The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis
The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis (CBP) is an experimental, multidisciplinary research incubator and co-working research-creation hub, an archival nexus, and creative atelier/studiolab that is rooted in the importance of black study, Afro-Indigenous relations, and Afro-diasporic technologies. The CBP was established in 2022 and is led by Prof. SA Smythe. It is a coalitional space where transnational and anticolonial cultural workers, educators, researchers, technicians, artists, activists, system-impacted and other community members collaboratively and creatively attend to the genre-defying aesthetic interventions of Black life and Black studies. We embrace our roles as makers and maintainers, relishing liberatory practices and ideas about where we’ve been and (re)imagining where and who we want to be, together.Find out more

Jasmine Liaw
Jasmine Liaw is an emerging interdisciplinary artist moving fluidly between roles of filmmaker, curator, designer, performer, and producer in contemporary dance, new media art, and experimental film. Evidenced in collaboration and community, her work leans into transcultural narratives intersecting her Hakka-Chinese diaspora, her queerness, and queer theories in temporality and ecology.
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Silver Press
Silver Press is an independent publisher founded in 2017. It began by publishing classic works from feminist perspectives, including books by Audre Lorde, Leonora Carrington, Diane di Prima and Ursula K Le Guin. In 2024, Silver Press expanded with the launch of a new imprint, Spiral House: a home for art, poetry, transformation and ways of knowing, which includes the Portals series of pocket-sized entrances to expansive bodies of thought. The expansive Silver and Spiral House constellation encompasses books, events, gatherings, exhibitions, listening sessions, workshops and activations of texts, ideas and dialogues.
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Amin Alsaden

Amin Alsaden is a curator, scholar, and educator whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. His curatorial practice is committed to advancing social justice through the arts, and to disseminating more inclusive narratives that decenter existing canons and challenge hegemonic epistemological and power structures. His exhibitions invariably raise questions concerning the interrelated domains of geography, colonialism, extraction, organized violence, and displacement.

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Video still of a young person of colour wearing a bright blue shirt with a floral motif, while yelling in front of a blurred backdrop of vibrant greenery.

Zoë Chan

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).

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