatorial strategies in live arts.

Zoë Chan lives in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. Since 2018, she has worked as Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she curated Uncommon Language (2020-21), and co-curated Where do we go from here? (2020-21) and Stories that animate us (2021). While working as an independent curator between 2012 and 2019, she delved into a range of subject matter including documentary practices, youth, food, and discourse around representation in art and visual culture. Her curatorial projects have been presented by Trinity Square Video, Vidéographe, Kamloops Art Gallery, Optica, MSVU Art Gallery, Foreman Art Gallery, Articule, and the MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels).

Dallas Fellini is a curator, writer, and artist living and working in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their practice is invested in the dissolution of boundaries between different art forms and arts communities, trans and queer histories and futures, community practice, and the intersections of art and popular culture. Dallas is a member of curatorial duo Crocus Collective and a cofounder of Silverfish, an arts publication devoted to interdisciplinary collaboration, skill-sharing, and cultivating ongoing dialogues between emerging artists and writers.

Magdalyn is a curator and writer. Her practice explores embodied experience in relation to Western display practices and methods of knowing, taking into account familial knowledge, folklore, spirituality, and generational trauma.