Critical Distance Media socially-engaged practices

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School is a leading research hub dedicated to politically engaged art. Founded in 1992 during intense debates around free speech, identity, and the role of the arts, the VLC has consistently framed the arts as essential to civic life.

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.

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.

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).