Critical Distance Profile Type Writer

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.

Yaniya Lee’s writing and research track Black creative practice and narratives of liberation across the nation. She is the author of Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (2024, figure ground/Art Metropole) and Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project (2024, Artexte). 

Lee has taught or written about art for universities, museums and institutions across North America and Europe including Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, de Appel Amsterdam, Dutch Art Institute, Momus, Toronto Biennial of Art, Art in America, British Vogue, Vulture, Racar: Canadian Art Review, Chatelaine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, The Fader, Flash Art, Montez Press, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Bushra Junaid is a multidisciplinary artist-curator, author, and arts administrator based in Toronto. Born in Montreal to Nigerian and Jamaican parents, and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Junaid is best known for exploring history, memory, cultural identity, and placemaking through mixed media collage, drawing, and painting. Pivoting on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” and reflecting on John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015), Junaid’s landmark curatorial project, What Carries Us: Newfoundland and Labrador in the Black Atlantic was presented at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery (2020) and included video, mixed media, mural, and photo-based works by Canadian and international artists, as well as rare archival items.

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.

Kay Rangel works with archives, navigating erased history to bring visibility to contemporary artistic practices – particularly those rooted in her homeland, Mexico. She’s also focused on working with theories of place, queerness, and feminism. Her practice, as an artist, relies heavily on words too, pushing the viewer to explore the written language within the visual realm.