Critical Distance Media socially-engaged practices

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.”

Zoë Chan lives in Vancouver on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations. She works as Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Presented across Canada, her curatorial projects have delved into a range of subject matter including storytelling, documentary practices, youth, food, and discourse around representation. She was a recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Joan Lowndes Award in recognition of excellence in critical and curatorial writing in 2015. She graduated with a Master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University.

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.