Critical Distance Media socially-engaged practices

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).

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator based in Toronto. Her area of focus is on research-based artist practices and contemporary exhibition history. Her recent exhibitions include Nicole Coon: Jetee (Beauty Supply, 2024), Andrew James Paterson: Never Enough Night, co-curated with Laura Carusi and Anthony Cooper (the plumb, 2024), Louise Lawler, Louise Noguchi (Beauty Supply, 2023), and John Devlin: Out of a Heart of Quiet (Erin Stump Projects, 2022).

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.

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.”