Critical Distance Media fibre arts / textile / paper-based practices

francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, artist, and storyteller born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was awarded the Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers in 2022 for her debut novel Butter Honey Pig Bread. Her novel was also shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the DUBLIN Literary Award. As an accomplished writer and artist in her own right, Burnt Sugar at Critical Distance is francesca’s first curatorial project, and an experiment in storytelling across mediums.

Shaya Ishaq is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and writer whose research interests are engaged in craft, diaspora, design anthropology, and (afro)futurism. Devoted to materiality, she works with textiles and clay to create wearable art, jewelry, and installations. She has studied Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University and has previously attended Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine. In 2023 Ishaq received the Saunderson Prize for Emerging Artists from the Hnatyshyn Foundation.

Stephanie E. Creaghan is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work about how violence presents itself in communication, combining different forms of language (visual/audio/spatial/temporal) to reveal latent forms of manipulation.

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. 

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator from Saskatoon living in Toronto. Her most recent exhibition, In the Rough (The Plumb, Toronto, 2021), explored the healing crystal industry and its imbrication with theosophical symbolism, medical technology and labour organizing in the 20th century. Her curatorial projects look at the materialist and mythological lives of commodities, including crystals, flowers, and cosmetics.
Kate holds a Master of Curatorial Studies from the University of Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2018 Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award, the 2020 C Magazine New Critics Award and participated in the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency.