The Tempest, 2008, Repercussion Theatre, www.esselab.com
The Sirens, video installation, 2008. Photo Credit: Nelson Henricks
www.plantsandanimals.ca
Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles!
Photo Credit: Micheal Slobodian
Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles! The vision behind ELAN’s RAEV project is very simple: Artists need to be part of a community and communities need artists. As ELAN began the task of documenting the “English-speaking” artistic community in Quebec, the equation became much more complex. Most of Quebec’s “English-speaking” artists are bilingual, trilingual or multilingual. Some work almost exclusively in French. Many were born in Quebec while others emigrated here as children or were drawn as adults by the vibrant mixture of cultures. Friends and fans submitted more than 1,700 names to participate in the RAEV project. The sampling of artists featured in this “group portrait” were recommended by their peers to present a spectrum of disciplines, regions, and career stages: from internationally renowned icons to emerging artists creating a buzz in their local scene. These short bios are a snapshot from a much larger artistic community. In the background, you will glimpse the festivals, schools, performance spaces, galleries, studios and neighbourhoods they inhabit. Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles! began as a project intended to increase the visibility of these artists, and it has become a true revelation of the diversity and depth of creativity in Quebec.
Benjamin Hatcher, The Soul Project, 2008. Photo credit: David Cannon
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Winner of both the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2009 Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and the McAuslan First Book Prize, the up-and-coming Eric Siblin has built a reputation as a writer of intelligent and evocative journalistic narratives. Along with accolades in Quebec, his bestselling first book, The Cello Suites: J. S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece, was also named a finalist for a Governor General’s Award, a Writer’s Trust Award, and the coveted British Columbia National Award for Non-Fiction. Born in Montreal, Siblin spent seven years at the The Canadian Press Montreal bureau as a reporter and editor, before becoming a pop music critic at The Gazette. In 2002, he wrote and directed Word Slingers, a short documentary about Scrabble tournaments, which won him the Jury Award at the Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival. Alongside publications in numerous magazines, he also codirected a second documentary, In Search of Sleep. (DN)
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ERIC SIBLIN
Chet Doxas
Daniel Cross
Filmmaker Daniel Cross has given a camera to a squeegee kid, a Child prodigies in music are an inspiration to us all, so voice to the displaced, peered into Islamic punk, and told stories of Quebecers will be pleased to learn that among this rarefied Inuit teens and Chinese villagers. Cross is president of Montreal’s group is their very own Chet Doxas. Classically trained on EyesSteelFilms, which in 2007 produced Up the Yangtze, the story of the piano and drums since the age of four, by the age of a family displaced by the construction of China’s Three Gorges Dam. thirteen Doxas had played his first professional concert. It won dozens of awards, including a Genie for Best Documentary. A Now 30 years old and an accomplished saxophonist and director and producer who makes Montreal his home, Cross has used composer, he has already performed at Carnegie Hall, a cinema vérité style to try and bring about change, which was most received the Rico Golden Reed Award at Music Fest Canada, evident in his gritty street trilogy, Danny Boy (1993), The Street: A and been named Jazz Report Magazine’s Best Secondary film with the homeless (1996), and SPIT: Squeegee Punks in Traffic Jazz Musician in Canada. His contributions to North (2002), which spawned the 2009 UN World Summit Award winning American contemporary jazz can be heard on over eighty Homeless Nation project. He has also produced a film on the first albums by other musicians, as well as on his debut album, black hockey players and documented the clashes between the remix Sidewalk Etiquette and his 2010 sophomore release Big culture and copyright purveyors. His film, Last Train Home, received Sky. Quebecers will recognize his playing from his Grammythe 2010 Jutra for best documentary feature. He is an assistant nominated soundtrack and homegrown box-office smash, , professor at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Les Triplettes de Belleville; one of numerous international Cinema. (PF) soundtracks on which he has performed. When not heading up his own quartet, Doxas also moonlights as a member of the Montreal Jazz Saxophone Quartet. (DN) 2
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Liz Valdez has directed new works by Montreal playwrights, poets, and her own collective creations, easily switching from a gritty George F. Walker comedy to a playful children’s production. Many Montreal English theatres, including the Centaur, Geordie and Tableau D’Hôte, have gladly taken her on to direct their productions. She recently mounted Haunted House, written by Endre Farkas, about the life of Montreal poet, politician, and lawyer, A. M. Klein, at the Segal Centre, and directed The Nutmeg Princess by Richardo Keens-Douglas for Black Theatre Workshop’s school tour. A graduate of Concordia’s Theatre Department, she worked as a professional actor for 15 years. A resident of NDG, where she lives with her husband and three daughters, she also teaches theatre at Concordia and has trained countless young people at the Actors Studio Montreal and John Abbott College. (PF)
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Liz Valdez
Chanti Wadge
Evergon
The 2007 recipient of the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Evergon is an international award-winning photographer of, for Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding artistic achievement the most part, queer subject matter. Ramboys: a Bookless Novel in dance, Chanti Wadge has been exploring the boundaries is about an imaginary race of half-satyr and half-urban hustlers of bodily movement since 1999. In this period, she has and Manscapes is an exploration of gay cruising grounds. These cultivated a distinctive style incorporating aspects of contact, represent the two large bodies of work he created in the nineties. improvisation, butoh, and classical dance traditions into multiMore recently, his work turned to a nude portrait series of his disciplinary performances that draw significantly on the use of mother called Margaret & I, and a series of self-portraits, Chez video, installations, photography, and the written word. KoreanMoi: Domestic Content, which were accompanied by images born and Vancouver-raised, Wadge moved to Montreal in 2002, gleaned from his lifetime trove of memorabilia. Evergon has where her aspirations as a dancer and choreographer came to experimented with various photographic platforms, from his early fruition in a series of notable works. This period of creativity work with Polaroids and colour photocopying, to digital imaging included undertakings such as Save Project As: unrehearsed and holograms. He has exhibited over a thousand times, in several phases of A Becoming Human (2003), [we]: fieldnotes from countries, including Australia, the UK, Germany, the US, Holland, the bardo (2005), [thru]: the stilllife series (2006), and 100 Switzerland, France, Sweden, and Spain. Born in Niagara Falls, Returnings (2007). Montreal has also served as a platform he abandoned his birth name after he became a professional artist for an international career; Wadge’s works has been presented in the seventies. Since 1999, he has worked as a professor in the throughout Europe, where she has also held numerous visual arts program at Concordia University. (PC) residencies. (DN) 3
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A three-time finalist for the Journey Prize – Canada’s most coveted short story award – expectations were already high for Neil Smith when he published Bang Crunch. The off-kilter, punchy tales in his debut story collection were ably delivered, and rode a tall wave of critical acclaim after publication in six countries. A lifelong Montrealer, Smith’s stories were first spotted in a local creative writing workshop, where writer Connie Barnes Rose noticed his innate talent and encouraged him to send his stories out. Following her advice, Smith went on to publish in numerous magazines and journals, gains that proved pivotal on his path towards becoming a national literary sensation in 2007. That year, Bang Crunch won the Quebec Writers’ Federation McAuslan First Book Prize, and was named finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, as well as notable book of the year by The Globe and Mail and The Washington Post. (DN)
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Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles!
Neil Smith
Joel Miller
Arnie Gelbart
Arnie Gelbart has been producing award-winning documentaries, Joel Miller started playing saxophone at the age of 10 and at feature films, and television shows for the last 20 years. His film 18 he left his hometown of Sackville, New Brunswick to move career began in the 1970s as assistant-director on celebrated to Montreal to pursue his dream of being a jazz musician. director Luis Buñuel’s, Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, and Since completing his degree at McGill University, he has as co-writer of the audacious Montenegro. President of Galafilm recorded many original compositions featuring deceptively since 1990, he has produced what is arguably Canada’s most simple melodies combined with complex harmonic structures, controversial ever documentary, Brian and Terence McKenna’s The developing a style that critics have compared to the smoky Valour and the Horror. It documented incidences of military brutality soulfulness of Stan Getz. Miller has been the recipient of an and incompetence by allied troops in key WWII battles, angered array of accolades over the years including the Grand Jazz many Canadian veterans, and won five Gemini and Gémeaux Award at the Montreal International Jazz Festival and an Opus awards. Several awards were also won for The Origins of AIDS and Award for the concert of the year from Le Conseil Québécois the television series, Cirque du Soleil – Fire Within. With offices in de la Musique. He has toured, recorded and collaborated with Montreal’s Mile End, Gelbart has also produced seven feature films, such jazz musicians as Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Monder, Ingrid including The Blue Butterfly and The Hanging Garden, and several Jensen, Steve Amirault, and Gary Versace. His recording career television shows, including international hits The Worst Witch, spans 12 years, including his latest album, Tantramar (2008). Fungus the Bogeyman, and their newest production, the comedy (DN) series 18 to Life. (PF) 4
Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles!
Folk music may be one of Canada’s oldest songwriting traditions, but in the able voice and fingers of Rob Lutes, the long-standing genre is infused with more than a touch of the blues. Known for his deft fingerstyle guitar work and impassioned live performances, Lutes now has four critically acclaimed albums to his name, the most recent being Truth & Fiction (2009). The album spent three months near the top of the Euro-Americana charts and earned him a Songwriter of the Year nomination at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. It came on the heels of his breakthrough third album, the internationally acclaimed Ride the Shadows (2007), which broke his musical talents wide open at home, in the US, and on the European charts. Several of his songs have been recorded by other artists, such as Bob Walsh, Nanette Workman and Dawn Tyler Watson. (DN)
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Magnus Isacsson
Chip Chuipka
Chip Chuipka has acted in over 100 stage productions, working Montreal documentary filmmaker Magnus Isacsson follows his twice with legendary director Robert Lepage in National Capitale subjects for as long as their compelling stories require. In his Nationale and Roméo et Juliette, and he has appeared on numerous 1996 award-winning film, Power, he chronicled the five years Canadian stages, including the National Arts Centre, the Prairie it took the Cree to defeat Hydro-Québec’s Great Whale project. Theatre Exchange, and the Globe Theatre. After earning a science In The Choir Boys, another award-winning film, he shot footage degree, he worked as a carpenter, truck driver, tree planter, and of Montreal’s choir of homeless men for two years. He not only bartender, until he returned to school and fell in love with the plays captured the choir’s enthusiastic receptions but also its internal of Shakespeare, Beckett, Pinter, and Mamet. He then moved to conflicts. In two separate films, Union Trouble – A Cautionary Montreal in 1988 and quickly established himself as a film actor. Tale, and Maxime, McDuff and McDo, Isacsson documented Chuipka has been cast in feature roles in Manon Briand’s The attempts in Quebec to unionize McDonald’s restaurants. He Marilyn Bell Story and Bruce MacDonald’s Platinum, appeared in explored protest politics in two further films, first in Pressure Richard Attenborough’s Grey Owl and Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes, Point – Inside the Montreal Blockade, and then in View from the and had recurring roles in Emily of New Moon and Tabou. (PF) Summit, a feature-length documentary that involved directing seven film crews during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Isacsson studied political science, history, and cinema in Montreal and began his career as a broadcast journalist working for “The Fifth Estate,” “Le Point,” and “Contrechamp.” (PF) 5
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Montrealer James Di Salvio, leader of the eight-member musical group Bran Van 3000 had an international hit with their 1997 single, Drinkin’ in L.A., which received worldwide airplay and reached number three on the U.K. charts. Driven by hip-hop and electro-funk and its chorus of “What the hell am I doing, drinkin’ in LA at 26?” (inspired by the same question Di Salvio had earlier asked himself), it has been called the perfect summer party song and a timeless description of twentysomething malaise. In 1998, the group won a Juno for Best Alternative Album and toured the U.S. and Europe. Di Salvio, who began his career as a deejay, has produced two other BV3K albums, Discosis, which attracted the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Youssou N’Dour, and Jean Leloup as collaborators, and Rosé. Bran Van 3000 played their biggest concert ever in front of 220,000 fans for the perfect summer party at the 2008 Montreal International Jazz Festival. (PF)
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Stacey Christodoulou
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Stacey Christodoulou is an important innovator in Quebec An Ontario native drawn to French culture, writer/journalist theatre . In 1991, she founded The Other Theatre, which has Marianne Ackerman moved to Montreal in 1981, where tackled subjects from fractals to fascism, physics to pop culture, she undertook a career as a freelance journalist, eventually and television to terrorism. The plays take place in theatres, becoming theatre critic for The Gazette in 1984. Not content warehouses, lofts, galleries, moving elevators, and shopping mall to observe from the sidelines, in 1988 she left The Gazette to windows. Often collectively written, the scripts usually evolve out co-found Theatre 1774, one of Quebec’s first theatre companies of discussion, improvisation, experimentation, and places “other involving both English- and French-speaking artists. In that than theatre.” The Other Theatre describes itself as a think tank time, she wrote a dozen plays, twice collaborating with director for performance. All of this experimenting has yielded concrete Robert Lepage. In the nineties, she moved away from the results, with Christodoulou praised for her work in both francophone theatre scene and published her debut novel in 2000. Jump and anglophone circles. She was nominated as the Masques was a rollicking roman-à-clé about the Montreal theatre scene Awards’ Best Director for Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now (the first Englishin the eighties. Ackerman’s more experimental second novel, speaking Quebecer to be nominated outside the Best Anglophone Matters of Hart, followed in 2005, but by then she was on the Play category). In 1999, Human Collision/Atomic Reaction played move again. Her latest venture is perhaps her most exciting to the prestigious Festival de Théâtre des Amériques and went on to date: Rover Arts is a bilingual online culture review that has win Montreal English Critics Circle Awards for best production and quickly become an essential voice in Montreal arts criticism. director. (PF) (DN)
G. Scott MAcLeod
Elizabeth Langley
As well as a respected musician, G. Scott MacLeod has been A long-time professor of contemporary dance at Concordia a successful painter for more than 20 years; for the last five University, since 1979 Elizabeth Langley has become synonymous filmmaking become part of his palette. He has exhibited with the fabric of the many aspiring, young dancers who pass in Mexico, Germany, Ireland, Czech Republic, the US, and through her studio every year. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in across Canada. Several museums own his paintings, including 1933, she got her start as many dancers do, juggling a mixture of the National Gallery of Canada and the Museo Nacional de company performances with work as an interpreter, choreographer, la Estampa, numerous corporate offices hang his works, and and teacher. In 1960, she moved to New York, where she trained in celebrities, such as Jane Goodall and Rick Mercer, collect his the Martha Graham technique. The New York experience in hand, canvases. In film, his most recent project was a 22-minute she then moved to Canada five years later, where she resumed documentary-animation, After the war with Hannelore – A her career as a dancer and teacher. In later years, Langley has Berliner war child’s testimony 1945–1989, which was featured developed as a teacher and a technician of dance, continuously refining her talents at international residencies, and bringing back at Arsenal, Berlin’s Institute for Film and Video Art. McLeod her experiences to her students in Montreal. She retired from says he tries to make his art accessible while reflecting social, Concordia in 1997 and in 1998, she was awarded the Canada political, and historical themes. He has been awarded numerous Council’s prestigious Jacqueline Lemieux Award. (DN) arts grants and residencies, including two with the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, and a four-year stint at Montreal’s Centre St-Ambroise. (PF) 7
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One of Canada’s most accomplished clarinetists, Lori Freedman boasts a critically acclaimed career that runs over three decades and displays her equally at home in both contemporary classical and avant-garde settings. Since 1981, her work has appeared on over 28 CDs, and more than 45 composers have written solo bass clarinet music for her. The daughter of composer Harry Freedman, Lori was born in Toronto. After joining the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra in 1986, she spent the next few years in various orchestras before breaking out on her own. In 2001, Freedman was so inspired by Montreal’s world-class improvisational circuit, she moved to the city. Since then, she has collaborated widely with Quebec’s most renowned and experimental musicians, among them Martin Tétreault, René Lussier, and Dianne Labrosse. Meanwhile, her cadre of international collaborators is a veritable who’s who of contemporary classical, musique concrete, and free jazz legends, including Evan Parker, Fred Frith, John Oswald, and many others. (DN)
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Lori Freedman
Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles!
Dayna McLeod
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Dayna McLeod is a writer, video and performance artist whose work is exhibited worldwide. She created and manages 52 Pick-Up, a video website where participants create a video each week for an entire year. She has been invited to queer events in Poland, Turkey, and Toronto, and her theatrical series, Hot Hot Gossip, played in Montreal at Studio 303’s Edgy Women Festival. She incorporates several genres into her work, including cabaret and animation. In 2010, her film Ultimate SUB Ultimate DOM was both the audience winner and best short film at the Reelout Queer Film Festival in Kingston, Ontario, and in 2000, PlanetOut Queer Short Movie Awards deemed her film, How to Fake an Orgasm, the best comedy and audience choice. Born in Alberta, she came to Montreal in 1995 to complete an MFA at Concordia University. She says she loved the city so much that she never left. (PF)
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From the age of 12, Tracey Deer wanted to be a filmmaker. After To rock musicians along Boulevard St. Laurent, MELISSA AUF studying film at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, she now dER MAUR is a lifelong Montrealer - daughter of boulevardiermakes award-winning films that offer a glimpse into Aboriginal journalist-politician Nick Auf Der Maur and translator Linda issues. In Club Native (2008), Deer looks deeply into the history Gaboriau - who got to live the rock n’ roll dream. In her earlyand present-day reality of Mohawk identity. It earned two Gemini twenties, the Concordia photography major befriended alt-rock Awards, shared with producers Rezolution Pictures and the giants Smashing Pumpkins, and soon after was asked to join National Film Board. One More River (2004) is a documentary Hole – featuring the infamous Courtney Love – as a replacement Deer co-directed with Neil Diamond. Engaging viewers in an bassist at the peak of the band’s popularity. During her fiveaccount of a Cree Nation’s controversial decision to support a year contract, she recorded the 1999 follow-up album Celebrity new hydroelectric dam, it won Best Documentary at the RendezSkin and toured arenas all over the world. In 2000, after joining vous du cinéma québécois. Her film, Mohawk Girls (2005), the Smashing Pumpkins on tour, AUF dER MAUR returned follows the lives of three teenagers growing up at Kahnawake to Montreal, where she fronted the Black Sabbath cover-band and was honoured with the Alanis Obomsawin Best Documentary Hand of Doom in 2002, and in 2004 released her first solo Award at the ImagineNATIVE Film Festival. It was recently turned album, Auf Der Maur. Since then, she has returned to her first into a television pilot, which she directed and called “Mohawk love, visual arts. In 2009, she conceived and directed the Girls: the series.” She credits local filmmakers for getting her multi-media film, Out of Our Minds, which played to critical started, particularly Catherine Bainbridge of Rezolution Pictures. acclaim at Sundance and has gone on to earn an installation at (PF) the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. (DN)
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Monique Polak
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Monique Polak has a gift for knowing how to write socially charged issues for young adult readers. On the Game was inspired by a group of Quebec City girls from seemingly ordinary families who were recruited as prostitutes. Polak uses her skills as a freelance journalist and experience as a teacher to put together books such as Scarred, about a young woman who cuts herself and based on some of her CEGEP students’ confessions of self-mutilation. In 2005 and 2006, she won three awards for three separate books, from both The American and Canadian Children’s Book Centres and the American Library Association. In 2009, the Quebec Writers’ Federation awarded the Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature for What World Is Left, a book based on her mother’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. (PF)
Christine Jensen
Melvin Charney
Dubbed “one of Canada’s most compelling composers” by Montrealer Melvin Charney’s relationship with art and architecture The Globe and Mail, jazz composer and saxophonist Christine can be traced back to confrontations over urban development, with Jensen has been an active member of the Montreal music Montréal plus ou moins, a 1972 exhibition that looked at quality of scene for nearly two decades. A British Columbia native, life after the massive changes of that era, and Corridart, an eightJensen moved to Montreal in 1990 to pursue a degree in jazz kilometre-long outdoor exhibit of artworks during the 1976 Montreal performance at McGill’s School of Music. In 1995, a year Olympics. Corridart. With large facades that ran along Sherbrooke after graduating, she collaborated on her sister Ingrid’s Juno from Atwater to the Olympic Stadium, it was dismantled two days Award winning jazz album for composing the title track “Vernal before the games began. Mayor Jean Drapeau alleged the exhibit Fields”, and this early success spurred her to keep writing her contravened city bylaws but some believe it was torn down because own music. As a bandleader, she has released five recordings, certain pieces criticized the city. Since that time, the rest of the including her latest Treelines (2010). In 2006, she received the art world has been more receptive than Drapeau, with venues as Opus Award for Jazz Concert of the year for her work with the prestigious as the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kasel inviting 18-member Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra. (DN) Charney to exhibit. In Ottawa, he created the half-block long, Canadian Tribute to Human Rights, and, in Montreal, the celebrated CCA Garden, a public space across from the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The sculpture garden, peering over a highway, makes use of a scarred and ignored urban space, a subject Charney has often explored as both an artist and theorist. (PF) 9
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Brian McKenna Brian McKenna makes provocative, prize-winning films on Canada’s history. A native Montrealer, he directed The Valour and the Horror, arguably Canada’s most controversial documentary; The Killing Ground, a documentary on the First World War; and Memoirs of Pierre Trudeau, a five-part series broadcast on CBC’s French and English networks. Other historic films include War at Sea, Web of War, War of 1812, and Fire and Ice: The Rocket Richard Riot. In 1987, he wrote and produced a feature-length drama on the Montreal underworld, And Then You Die, directed by Francis Mankiewicz. During his 12 years at the CBC’s Fifth Estate, he wrote and directed some 60 films, winning a host of awards. Amnesty International used his feature documentary on torturers, The Hooded Men, in their campaign against torture. He has been honoured with two lifetime achievement awards: a Pierre Berton Award for bringing history alive and a Gemini Award. (PF)
Jeffrey Moore
Steve Galluccio
Steve Galluccio is a successful screenwriter and playwright. His Relatively few Canadian writers win significant international play, Mambo Italiano, about a gay man coming out to his traditional awards, but Montreal’s Jeffrey Moore managed just that in Italian-Canadian parents, earned extended runs at the Centaur 2000 with his first novel, Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain. A Theatre after it debuted in 2000. Since that time, he has secured searing satire of academia first published by a small press a place in Quebec as an important comedic writer. Mambo was in Saskatchewan, Moore’s debut won both the Regional and translated into French by playwright Michel Tremblay and later International Commonwealth Prizes, and launched his literary went onto become a film, featured in more than 53 countries. He career. In 2004, he published his second book, The Memory has written two other screenplays, Surviving My Mother, which won Artists, a novel that went on to win the Canadian Authors’ favourite Canadian feature at the 2007 edition of the Montreal Association Award for Fiction. Both books have been optioned International Film Festival, and Funkytown (2010) a forthcoming for film and published in some 20 countries. His third novel, The Extinction Club, was released in Canada and the U.K. bilingual film about Montreal’s disco heyday. Galluccio has also in April 2010. Moore was long steeped in academia; when had a thriving writing career in francophone Quebec, where he won not writing novels, he taught translation at all four Montreal a Gémeaux Award for his work on Un gars, une fille, the top-rating universities. Alongside his academic work, he is also an Guy A. Lepage comedy that ran on Radio-Canada from 1997–2003. esteemed translator for numerous cultural organizations both in He also earned a nomination for Ciao Bella, a 2004–05 comedy Quebec and abroad. (DN) series about Italian Montrealers, filmed in both French and English. His ninth play, In Piazza San Domenico (2009), was a recent fullhouse hit at the Centaur. (PF) 10
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Anita Rau Badami
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Anita Rau Badami launched her literary career while living in Calgary, when her graduate thesis, the novel Tamarind Men, was famously salvaged from the slush pile and published to worldwide acclaim in 1996. Although she moved to Canada in 1991, her passion for writing was already well established in India, where she freelanced for major newspapers and published children’s literature. Badami’s major works explore the plight of Indian emigrants to the West. In 2001, she published her second novel, The Hero’s Walk, which garnered the Regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, Italy’s Premio Berto, and was named The Washington Post’s Best Book of 2001. In that year, Badami was also honoured with the Marion Engel Award, presented to a female writer in mid-career. She moved to Montreal in the “mid-noughties.” Since then, she has published her third novel, 2006’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (DN)
PlantS and Animals
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It’s not every twelve-year-old that gets to debut her musical career in By the time Parc Avenue was named finalist for the 2008 front of six-figure audiences, but that’s exactly what vocalist Nikki Polaris Prize, as well as a 2009 Juno Award for Alternative Yanofsky did at the 2006 Montreal International Jazz Festival. She Album of the Year, practically everyone paying attention to was the youngest person ever to take the famed Montreal stage and Montreal’s anglo-rock renaissance knew that Plants and Animals the following year Yanofsky became the youngest person ever to were bound for bigger things. The brainchild of transplanted record for the legendary jazz label Verve Records. Her contribution? Nova Scotians, Warren Spicer and Matthew Woodley, and A cover of Ella Fitzgerald’s “Airmail Special.” In fact, this very French Quebecer, Nic Basque, the band formed in the special Montrealer has many records to her credit. Millions of “mid-noughties,” just as Montreal was gaining international Canadians are familiar with her voice as a result of her performance recognition as a hotbed of indie-rock creativity. Over the of the Canadian national anthem this past winter and of the 2010 course of two well-received EPs, the trio gained a strong local Vancouver Olympics theme song, heard all over the world by an following, and when their debut album was released in 2008, audience of 3.2 billion people. Yanofsky also sings Team Canada’s that popularity quickly spread to the rest of North America. theme song, “I Believe,” which has topped Canadian and American Since then, they’ve played over 100 shows across several charts, and she broke the record for highest debut of any Canadian continents, including a number of internationally renowned artist in Soundscan history. Did we mention she has done all this by music festivals. With their follow-up album La La Land due age sixteen? (DN) in the spring of 2010, public anticipation is already bubbling and all eyes are on Plants and Animals to join the pantheon of Canada’s most beloved bands. (DN)
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Karen Cho
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Through her films, Karen Cho recounts untold histories and explores themes of immigration and social justice. The awardwinning documentary, In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, explored the legacy of Canada’s Chinese head tax. Her featurelength documentary, Seeking Refuge, which follows five asylum seekers, earned a 2009 Gemini nomination and has been used by organizations such as the Canadian Council for Refugees. She directed four episodes of Global TV’s Past Lives, a documentary series about Canadians in search of their ancestral roots, and worked on Extraordinary Canadians, a biography series that explored the lives of eminent Canadians, where Cho directed episodes on Nellie McClung, Lester B. Pearson, and Norman Bethune. She is currently developing a documentary about the women’s movement for the National Film Board. She is also working on an experimental documentary entitled Family Secrets, a collage piece that uses old family movies, found photos, and archival images. (PF)
Cheryl Braganza
David Homel
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The author of seven novels, David Homel published his first novel, Born in India and having lived in Pakistan, Italy, the United Electrical Storms (1988). His latest novel, The Speaking Cure Kingdom and Canada, painter Cheryl Braganza brings her global (2003), won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Hugh McLennan Prize experiences to the message of optimism that shines through for Fiction. Born in Chicago and resident in Quebec since 1980, her artwork. A mainly self-taught and prolific artist, Braganza the prodigiously bilingual Homel maintains a literary-arts column in uses brilliant color and texture to characterize emotion and La Presse, Quebec’s leading daily newspaper. A two-time Governor movement in her naïve and richly intuitive paintings, which General’s Award winner for translation, he has introduced English often reflect her day-to-day life in Montreal and elsewhere. An readers to a wealth of Francophone writing, including novels by activist for human rights, she collaborates with charities to Dany Laferrière, Monique Proulx, and others. French translations better the lives of people within her Montreal neighbourhood of his novels regularly outsell their English originals and Homel and globally. Having first exhibited her work in 1964 at the has developed a strong following in Europe. His 1996 novel Sonya Lord Mayor’s Exhibition in London, since showcasing her & Jack earned him France’s prestigious Prix Millepages, and paintings at Expo 67 Braganza has made Montreal and its his screenplays were honoured with a Prix Géode. In 2006, he suburbs her creative home. Of her art, the painter says, “I want published a children’s book, Travels With My Family, with his wife my art to play a role in lifting people’s spirits, in challenging and fellow writer, Marie-Louise Gay. (DN) their assumptions, in provoking thought, thus promoting dialogue between peoples towards peace.” (DN)
Katie Moore
Gerald Potterton
Gerald Potterton is a celebrated Canadian animator who directed Operating at the crossroads between folk music and indie-rock, the animated cult classic, Heavy Metal. In 1968, he animated a Katie Moore has built a distinctive sound from blending sequence for the Beatles’ feature Yellow Submarine. At the time, he old and new. Moore got her start at Montreal’s longstanding was running one of the largest private film corporations in Canada, bluegrass open-mic night at the Barfly, where she first gained Potterton Productions. Born in England, he came to Canada in recognition in the local music community. Whether performing 1954 to work for the National Film Board, where he directed solo or collaborating with other Montreal artists like Plants more than a dozen films, including My Financial Career and The and Animals, Socalled, and Patrick Watson, Moore brings Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones, two short animation classics. a keen appreciation of old-time country, bluegrass, and altIn 1965, he directed Buster Keaton in a live-action comedy, The country to both her songwriting and her radio show, CKUT’s Railrodder, one year before the comic legend’s death. Now living in Country Classics Hour. In 2007, Moore released her strippedthe Eastern Townships, Potterton recently wrapped up a children’s down debut album, Only Thing Worse, which featured the short animation called Peter Piper and the Plane People. Numerous accompaniment of Plants and Animals member, Warren Spicer. retrospectives have been held in his honour and he was named one Since then, she has co-written the Socalled song, “You Are of “Ten Men Who Have Rocked the Animation World” at the 1998 Never Alone,” which became a hit single in France, while World Animation Celebration in Pasadena. (PF) “The Storm” – her duet with Patrick Watson – appeared on his 2007 Polaris Prize-winning album Close to Paradise. When not performing solo, Moore also plays in the Montreal bluegrass band Yonder Hill. (DN) 13
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Popular with audiences and constantly working, actor Ellen David has collaborated with many names in film and theatre. The comic performer appears to be especially popular with Montreal writer Steve Galuccio and celebrated Quebec film director Denys Arcand. She was cast in the premiere of Galuccio’s 2009 play, In Piazza San Domenico, at the Centaur Theatre; appeared in the Montreal and Toronto runs of his hit, Mambo Italiano; won an ACTRA award for her starring role in his feature film, Surviving My Mother; and was nominated for ACTRA and Gémeaux awards for her work in his series, “Ciao Bella.” She has acted in three of Arcand’s films, Love and Human Remains, Stardom, and Joyeux Calvaire. David has been seen in numerous stage productions, many films, and numerous television series, including the current Gala Film produced CBC comedy, “18 to Life.” She trained at Concordia and York Universities, as well as the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. (PF)
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Eric Davis is an actor committed to making art in Montreal. He says he has chosen this city (and country) over getting caught up in “the mainstream star system of our US neighbours.” Working with local theatres such as Tableau D’Hôte and Geordie Productions, he has also found success in film, television, and video games. After graduating from Concordia’s theatre program, he landed consecutive roles in two Centaur productions, Antony & Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale, the latter winning a 1997 Masques Award for Best Production. He appeared in the hit Quebec play, Matthew and Stephen, a tour that included a run at the New Victory Theatre on Broadway, as well as on stages in Philadelphia and Toronto. He also played opposite William Hurt in the Infinitheatre/Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production of Richard III and has shared the stage and screen with other well-known actors, including Ben Kingsley, Denzel Washington, Angelina Jolie, Isabella Rossellini, and Judy Davis. (PF)
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Stephanie Bolster
Ana Rewakowicz
Ana Rewakowicz creates whimsical art through inflatable sculptures Stephanie Bolster’s keen imagistic sensibilities and ear for that are worn or entered by the visitor. Her playful design and linguistic rhythm have been imprinted on over a decade’s worth technological fascination explore private and public spaces, with of poetry. In 1998, Bolster published White Stone: The Alice Rewakowicz drawing inspiration from the experiences of the people Poems (Pierre Blanche: poèmes d’Alice), which won her both who activate them. For The Conversation Bubble (family therapy the Governor General’s Award and the Gerald Lampert Award. room), five people share a common space inside a transparent In quick succession, Two Bowls of Milk appeared a year later. bubble, with their heads free to move and their bodies squeezed As well as winning the Archibald Lampman Award, it was between two layers of vinyl. In The Inside Out Inflatable Room, shortlisted for Ontario’s Trillium Award. Invited to Montreal by an air-filled inflated rubber latex structure, a visitor can enter and Concordia University, Bolster quickly became a fixture in the feel the oddness of the space that was made from a mould of one city’s vibrant literary community. She is now one of the most of the rooms in her old apartment. She has received numerous coveted mentors in Concordia’s writing program, endowing grants for her work, which has been shown and experienced in numerous students with the generosity of her guidance. After many countries, including Mexico, the US, France, Belgium, and publishing her third collection, Pavilion, in 2002, she has Germany. Born in Poland, Rewakowicz moved to Montreal in 1998, dedicated herself to editorial work, presiding over the collected where she graduated with an MFA from Concordia. (PF) works of the late Ottawa poet, Diana Brebner (2005), as well as The Best Canadian Poetry in English (2008) and the collection Penned: Zoo Poems (2009). (DN) 14
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Susie Arioli These days she’s considered one of Montreal’s most successful jazz-and-blues vocalists, but back in the nineties, Susie Arioli was singing in the backrooms of the city’s many jazz clubs, trying to catch a break. That break came when Arioli met guitar player Jordan Officer. Together they formed The Susie Arioli Band, and in 1998, they were invited by the Montreal International Jazz Festival to open for Ray Charles. The performance was considered by many in attendance one of the brightest moments in the history of the festival, and it set The Susie Arioli Band on the way to greater opportunities. In 2000, the band released its debut album, It’s Wonderful. Arioli’s performance at that year’s Montreal Jazz Festival was a highly anticipated and sold-out event, evidence of Quebec’s growing love affair with her sultry vocal style. Now five albums in, Susie Arioli’s works have been both big sellers and critical favourites, garnering three Juno nominations and a devoted fanbase. (DN)
Albert Nerenberg
Gioconda Barbuto
Filmmaker Albert Nerenberg has pioneered some offbeat art Gioconda Barbuto proves that success in dance can be sustained forms. He has shot fictional characters in real-life situations, even into one’s fifties. Born in Toronto, she began her training in making “truvies,” and founded a company that produced the 1960s and still works regularly as both a choreographer and dozens of fictional movie trailers. His comic documentaries performer. She made her name as a soloist with Les Grands Ballets include Stupidity, which explores the nature of stupidity in Canadiens de Montréal from 1980–96. While there, she performed Western society; Escape to Canada, which sizes up Canada with dozens of choreographers, including James Kudelka and as a new Land of the Free; and Let’s All Hate Toronto, which Ginette Laurin. Before that, she danced with the Royal Winnipeg follows a character who tours the country to promote the city Ballet and the Minnesota Dance Theater. Barbuto was recognized Canadians love to hate. A laughologist, who speaks and writes for her choreography in 1996 with the Clifford E. Lee Award. Two on the benefits of laughter as therapy and exercise, his most years later, she was among a group of dancers, all over the age of recent film, Laughology, makes the case that laughter has led 40, invited to join Nederlands Dans Theater III. Gioconda spent to the rise of human civilization. Nerenberg began his career in eight years with NDT III and is featured in two of Jiri Kylian’s awardimprovisational theatre, leading the Montreal underground stage winning films, Birth-Day and Car Men. Barbuto has continued to troupe, Theatre Shmeatre. He currently lives in the Eastern choreograph and dance for independent projects, including the Townships and writes a monthly column for the Montreal 2008 projects, LifeLines, and Margie Gillis’s M.Body.7. (PF) Gazette. (PF)
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Mary di Michele A longstanding pillar of the creative writing program at Concordia University, the much-anthologized poet Mary di Michele is regarded as one of the country’s most prolific chroniclers in verse of the Italian-Canadian experience. Since her first volume, Tree of August, appeared in 1978, she has published eight collections, including Immune to Gravity (1986); Luminous Emergencies (1990), which was shortlisted for the Trillium Award; and Debriefing the Rose (1998), a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation A. M. Klein Award for Poetry. Particularly active in the eighties and nineties as a poet and editor, her prodigious output in the past decade slowed down to accommodate the writing of her ambitious second novel, Tenor of Love, published in 2005. Alongside the many young writers she mentors, di Michele is currently assembling a selection of 100 poems by the late Montreal poet, Irving Layton, whose works will soon be translated into French. (DN)
Rahul Varma
Nadia Myre
The Teesri Duniya Theatre has a motto: “Change the world, one Nadia Myre brings her Algonquin ancestry to her multidisciplinary play at a time.” Playwright and activist, Rahul Varma, its current art. From 2000–02, a group she led beaded over The Indian Act, a 55-page document. In 2005, she started The Scar Project, artistic director, co-founded the theatre in 1981. Originally an ongoing “open lab,” where viewers sew their scars – real or intended as a place where South Asian Canadians could express symbolic – onto stretched canvases and write their “scar stories” on themselves theatrically; since the early nineties, the theatre paper. She has had solo exhibits and has participated in numerous has become an important Montreal space for a wider politic. Its group shows such as Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian stock-in-trade are events that play out large and issues that get World, which travelled to Arizona, New York, and Toronto, and personal, such as the production of Jason Sherman’s Reading Shapeshifters, Time Travellers and Storytellers at the Royal Ontario Hebron (2000), directed by Wajdi Mouawad, which debated Museum. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée National the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Varma’s most recent production, des Beaux-Arts du Québec and the National Gallery of Canada all Truth and Treason (2009), used the Iraq war to discuss issues hold her work in their collections, and she been profiled in several of terrorism and military intervention. His most successful publications, including The New York Times and ARTnews. Born in play, Bhopal (2001), was named for the scarred Indian city Montreal, she obtained her MFA from Concordia University, and, in and dramatized the world’s largest industrial accident and 2009, won the Prix à la creation artistique du CALQ. (PF) in 1995–96, Counter Offence (L’Affaire Farhadi) focused on spousal abuse in an immigrant family. To encourage community dialogue, the theatre company often holds after-play talks with audiences and invited speakers. (PF) 16
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After working with her husband, Maurice Podbrey, to establish the Drawn into the world of dance through the Trojan horse of Centaur Theatre in the late sixties and seventies, director theatre, Vancouverite Deborah Dunn first arrived in Montreal Elsa Bolam founded her own theatre in 1981, putting on plays for in the mid-eighties to pursue a truncated degree at Concordia, young audiences in Montreal and taking theatre to Quebec’s outlying only to leave again a year later. But when she returned to the English-speaking communities. Across Quebec, Ontario, and New city in her early thirties, it was out of a commitment to her Brunswick, Geordie Productions reaches an average audience of artistic self and the belief that Montreal could nurture that 88,000 people each season, and has presented many Canadian part of her persona. It certainly has. Borrowing techniques she works over the years, from Billy Bishop Goes to War to A Promise is learned from her time drawing and painting, dance for Dunn a Promise. Just before Bolam stepped down as artistic director in is an evolution of design and form. Her dance company Trial & 2006, the Montreal English Critics’ Circle presented her with their Eros, first founded in Vancouver and now based in Montreal, Distinction Award “in recognition of her work nurturing young stage has so far developed eight evening-length works, including talent and taking theatre to far-flung audiences.” In 2008, Bolam group pieces such as Pandora’s Books and The Little Queen. An was named Member of the Order of Canada for her contribution in-demand dancer across the country, Dunn has also cultivated to Canadian theatre. She most appreciates having brought theatre a vibrant reputation as a first-class soloist with such works as to groups that do not have opportunities to see live shows: “It has Moth, Fuse, and Macbeth’s Wife. (DN) been a great pleasure to create imaginative worlds for young people, especially for those in small and isolated communities.” (PF) 17
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John N. Smith is an internationally respected filmmaker, best known for the 1992 drama, The Boys of St. Vincent, set in an abusive Catholic orphanage in the 1970s. He began his career working at the CBC, producing the public affairs program, The Way It Is. He then moved to the private sector, where he won an Emmy Award for the series, 51st State (2001). Smith joined the National Film Board in 1972 and directed numerous films, including The Masculine Mystique, a humorous docu-drama about four men’s take on feminism, co-directed with Giles Walker. In the 1980s, Smith brought to the screen a series of critically acclaimed NFB films, including First Stop, China, Sitting in Limbo, and Train of Dreams. More recent credits include feature films Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, and Love and Savagery. Television mini-series include Random Passage, Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, and The Englishman’s Boy. (PF)
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Rick Leong
Alanis Obomsawin
Alanis Obomsawin has made over 30 documentaries on issues Rick Leong is a painter who brings a contemporary approach affecting Aboriginal people in Canada. She directed Kanehsatake: to traditional Chinese imagery. A third generation Chinese270 Years of Resistance, the 1993 feature-length film that won 18 Canadian, he paints delicate large-scale canvasses that often international awards. It was the first of a series of four films about incorporate snakes, dragons, and landscapes – images used by the 1990 Oka Crisis, the 78-day armed standoff between Mohawk ancient Chinese artists. Leong gives life and animation to these warriors and the Canadian military. Her award-winning 2006 feature quiet scenes, with trees, fungi, mosses, and rocks morphing into documentary Waban-Aki: People from Where the Sun Rises, features skeletons of animals or graffiti-like script. His Dancing Serpent the people of Odanak and their stories. In 2009, the National Film in Dawn’s Quiet was purchased by the Montreal Museum of Fine Board released her documentary about a controversial professor at Arts. Represented by Parisian Laundry, his work has been shown McGill University, called Professor Norman Cornet: “Since when do across Canada in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Leong we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?” Obomsawin was born in Burnaby, BC, obtained a BFA at the University of began her career as a singer, writer and storyteller, but dove into Victoria, and came to Montreal to experience life in a large city filmmaking in 1967 with Christmas at Moose Factory, which she and study at Concordia University, where he obtained his MFA wrote and directed. She has won numerous awards throughout in 2007. (PF) her career, including the International Documentary Association’s Pioneer Award. (PF)
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Since graduating from Concordia University’s contemporary dance program in 2004, Andrew Turner has worked with numerous companies, paired with several dancers, and presented solo shows. He has appeared with PPS Danse, Trial and Eros, and Sasha Kleinplatz to name a few. His work, Duet For One Plus Digressions, won prizes from both Studio 303 and L’Office Québec-Amériques pour la jeunesse. The piece emerged when his partner did not show up for a performance and he decided to attempt the duet on his own. The “duet” has toured in France and Belgium. Turner grew up in NDG and, while many dancers have had to quit dance because of injuries, injury launched his career. Tendonitis forced the former history and literature student to become physical in his early twenties. Although he had little experience, he was accepted into the dance program in 2001 and has been forging his career since. (PF)
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Paul Hopkins
Rawi Hage
Few contemporary authors have received international acclaim Paul Hopkins began his career acting with Montreal theatre as quickly as Lebanese writer/photographer Rawi Hage. In rapid companies, including the Saidye Bronfman Theatre (now the succession, he published two of the most widely discussed Segal Centre), Geordie Productions, and Repercussion Theatre, Canadian novels of the past decade: De Niro’s Game (2006) and which has been performing Shakespeare in Montreal parks since Cockroach (2008). Both novels were named finalists for Canada’s 1990. His work with Repercussion Theatre and on classical three major literary awards, and in 2007, De Niro’s Game became stages in Atlantic Canada led to two seasons at Ontario’s the second Canadian novel to win the IMPAC Dublin Literary internationally renowned Stratford Festival, which prepared Award, one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for a single work him to assume the role of Artistic Director of Repercussion of fiction. Hage’s fresh take on the immigrant experience has won Theatre in 2007. Hopkins had a leading role in Armistead him numerous accolades in Quebec as well, where his novels Maupin’s “Tales of the City”, portraying the sexually active garnered three Quebec Writers’ Federation Awards. Its francophone gay gardener Michael “Mouse” Tolliver in the television series’ readers were equally enthusiastic about De Niro’s Game (Parfum de Showtime run. He has also been a regular on Montreal film and poussière); it was awarded the Prix des libraries du Québec and won television shoots, including the lead role in the series “Vampire the 2009 edition of Combats des livres, a Radio-Canada equivalent High,” filmed in Montreal, the series “The Hunger,” and Steve to CBC’s Canada Reads. (DN) Galuccio’s film, Mambo Italiano. (PF)
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Colin Low’s innovations in documentary filmmaking have made a lasting impact on the genre and his films have garnered over 100 awards. Born in 1926 in Alberta, he moved to Montreal in 1945 to join the National Film Board, where he directed The Romance of Transportation in Canada, a witty animated film that viewed Canadian history through the impact of technological developments. He moved to documentaries and directed the award-winning short, Corral. Filmed in Alberta on the ranch where Low spent his childhood, Corral eschewed the usual commentary and employed only a solo guitar piece to accompany the lyrical images of a cowboy rounding up horses. In 1952, he and Wolf Koenig directed the film, City of Gold, which documented the Dawson City gold rush told mainly by means of still photographs. Low also helped develop the NFB’s Challenge for Change program, which, from 1967–80, put film and video equipment into the hands of people from diverse communities. (PF)
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Courtney Wing is a perfect example of what happens when a rich mixture of musical heritages all live and perform within a few square kilometres of each other. An orchestral folkpop bandleader who fronts a 15-piece orchestra replete with two violins, a double bass, a drum kit, a synthesizer, and a 10-member opera choir, his songsmanship can deftly blend any number of musical instruments into one song. Given the ingredients, it’s no surprise that a Wing song can go from homely to heavenly at the stop of a dime. Wing hasn’t always performed with such lush Montrealais accompaniment. He recorded his first album, For the Good Times (2001), in Vancouver and Victoria, and it wasn’t until the creation of Starlight Shuffle (2005) that he joined the Canadian musical emigration to Montreal and added his voice to the city’s rock renaissance. In 2008, Wing formed his orchestra and his third album, Bouquet of Might and Fury, has just been released. (DN)
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alcides lanza is a prodigious avant-garde musician and composer. Whether her subject is de-contextualized body parts floating Born in Argentina in 1929, he studied composition and electronic randomly in space or nudes self-consciously set in nature, music and moved to New York in 1965 on a Guggenheim visual artist Andrea Szilasi’s creativity stems from the alienation fellowship. While there, he worked at the Columbia-Princeton of human anatomy. Born in Montreal in 1964, Szilasi may use Electronic Music Center and studied with several great musicians, photography as the foundation of her creations, but admirers including Aaron Copeland. In 1971, he was hired as a McGill would be hard-pressed to call her work realistic. Drawing University professor and, since 1974, has been the director of the inspiration from the pages of science magazines and anatomy Digital Composition Studios (formerly the Electronic Music Studio). textbooks, her captured images of the human body are often lanza is particularly interested in the music of the three Americas cut, manipulated and distorted to portray darkly impressionistic and his compositions make use of both traditional instruments portraits of both our internal and external selves. A graduate of and electronica. He has made several recordings as a pianist and Concordia’s fine arts program, Szilasi has exhibited her work has been a frequent performer on radio and television. He was the across Canada, as well as in Mexico and Europe, and her pieces subject of a 2007 biography by Pamela Jones called alcides lanza: can be found in the collections of the Canadian Museum of portrait of a composer, and won the 2003 Victor Martyn LynchContemporary Photography the Musée National des Beaux-Arts Staunton Award from the Canada Council, which recognized his du Québec. (DN) career as a composer. (PF)
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Inspired in large part by her family’s immigration from Hungary when she was still a child, Elaine Kalman Naves’ broad body of work plumbs the multicultural complexities of Montreal, the city that she has embraced as home. A writer, journalist, and broadcaster whose endeavours reach back two decades, Naves has authored several books that explore the Hungarian-Jewish experience, beginning with Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (1996), which won the Elie Wiesel Prize. A notable documenter of Montreal immigrant writing, her 1998 book, Putting Down Roots: Montreal’s Immigrant Writers, garnered the Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and expanded on the work she began with The Writers of Montreal (1993) and continued in Storied Streets: Montreal in the Literary Imagination, cowritten with Bryan Demchinsky (2000). Naves is a frequent contributor to the CBC Radio program Ideas. (DN)
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Artist Karilee Fuglem infiltrates architectural spaces Catherine Kidd is a writer and performer whose multimedia with subtly visible materials in installations that are collaborations and solo works have toured extensively to intended to be experienced physically. Imaginary Range, festivals throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. nearly invisible overhead, draws an audible gasp when its Her solo show, Sea Peach, described as “an adult blend of massive presence is finally noticed; while the discs that Dr. Seuss and Aesop’s Fables,” toured internationally for six make up Secret Visibility hypnotically flutter in and out years. It also won a 2003 Montreal English Critics’ Circle of sight, and in my Darling one can walk through clear Award for Best New Text. Her short story Green-Eyed Beans was threads suspended ceiling to floor, bringing intimacy nominated for the 2005 Journey Prize. Her performed poetry to a vast space. She has exhibited and participated has played to audiences from Whitehorse to Oslo, and in small in projects across Canada, including solo shows at clubs in New York to amphitheatres in Cape Town. In 2007, Montreal’s Darling Foundry in 2006 and Toronto’s Koffler her novel, Missing the Ark was published. Kidd, who graduated Centre of the Arts in 2008. Her work has been collected from Concordia’s creative writing master’s program, is based by several museums, including the National Gallery of in Montreal but spent most of 2009 in a cabin on the Bay of Canada and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Fundy in Nova Scotia working on her next collection of storyOriginally from BC, Fuglem studied in Calgary and poems, Hyena Subpoena. (PF) Toronto before moving to Montreal in 1989 for Concordia University’s MFA program. She stayed because she finds the city’s linguistic mix provides an ideal setting for visual art.
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A veritable movement in Montreal’s garage/punk underground, over the last several years the Red Mass collective has amassed over thirty musicians in its ranks. Instigated largely by Roy Vucino (aka Choyce) and bassist, The Roller, after the demise of their short-lived but popular band CPC Gangbangs, the duo began Red Mass as another recording project, only to see its parameters grow as more musicians became involved. Vucino, who comes with an infamous local reputation for partying hard and working even harder, was eager to develop Red Mass as more than just an average band (he’d already been in about fifteen of those). As a result, the collective has developed into an occasionally unwieldy and always indefinable musical genre. These days, its members are a who’s who of Montreal rock, including musicians from such bands as Black Feelings, Hot Springs, Demon’s Claw, and Ghost Limbs. (DN)
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A multidisciplinary visual artist whose work evokes the “A work of art does not simply observe reality,” says ballet issues of identity and cultural diversity surrounding her dancer Benjamin Hatcher, “It is purposeful, inspires us to various roles as a Chinese-Canadian artist, a mother and achieve greater awareness, and brings about change.” Such are a community worker, Mary Sui Yee Wong has been a the philosophical underpinnings behind the graceful movements continuous presence on both the local and international of Hatcher’s ballet. Born in Toledo, as a child Hatcher moved visual arts scene for nearly two decades now. Having to Quebec City, where he studied dance at the Académie moved from Hong Kong to Canada as a child, Wong’s des Grands Ballets Canadiens. Since then, he has danced artwork often draw upon personal memories, histories, major roles in ballets such as Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Na and legacies, in an attempt to examine the dialectics Floresta, and Piccolo Mondo. Not content to simply perform, of the constructed self in constant flux, subject to everHatcher has been creating his own ballets and choreography shifting national identification as the world moves towards since the age of sixteen. In 1998 he was awarded first prize an aggressively promoted concept of globalization. at the Festival des arts de Saint-Sauveur for his piece De Site-specific and experiential, her installations are a l’argile de l’amour, je t’ai façonné. In 2002, he premiered culmination of Western theory and Asian sensibilities Covenant, which went on to win the Clifford E. Lee Award for and often manifest in unusual juxtapositions. Active choreography. In 2003, he pushed ballet toward more popular within the Montreal arts community, Wong has in the past fare, setting the dance to the music of The Beatles in The coordinated the MFA & Studio Arts Visiting Artist Program Beatles Go Baroque. (DN) at Concordia University, where she currently serves as an Assistant Professor. 22
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The seventies and eighties were a golden era for new Canadian One of the numerous offshoots to spring out of the short-lived but legendary Montreal instrumental-rock collective Godspeed drama. Tableau D’Hôte Theatre’s Mike Payette and Mathieu Perron You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion is now over a decade have brought Montreal audiences some of that gold, and more. Not old. Originally a side-project for Efrim Menuck to explore fringes only do they produce new Canadian plays, but they also pay tribute of sound not opened by Godspeed, the original Mt. Zion enlisted to that golden era by re-mounting some of the best plays ever Godspeed violinist Sophie Trudeau and bassist Thierry Amar produced in this country. Since it was founded in 2005, Tableau for its live debut in 1999. By 2000, the trio had released its D’Hôte has mounted more than a dozen works from greats like debut album on Constellation Records (incidentally owned Judith Thompson, George F. Walker, Joan MacLeod, Sally Clark, and by yet another member of Godspeed). A year later, Mt. Zion’s Morris Panych. Payette and Perron, who have been working together membership had blossomed into a sextet, and their 2001 since they were teenagers, are also making household names out of sophomore album accommodated both a fuller string section newcomers like Joel Fishbane, Wandy Graham, and Jordan Hall, and and an even longer variation of the band name. Ever since, Mt. more established writers like Ken Norris, Mike Czuba, and Endre Zion’s sound has eagerly spiralled into ever-new directions. Now Farkas. Montreal audiences and critics have been recognizing their supporting their sixth album, Kollaps Tradixionales (2010), efforts: a Montreal Mirror poll named three of Tableau D’Hôte’s Menuck and his ever-changing cast of instrumentalists have plays among the top 10 productions of the 2008–09 season. (PF) entrenched themselves internationally as one of Canada’s mustsee live acts. (DN) 23
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The year 2009 was a breakthrough one for Montreal writer Claire Holden Rothman. The Heart Specialist, her ambitious historical novel, was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, named one of Quill & Quire’s 15 most important books of 2009, and readers kept it in on the bestseller list of The Gazette for an impressive 44 weeks. Her previous works of fiction – Salad Days (1990) and Black Tulips (1999) – paint a distinctively impressionistic portrait of the daily lives of English Montrealers. In 1994, she won the John Glassco Translation Prize for her rendering of the 1837 volume, The Influence of a Book (Le chercheur de trésor) by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, widely regarded as the first novel written in French Canada. For many years a leader of the fiction workshop at McGill University, Rothman’s involvement in her hometown’s literary community also extends to journalism, book reviews, and translation. (DN)
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Claire Holden Rothman
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David Solway
Daniel Olson
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David Solway ranks among the most highly regarded contemporary contributors to Montreal’s heritage as a city of poetry. Born in 1941, his poems first saw publication in 1962, and he has since published twelve poetry collections, many of which find inspiration in the Greek Islands, where he sometimes lives. In 2004, his collection Franklin’s Passage was the first English work to ever win Le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and Reaching The Clear (2007) continued that winning streak with the Quebec Writers’ Federation A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Solway has also penned seven books of non-fiction. Not one to shy away from controversy, Solway’s literary reviews have garnered him a reputation as a polemicist. In 2007, he extended his divisive ideas into socio-political thought with the publication of his non-fiction book, The Big Lie: On Terror, Anti-Semitism, and Identity. He continues to court controversy with Hear, O Israel! (2009) and his forthcoming polemic, Living in the Valley of Shmoon, itself a companion to the forthcoming collection of essays, The Occupied Mind. (DN)
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Founded in 1995 by native Montrealer Murray Lightburn, The Dears Daniel Olson is an installation artist and sculptor whose detailed draft a more artful Britpop swagger onto the ragged framework and sometimes haunting work has been seen in countless of Boulevard St. Laurent romanticism. In 2000, local indie-label galleries across Canada. His eye for detail comes across in Grenadine Records released their debut album, End of a Hollywood the 1998 installation, Private Investigation, which recreates Bedtime Story, which put the group at the forefront of a particularly a classic private eye’s office, right down to the worn wooden fertile period for orchestral-infused rock music in Montreal. The desk and bottle of scotch. His menacing side was described band’s success grew to international proportions with the critically in a 2002 CanadianART review that called his Oakville acclaimed release of No Cities Left (2004). After recording installation, Philosophical Moments: “a carnival haunted and extensively touring the albums Gang of Losers (2006) and house on sedatives.” He has received numerous arts grants, Missiles (2008), the group saw several dramatic member changes. including the prestigious Canada Council Paris Studio Award While some prophecized of the band’s demise, 2010 saw Murray and has been offered several residencies, such as the Irish Lightburn and keyboardist Natalia Yanchak rebuild the group with Museum of Modern Art Artists’ Work Programme. Olson has also an all-star lineup including former members Patrick Krief, Rob published many artists’ books. Born in California to Canadian Benvie (of Thrush Hermit) and Roberto Arquilla. (DN) parents, Olson came to art through degrees in mathematics and architecture. He obtained a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from York University. He’s been making Montreal his home since 2001. (PF)
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Trevor Gould
Carolyn Marie Souaid
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Trevor Gould begins with the premise that a zoo, with its animals on display, is very much like an art exhibit. He creates multimedia productions and installs them in non-conventional venues: a botanical garden, a public park, and a natural museum. Through photos, watercolours, drawings, life-sized sculptures, and various flora and fauna symbolism, Gould explores issues like colonialism and identity. Using exhibition techniques such as taxidermy, theatrical presentation, and archival documents, he looks at our past and present relationships with nature. His exhibit Posing for the Public, which appeared at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain in 1998 and toured nationally and internationally, gathered artifacts and archival material from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Gould’s own work. Born in South Africa, Gould came to Canada in 1980 and lives in Montreal. He is a member of Concordia University’s Hexagram, the Institute for Research and Creation in Media Arts and Technologies. (PF)
Eleanor Stubley
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Hailed in 1996 as “one of Canada’s most promising young As a three-time nominee of the Quebec Writers’ Federation A. conductors,” the indefatigable Eleanor Stubley has spent the M. Klein Prize for Poetry, Carolyn Marie Souaid’s reputation last fifteen years living up to the accolade. A conductor and among Montreal’s current generation of poets is both secure musicologist, Stubley began her music career in the early eighties and considerable. The current editor of one of the country’s as a budding French-horn player. In 1989, she joined McGill’s top poetry houses, Signature Editions, Souaid first collection, Faculty of Music as an associate professor and by 1992 had 1995’s Swimming into the Light, emerged as a thesis from won the Prague Conservatory’s International Dvorak Competition, Concordia University’s writing program and went on to be dedicated to the discovery of new classical talent. Since then, nominated for the 1996 A.M. Klein. Since then, she has Stubley has conducted numerous Canadian and international published six more volumes, many of which focus on important ensembles, including the Massey Singers, the Bach Festival moments in Quebecois history. Her latest publication, a Orchestra, and members of the Canadian Opera Company. Eager collaboration with fellow poet, Endre Farkas, is a book and DVD to contribute back to her home city, Stubley currently serves as called Blood is Blood (2010). Not content to only write, Souaid artistic director of Chora Carmina (an organization that undertakes is also respected as an avid participant in Montreal’s literary interdisciplinary film projects with Montreal painters, sculptors, and scene, having co-produced two major events in the city. Poetry dancers) as well Montreal’s Yellow Door Choir. As a musicologist, in Motion showcased poetry on Montreal buses and Circus of she has written many books, including Louis Riel: The Opera and Its Words/Cirque des mots developed theatrical presentations of Making (2005), which won the Opus Prize. (DN) multi-lingual poetry. In 2009, she co-founded the online review, Poetry Quebec. (DN)
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Rock group Priestess creates pop-driven melodies with metal muscle. With two albums to date, it has garnered a growing legion of fans around the world. When their first album, Hello Master, came out, the indie music site, kevchino.com, called them “one of the most primal music forces to appear on the scene in a long time.” A year later, group members Mikey Heppner, Mike Dyball, Vince Nudo, and Dan Watchorn were sharing a bill with the group, Megadeth in the U.K., and their song, Lay Down, was featured in the video game, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Their second album, Prior to the Fire, was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by David Schiffman, who worked with Nine Inch Nails. “This is no-nonsense in-yourface hard rock music at its best,” wrote Rock Choice, a website dedicated to hard rock and heavy metal music. (PF)
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Priestess
Catherine Widgery
AIDS Wolf / SERIPOP
Few people outside the fine arts are familiar with the name and Blending elements of post-hardcore sludge, white-noise peaks, admirable reputation of public and environmental artist and no-wave skittishness into one loud hammer attack of riffage, Catherine Widgery, but it’s safe to say that many a Quebecer Montreal’s AIDS Wolf are among one of the heaviest and most has been transfixed by her powerful, larger-than-life sculptures notorious underground rock bands to break off the Main in the past and designs. From Wind Fossils (1988), found in the grassy decade. Though the band has undergone more personnel changes knolls of the Rimouski Museum to Wind Boat (1992), the than most bands could withstand, the current trio of Chloe Lum, oblong steel-and-aluminium windmill that greets drivers as they Yannick Desranleau, and Alex Moskos are holding tight. AIDS Wolf enter Ville Lasalle, Widgery’s artworks have been illustrating was known for their infamous live show long before they began the history of this province for over 20 years. In 1992, she releasing records on American labels such as Lovepump United was commissioned to commemorate the 350 th anniversary of and the legendary noise-rock imprint Skingraft. While Moskos has divided his time between AIDS Wolf, spazzy space-rock jammers Montreal. The result, Passing Song, is a remembrance to the The Unireverse and his solo project Drainolith, Lum and Desranleau many beavers killed during the fur trade that brought commerce have perhaps left a wider imprint on Montreal’s indie community to the city’s port. Montrealers would also be advised to look out through their poster and album art as Seripop. Their unique for Le vent se lève (1996), which stands in front of the HEC designs have graced the concerts and records of countless bands Montreal, the business school at the Université de Montréal. and festivals, been pasted onto walls and floors of art galleries as (DN) large-scale 3D installations, and been featured in books such as as Steven Heller’s New Vintage Type and John Foster’s New Masters of Poster Design. In 2007 Seripop was even the recipient of a Juno Award for CD/DVD Artwork Design of the Year. (DN) 26
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Carmine Starnino
Norman Nawrocki
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In just over a decade’s time, poet and critic, Carmine Starnino, has established himself as one of the most influential underforty writer in Quebec’s anglo-literature scene. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve Magazine, the Signal Editions’ editor for Véhicule Press, and the non-fiction editor for Porcupine’s Quill Press. His work has won many awards, including a nomination for the 2009 Governor General’s Award and the Quebec Writers’ Federation A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry in 2009 for his latest poetry collection, This Way Out. Debuting in 1997 with a volume of poetry entitled The New World, he garnered a Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book. Credo (2001) won the Canadian Authors’ Association Prize for Poetry, while With English Subtitles (2004) took the Quebec Writers’ Federation A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Starnino’s non-fiction belies an expert sense of contemporary poetics. Among his most significant critical contributions are A Lover’s Quarrel (2004), A New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005), and The Best Canadian Essays of 2009. (DN)
Roger Sinha
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If dancers interpret the circumstances of their lives into movement, Anarchist, activist, and unconventional artist, Norman Nawrocki then Roger Sinha brings a range of cultures with him to the stage embodies the bohemianism, punk audacity, and individualistic every time he performs. Born in London to an Armenian mother and verve of Montreal’s creative independence. Born in Vancouver, Indian father, Sinha arrived in Saskatchewan at the age of eight. he arrived to Quebec in 1981, where he at first dabbled in From there, he moved to Toronto in his early twenties, where an the cabaret arts. Since 1985, he has recorded and released economics degree fell by the wayside when he discovered dance over 50 albums and compilations both solo and with his classes. For Sinha, dance provided a means to reconnect with his bands like Rhythm Activism, Bakunin’s Bum, DaZoque!, The heritage, and he soon specialized in the Southern Indian form Flaming Perogies, The Montreal Manhattan Project, SANN, known as Bharata Natyam. Drawn to Montreal in the’80s by the and many others. He has also produced and written numerous, Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault – a meeting point for many of topical, musical ‘community cabarets’ (in English and French) Montreal’s dancers – Sinha incorporates aspects of martial arts, about tenants’ and welfare rights, and anti-globalization. ballet, and contemporary dance into the traditional forms that Along with music and theatre, Nawrocki has also published create the basis for his choreography. In 1991, he founded Sinha seventeen chapbooks and manifestos since 1986, including Danse as a vehicle for his hybrid style, and the troupe has toured the acclaimed collection of short stories, The Anarchist & The extensively in Canada, and performed at American and European Devil Do Cabaret. He’s also known across Canada and the US venues. (DN) for provocative, queer-positive sex-comedy cabarets such as Sex Toys!, My Dick & Other Manly Tales, I Don’t Understand Women! and Lessons from a 7ft Penis. (DN)
Music promoter Dan Seligman is a driving force for Montreal’s thriving indie music scene. He is creative director of Pop Montreal, a festival he launched in 2002 with Noelle Sorbara and Peter Rowan; promoter for Plants and Animals and The Arcade Fire, whose Quebec shows he has produced since the launch of their breakthrough album, Funeral (2004); and manager of the eccentric Jewish hip-hop artist, Socalled. Seligman was born in Toronto in 1976 and, shortly after graduating, started his music career by helping out his brother’s band, Stars. This evolved into booking, promoting, and managing the group for three years, during which time they found international success. It was at that point that Pop Montreal began, with Seligman booking artists as diverse as Patti Smith, Loudon Wainwright III, The Butthole Surfers, Metric, and Roxanne Shante, and promoting emerging bands like The Unicorns, Duchess Says, and Think About Life. (PF)
Adad Hannah
Joel Yanofsky
A prominent literary journalist in Canadian letters, Born in New York and raised variously in Israel, England, and Joel Yanofsky has been documenting Montreal’s writers for over two Vancouver, for the last nine years multi-media artist Adad decades. Among his most celebrated portraits is his 2004 memoir Hannah has lived in Montreal, where he has pushed open the of the late Mordecai Richler, Mordecai & Me: An Appreciation of borders between the body and installation art by fusing the a Kind, which won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant two in thoroughly evocative ways. Hannah combines video, Prize for Non-Fiction. An ardent and respected arbiter of new voices, photography and performance into tableaux vivants. A multiYanofsky’s award-winning journalism has introduced many Montreal faceted exchange between art and history, Hannah uses the writers to the rest of the country through the pages of The Globe & space between the static body and the recorded motion to make Mail, Chatelaine, Quill & Quire, The Village Voice, the Toronto Star, statements on the tension of our bodies’ natural dichotomies. and many others. His keen understanding of the writer’s world – and Young and prolific, in any given year his installations can be the element that elevates Yanofsky’s journalism from that of his found around the world, living in galleries as far and wide as peers – comes from his practice of the art itself. His 1997 novel, Berlin, New York, Seoul, or Australia. In 2003, he received Jacob’s Ladder, was named finalist to both the Grand Prix du livre an Honourable Mention at the 10th International Media Arts de Montreal and the Prix Parizeau, while his 2008 personal essay Biennale. In 2009, he won the Canada Council’s prestigious “What You Need” won the CBC Quebec Literary Competition. (DN) Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding artistic achievement by a Canadian artist in mid-career. (DN)
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Dan Seligman
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J. R. Carpenter
Connie Kaldor
A recipient of both the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal and the Order J. R. Carpenter is a new media artist, fiction writer, poet, of Canada, it’s with great surprise that English folk singer/songwriter essayist, performer and pioneering author of electronic Connie Kaldor has, by her own admission, a relatively low profile literature. Since she began using the web as a medium for within the Quebec arts communities. Although she has lived here for the creation and dissemination of non-linear, intertextual, nearly twenty years, Kaldor was born in Regina and spent her early hypermedia narratives in 1995, her web-based electronic artistic years in Toronto, where she divided her time between music literature has been presented in museums, galleries, festivals, and theatre. Ultimately, music proved to be a more compelling draw conferences and collections around the world. Her short fiction, and by 1981, she had founded her own independent record label, poetry and essays on textile art and technology have been Coyote Entertainment Group, and released her first album, One of translated into French and Spanish, broadcast on CBC and These Days. From that point, recognition of her considerable talent published in numerous anthologies, catalogues and journals. has spread across North America, supported by 15 albums of folk Her essay, Wyoming Is Haunted, won the inaugural QWF Carte and children’s music. In 1991, following the birth of her first child, Blanche Quebec Prize. She is also a two-time winner of the CBC Kaldor joined her husband in Montreal, where she now manages Quebec Short Story Competition. Her first novel, Words the Dog a vibrant career outside the province from her home on the South Knows, a fictional work set in Montreal’s Mile End, won her the Shore. In addition to consistent critical praise for her songwriting Expozine Alternative Press Award for Best English Book. Born talents, Kaldor has also won three Juno Awards. (DN) on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, she has made Montreal her home since 1990. (PF) 29
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Dancer Linda Rabin has been teaching movement for 40 years. She has taught extensively across Canada for many of the country’s major dance companies, schools and university programs. Born in Montreal in 1946, Rabin graduated from New York’s Juilliard School and, in 1981, co-founded Les ateliers de danse moderne de Montréal. Since then, her choreographies have been commissioned and performed by Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Nederlands Dans Theater 2, Israel’s Batsheva Company, Winnipeg’s Contemporary Dancers, Toronto’s Dancemakers and Montréal Danse. She has self produced several works, including the seminal dance-theater piece, The White Goddess (1977). Linda’s choreographies are signified by a minimalist and ritualistic movement style, strong musicality and having both a lyric and dramatic expression. Her last choreography was the hour-long work, Katabasis, presented in 1992 and was co-produced by Danse Cité, Montréal Danse and Canada Dance Festival.
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Linda Rabin
Tim Brady
Naomi London
Naomi London has given her audiences big plush letters that lean Equally at home in the worlds of jazz, contemporary classical, over each other and spell out the word “hope,” knitted sweaters and electro-acoustic composition, shape-shifting guitarist Tim that wrap around heads and trees or sport enormously long arms Brady has blended many of Montreal’s musical antecedents into a richly complex and international career. In 1997, Guitar and adorned walls with polka dots. The Montreal visual artist, Player magazine named the Montreal-born Brady “one of the according to critic Anna Maria Carlevaris, “engages the viewer’s 30 most important guitarists for the future of the instrument,” imagination in play, wonder and sensual delight.” She has exhibited and, looking back over his adventurous cultural contributions, in Canada, the US, Europe, and Japan and has been involved in it’s easy to see why. His first compositions emerged during numerous group shows. Her work can be found in public and private a seven-year sojourn in Toronto in the 80s. Brady’s stylized collections, including Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts and Musée orchestrations belie an eccentric understanding of chamber d’art contemporain. She graduated with a MFA from UCLA and a music that is modernist in tendencies and ambitious in scope, BFA from Concordia University, and now teaches in the Fine Arts earning him comparison to stylistically unbound predecessors Department at Dawson College. She was lured back to Montreal such as Elliot Carter. In 1987, Brady moved back to Montreal by several things, including family, the opportunity to live in two and since then, has released 16 albums. His work is regularly languages and in what she sees as a liberal Quebec culture. (PF) performed on some of the world’s most prestigious stages. When not composing chamber music, he works with his ensemble, Bradyworks, who have become a favourite draw among electroacoustic audiences across North America. (DN) 30
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Montrealer Colleen Curran writes funny plays and novels that are peopled with loveable and quirky characters in often-harried situations. One of the most popular of her almost two-dozen plays, Cake-Walk, about a cake-baking contest gone awry, has been produced more than 50 times across Canada and Whoopi Goldberg later acquired it for her Showtime TV series. CakeWalk debuted at the Blyth Festival, the annual summer series of Canadian productions that has welcomed six of her plays, including the very popular Moose County and Miss Balmoral of the Bayview. Her play, Sacred Hearts, which she adapted for CBC Radio, won an international Gabriel Award, one of 10 playwriting awards she has earned. Curran is also a teacher at the National Theatre School and a novelist, publishing a trilogy of novels: Something Drastic, Overnight Sensation, and Guests of Chance. (PF)
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Colleen Curran
Michel Perron
Kevin Tierney
A film producer with an enviable track record for having his finger Michel Perron is a versatile performer who takes on comic and on the pulse of the public, Kevin Tierney, with his company Park Ex dramatic roles in both English and French. In the more than Pictures, has developed some of the most talked-about Canadian 20 years he has been acting, he’s performed in over 40 stage film productions of the last decade. A 1978 Concordia graduate, productions, 55 films, 10 television series, 50 commercials, Tierney is best known as the producer and co-writer behind the and given life to several cartoon characters. He has often been 2006 national box-office smash, Bon Cop, Bad Cop. A rare called on by Montreal writer Steve Galuccio: he performed comedic romp through Canada’s ultra-sensitive cultural divide, the in the 2009 play In Piazza San Domenico at the Centaur film earned Tierney both Genie Awards and Prix Jutras. However, Theatre, played in both the stage and film versions of the even before Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Tierney had built a reputation hit, Mambo Italiano, and appeared regularly in the TV series, for exposing Canadian taboos. One Dead Indian: MOW (2004), Ciao Bella. Perron won a 2007 ACTRA Award for outstanding dramatized the 1995 Ipperwash Crisis, while Choice: The Henry voice performance for Monster Allergy and received a Masques Morgentaler Story (2002) brought abortion to national television Award for a supporting role in the English production of Michel screens. Since 2006, he has produced movies in both French and Tremblay’s play, Assorted Candies. He was born in Richmond, English, including Serveuses Demandées (2007) and Love and Quebec, just north of Sherbrooke, grew up on Montreal’s South Savagery (2008). This year sees Tierney return to the team that Shore and trained in the theatre program at Dawson College. delivered his biggest success, with the quintessentially Montréalais (PF) Notre Dame de Grace. After decades behind the scenes, Tierney is directing his first film, French Immersion. (DN) 31
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Whether it’s vocal jazz, acting, children’s literature, or teaching, the multi-talented Ranee Lee has spent the better part of life in the Canadian arts scene. Born in Brooklyn in 1942, Lee first moved to Montreal after high school, where her first break came in the Emerson Bar & Grill stage production of Lady Day, a musical portrait of Billie Holiday. Since then she has had many acting highlights that highlight her singing abilities, including the stage production Dark Divas, the film Giant Steps, and the television program The Performers. She has won the prestigious Dora Mavis Moore Award for her acting, and in 2007, she was honoured with the ACTRA Award for Lifetime Achievement. In the fall of 2009, Lee starred in the Black Theatre Workshop presentation of Swan Song For Maria. A significant contributor to McGill’s jazz program, Lee has also recorded eleven jazz albums for the Justin Time label; her most recent release, 2010’s Ranee Lee Lives Upstairs, won the Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. In 2006, Lee was awarded the Order of Canada for her contribution to the arts. (DN)
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Ranee Lee
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Anna Fuerstenberg Playwright and arts communitarian Anna Fuerstenberg has been active on the Montreal scene from a very young age, when she won a scholarship to the Montreal Theatre School. Having been born in post-war refugee camps outside Stuttgart, she took decisive advantage of the scholarship, and has been writing, producing, and directing theatre ever since. Alongside a raft of cultural criticism in the pages of The Gazette, Marianne Ackerman’s Rover Arts, and The Senior Times, Fuerstenberg has published three plays, as well as a handful of short stories and poems. In addition to writing, she has also been involved in the shaping of Montreal’s younger actors, by directing three plays at Concordia University and teaching the tenets of theatre and acting in many Montreal classrooms. A tireless supporter of the arts, Fuerstenberg has worked behind the scenes with numerous theatre companies in Montreal and Toronto, and currently serves as the theatre representative on the board of the Quebec’s English Language Arts Network. (DN)
Trevor W. Payne, C. M.
Nairne Holtz
Trevor W. Payne, C. M., has directed the Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir from its humble beginnings as a church youth choir to its current situation, performing for dignitaries around the world. The choir has sung for Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II, and appeared on stage with Foreigner, Oliver Jones, Salome Bey, Céline Dion, and Ray Charles; and earned a Juno Award in 1995 for its CD, Jubilation V: Joy to the World. In 1996, he was appointed to the Order of Canada. Payne, who moved to Montreal from the Barbados as a boy, became a pop musician in the sixties, studying music at McGill University in the early seventies. While he admits that he can be a demanding choir director, he told The Hour that his proudest moments come “in rehearsal when the kids struggle and struggle and struggle and finally they hit it and everybody gets the chills, including me.” He was inducted into their Montreal Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 2009. (PF)
In 2007, Nairne Holtz released her debut novel, The Skin Beneath, and went on to win the Alice B. Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction, become a finalist for the QWF McAuslan First Book Prize, and have the Globe and Mail call her “a writer to watch.” Since then she has written This One’s Going to Last Forever, a novella with stories, which the Gazette described as “funny, witty, and original.” Thanks to her skills as a former librarian, a comprehensive annotated bibliography of Canadian lesbian literature exists at www.nairneholtz.com.
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Louis Rastelli In 2001, artist Louis Rastelli did something unique in the area of arts promotion. He created the Distroboto. The machines, found in various cafés, bars and bookstores in Montreal, sell art, crafts, music, film, and writing out of former cigarette machines. New York Times Magazine named the Distroboto network one of the “Ideas of the Year.” Since its inception in 2001, more than 30,000 pieces of art from over 600 Montreal artists have been sold. Rastelli began his career by writing music reviews and, in 1996, began publishing Fish Piss Magazine, an irregular compendium of local writing and art named “Canada’s best zine” by Broken Pencil Magazine. In 2002, along with other small publishers, Rastelli co-founded Expozine, Montreal’s annual small press, comic and zine fair. He also co-founded Archive Montreal, dedicated to preserving indie art. In 2007, Insomniac Press published his debut novel, A Fine Ending. (PC)
Think About Life
Erín Moure
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Erín Moure is the author of 13 collections of poetry and has won Following in the footsteps of dance-punk bands like The the Governor General’s and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, the Rapture and local loft-party legends The Unicorns, indieQuebec Writers’ Federation Klein Prize, and has been a three-time rock band Think About Life formed in 2005, emerging out finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is one of Canada’s most of a vibrant scene of ever-growing parties in empty factory eminent poets, as well a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, spaces along the fringes of Mile-End, Griffintown, and St. and Portuguese. One of Moure’s most acclaimed books was Little Henri. Originally the brainchild of drummer Matt Shane and Theatres (2005), an avant-garde work that brought Galician and keyboardist Graham Van Pelt (a studio engineer who also spends the poetic musings of her heteronym Elisa Sampedrín (a fictitious time in local band Miracle Fortress), the band quickly added character based on herself) together in a plea for little theatres in vocalist Martin Cesar to complete the line-up. Their main haunt the face of the big theatres of war. She admits her work operates was the Friendship Cove right across the street from the Bell on the edge of difficulty and acceptability. Among her many Centre. It was here that the band recorded its eponymous 2006 translations of poetry is the 2008 book she translated with Robert debut album (released by respected Montreal label Alien8) and Majzels, Nicole Brossard’s Notebook of Roses and Civilization. Her it was also where they played many of their shows. The album latest book is O Resplandor (2010). (PF) gained them enough notoriety to tour internationally, opening for fellow Montrealers, Wolf Parade, as well as international acts like Franz Ferdinand. After a few line-up additions, Think About Life released their second album in 2009, the much-praised Family. (DN)
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In the early nineties, Robyn Sarah wrote a short story called Accept My Story. The story was more than accepted: it took home a National Magazine Award and a Journey Prize nomination. Despite her success in the short story genre, Sarah is more widely known as a poet. She grew up in Montreal, and began publishing poems in Canadian periodicals in the early seventies. She has published several poetry collections, most recently, Pause for Breath. She has won the CBC Literary Competition for poetry and the Joseph S. Stauffer Award for fiction. Her numerous reviews and essays on poetry are collected in her book Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry. She also compiled and introduced The Essential George Johnston, The Essential Don Coles, and The Essential Margaret Avison for a series on Canadian poets. A selection of her poems, translated into French by Marie Frankland, was published as Le tamis des jours. (PF)
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Robyn Sarah
Derek Yaple-Schobert
Cat Lemieux
Born at the Royal Victoria Hospital and raised in NDG and St. Well-traveled and talented pianist Derek Yaple-Schobert guides Lambert, lifelong Montrealer Cat Lemieux is a French-Canadian who newcomers as well as seasoned concertgoers on musical has made her fluent bilingualism a virtue and a cornerstone of her journeys enriched by personal commentary. His recitals feature acting career. A graduate of Dawson College’s theatre performance a broad spectrum of the immortals, such as Haydn, Beethoven, program, Canadians may recognize Lemieux from her supporting Schubert, Liszt and Prokofiev as well as innovative Quebecois role in the 1992 Quebecois film classic, Léolo, directed by Jeanand Canadian works. Influenced by his Scandinavian heritage, Claude Lauzon. Although she has contributed to other French films he often infuses his programs with the musical landscapes of since then, such as Oscar et la Dame Rose, the bulk of this actor’s Edvard Grieg and Carl Nielsen. Having won numerous awards English performances have been on the theatrical stage. With two including 2nd Prize at the National Finals of the Canadian MECCA Award nominations to her credit, Lemieux has appeared in Music Competition and 2nd Prize at the National EckhardtRepercussion Theatre’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream Gramatté Competition, Yaple-Schobert tours internationally as and Macbeth, as well as Centaur Theatre productions such as an ambassador for the Montreal arts community. Born in the Murder on her Upper East Side and Leaf in the Mailbox. (DN) US, he moved to Ottawa at the age of two. Four years later he moved to Montreal, where he has lived ever since. With two albums under his belt, Bravo! Television has named him among the best of the next generation of Canadian classical musicians. (DN) 34
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Ingrid Bachmann
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Montreal visual artist Ingrid Bachmann uses both outdated and advanced technology in her work. Symphony for 54 Shoes, which was exhibited in Quebec City (2008) and Regina (2006), incorporated tap shoes and computer technology, while Memo, which was seen in both Montreal and Belgium in 2007, used Post-It notes and a pulley system. Using an endlessly innovative variety of textiles, she creates visually rich, immersive, and interactive environments. She has had solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the USA, Belgium, Peru, and England. Also a writer, Bachmann has been published in numerous anthologies, catalogues, and journals such as Fiberarts and Cube Magazine. Born in Southern Ontario, she has made Montreal her home since 1993 (with the exception of a twoyear visiting artist position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995). She chose Montreal for its French culture, public spaces, affordability, and great arts community. (PF)
Misstress Barbara
Dena Davida
Dena Davida is one of the key figures that have made Montreal a Misstress Barbara is quite simply the queen of the night. A premiere centre for contemporary dance. Since arriving in Montreal veteran DJ who routinely holds court across the globe’s many in 1977, she has worked as artistic director, teacher, and scholar. In dance floors, Barbara Bonfiglio (as she’s known to her parents) 1982, she co-founded the Festival international de nouvelle danse got her start spinning house and techno records during the latewith Chantal Pontbriand and Diane Boucher, bringing names like nineties heyday of Montreal’s big after-hours clubs. In 1999, Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham to Montreal and helping to she began releasing a slew of 12-inch singles that helped raise launch the careers of La La La Human Steps and O Vertigo. That her profile among the club cognoscenti. Since then, she has same year, she co-founded Tangente, a hothouse for contemporary become one of the more in-demand DJ’s on the global scene, dance. Since then, she has programmed for both organizations, regularly touring the world to perform in the main rooms of taught at the University of Sherbrooke, obtained a PhD, and some of the world’s biggest clubs. In 2009, she finally released, published numerous academic papers. She is working on several I’m No Human, a debut album that brought her vocals and love projects, including editing an anthology of Quebec dance and of synth-pop to the forefront and featured collaborations with launching a dance bookstore. Born to an artistic family in New York, fellow Montreal rock star, Sam Roberts. (DN) she studied theatre and dance and, just before moving to Montreal, founded the Caravan Dance Collective in Minneapolis. (PF)
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Alana Cymerman
Nelson Henricks
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A budding director and screenwriter with potential to burn, Alana Cymerman began her career in the local film and television industry as a location manager and scout, working on Montreal shoots with such respected directors as Steven Spielberg, Denys Arcand, and Todd Haynes. Not content to simply shop backgrounds for the pros, in 2007, she was selected for The Women in the Director’s Chair Program (in Banff) and the Toronto International Film Festival’s Talent Lab. By the following year, she had secured development funding for her feature script, A Good Enough Mother. Cymerman has also written and directed short films such as An Unremarkable Question and the award-winning When Erma Made Herman, as well as the musical comedy The Perfect Vacuum, and her fantastical next project, Julia Julep. Other feature projects, such as Erma Invents The Love Machine and The Mystique of Lost Ladies, are both in development. Meanwhile, her documentary work has included Women Warriors, a look at female Olympians for the CBC. (DN)
Tyrone Benskin
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Nelson Henricks brings his musings to the medium of Having studied theatre at John Abbott College and Concordia experimental video. In the six-minute piece, Satellite, Henricks University, Tyrone Benskin started working right out of school in juxtaposes images derived from old educational films with the Montreal theatre community, including The Centaur, the Saidye absurd, aphoristic slogans. Presented in 2004 at the Montreal Bronfman and Black Theatre Workshop. In 2005 he took on the role Museum of Fine Arts, and later in Calgary and Ottawa, it of artistic director of BTW, where he premiered productions of Le comments on our need to make sense of everything, at any cost. Code Noir by George Boyd and Swan Song of Maria by Carol Cece In 2000, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented his Anderson. From the title role in the Phantom of the Opera to the work as part of the Video Viewpoints series. With Steve Reinke, 71-year-old former slave Nelson Johns in the award-winning Wade Henricks co-edited an anthology of artist’s video scripts entitled in the Water, Benskin has acted in over 150 film and television By the Skin of Their Tongues. He has won the Telefilm Canada projects and well over 40 stage productions, performing on stages Prize at Toronto’s Images Festival and been the recipient of the across Canada, including the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and the National Arts Centre. He is recognized across the country as Mike Bell Canada Award in Video Art. He attended the Alberta College Hayes in the Canadian soap opera Riverdale and Karl Lubinshy in of Art and moved to Montreal in 1991, where he received a BFA the ground-breaking sci-fi series Charlie Jade. He is also featured from Concordia University and where he now teaches. (PF) in the mega-hit 300 and Oscar nominated I’m not There, playing guitar with the legendary Richie Havens. Benskin is also an accomplished musician and published songwriter. (PF)
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George Rideout George Rideout writes plays that reflect his fascination with both cross-cultural relationships and great social change. A Québécois family plays host to a bewildered, Ontario-born English professor in The Anglophone is Coming to Dinner and five ex-student radicals reunite 25 years after their occupation of a university records office in the thriller-meets-socialcommentary, Dead Together. In the critically acclaimed 2010 Centaur production, Michel and Ti-Jean, a young Michel Tremblay, just after having written Les Belles Sœurs, meets up with Jack Kerouac, a month before the beat poet’s death. Rideout has won several regional and national playwriting awards and his scripts have been produced across Canada. His play Texas Boy has had more than 30 different productions. Raised in Texas, Rideout moved to Thunder Bay, Ontario at the age of 16, living in several different provinces before settling in Quebec in the 80s. He teaches drama at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Quebec. (PF)
Bowser and Blue
Vittorio Rossi
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The comedic song-and-banter duo of Bowser and Blue lovingly Vittorio Rossi dramatizes the lives of Montreal characters, often package a distinctly Anglo-Quebecois brand of humour for Italian-Canadians, who live in his native borough of Ville Émard, Montreal stages. Formed by George Bowser and Rick Blue in and transports them to theatre stages from Stratford to New York 1978, the pair uses the parameters of traditional stand-up City. His stories of recognizable people in both comic and tragic comedy and injects elements of theatricality along the way, situations have earned him multiple playwriting awards since the most notably in their bevy of original songs. With 14 CDs to mid-‘80s. Rossi’s script The Last Adam won the Canadian Authors their name and numerous popular stage shows that finger Association Literary Award for Drama in 1996. Montreal theatre Quebec’s and Canada’s societal underpinnings – titles like “The critics honoured him with the MECCA Award for best new text in Paris of America” and “The 25 th Century Belongs to Canada” 2006 and 2007 for Hellfire Pass and Carmela’s Table, the first two parts of A Carpenter’s Trilogy, based on his family’s early life give a good idea of where their funny bones lie – Bowser and in Canada. Rossi, who trained as an actor at Concordia University, Blue has become a project of national interest, with tours across has also performed lead roles in the French-language Quebec series the country. Nevertheless, both men are still very active within Omerta: La loi du silence, the film Canvas, opposite Gary Busey, their local communities. Residents of Westmount also know and the CBS Emmy Award winning Day One. (PF) George Bowser as their city councillor and a humour columnist with the Westmount Examiner and Rick Blue also dabbles in humour for the Montreal Suburban. (DN)
Diana Fajrajsl
Paul Cargnello
Paul Cargnello is an award-winning roots musician who has Montrealer Diana Fajrajsl has spent more than 35 years in been bringing reggae and Cajun-influenced guitar work to Canadian theatre as an actor, director, and teacher. She has mainstream audiences. His single, “Une Rose Noire,” from played in more than 120 professional productions across his last commercial release, Brûler le Jour, attained topCanada, and appeared in first productions of plays by Ann20 status in Quebec. In 2009, he was awarded SOCAN’S Marie MacDonald, Norm Foster, Michael MacKenzie, and Echo Prize for independent Canadian songwriters, for the Banuta Rubess, to name a few. In 1991, she portrayed the song “Bras coupé” and, in 2007, he won Radio Canada’s infamous Canadian historical figure Gerda Munsinger in the film Sacré Talent – the same year he was nominated for a Félix Gerda. In 1995, she began a parallel directing career. She has Leclerc Award. From 1996–2001, Cargnello performed in the collaborated with playwright and actor Carolyn Guillet, directing 17 Anonymous Women and dramaturging Plucked, Hammered Montreal rock band, The Vendettas. He has made numerous and Strung, both for Infinitheatre in Montreal. She has taught appearances on television and radio and at festivals, thus and directed at the National Theatre School of Canada since amassing extensive experience recording and producing 1996 and has been a guest director and instructor at several music. A self-taught musician with no formal training and universities, including Bishop’s, Concordia, and McGill. Fajrajsl equally comfortable in both French and English, he has been was born in Prince Rupert, B.C. in 1958 and moved to Montreal playing music since the age of nine, singing and composing in 1977 to attend the National Theatre School of Canada. (PF) in both languages. (PC)
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Son of writer and Blue Metropolis founder Linda Leith, Adam Leith Gollner has quickly cemented a reputation of his own as a writer of eclectic and thoughtful non-fiction. Born and raised in Montreal, his youthful writing was decidedly more pop-culturally reactive, earning him the editor’s post at the city’s notorious Vice Magazine. Since then, his journalism and non-fiction has found its way into the pages of The New York Times, Gourmet, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, and many other publications. In 2008, he published his first book, an internationally popular work entitled The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce and Adventure. The book turned into a Canadian bestseller, won the Quebec Writers’ Federation McAuslan First Book Award, got picked up for numerous translations, and was named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Gollner is currently at work on his second non-fiction book, Springs Eternal: The Neverending Quest for Neverending Life. (DN)
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Adam Leith Gollner
Anthony Burnham
Alain Goulem
Equally at ease in front of Quebec’s theatrical audiences as A graduate of Concordia’s fine arts program, painter, and vinyl well as under the bright lights of Hollywood studios, bilingual sculptor Anthony Burnham has spent the past decade building actor Alain Goulem is a born-and-bred Montrealer whose work his reputation as one of Quebec’s promising young visual frequently takes him all over the continent. Goulem’s long artists. An alumnus of the 1999 France-Quebec Arts Exchange, career began with child roles in American productions featuring Burnham’s artwork has long been a fixture of the Quartier Liza Minelli and Lee Majors. Hollywood kept calling as he got Éphémère in Old Montreal, where he has exhibited both his older, and over the past twenty years, Goulem has garnered early paintings, such as the Superbia showcase in 2002, as well roles opposite Nicolas Cage, William Hurt, and Alec Baldwin. as works created with fellow artist, Suzanne Dery (a partnership Such fortunes south of the border have translated into Canadian known as The Flators). Although Burnham’s own work tends success. Goulem has starred in CBC productions such as The towards humorously hewn paintings, with The Flators, he Tournament, 18 to Life, and the French-language crime drama constructs urban installation art composed from inflated vinyl. Le Negotiateur. A voracious and constant presence on the Since his 2004 show at the Clark Gallery, Overlap and Rewind, theatrical stage, Goulem’s talents have earned him performances he has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Quebec from coast to coast, with starring roles at the Stratford Festival, and abroad. In 2008, Burnham was invited to take part in the Manitoba Theatre Centre, Banff Centre, and Montreal’s Centaur Quebec Triennial. (DN) Theatre. He is also an accomplished theatre director. (DN)
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Martin Duckworth is a documentary filmmaker and director of photography. He has recorded numerous stories and won several awards since his film career began in 1963. The Quebec Critics’ Best Film of the Year for A Wives’ Tale (1980), a Genie Award for No More Hiroshima! (1985), Best Film at Hot Docs, a Gémeaux for Referendum, Take Two (1987), co-directed with Stéphane Drolet, and a Special Jury Prize from UNESCO for Brush With Life (1994), co-directed with Glen Salzman. He has been director of photography on dozens of films, including Jacques Godbout’s L’Invasion (1976), and works regularly for filmmakers Mort Ransen, Magnus Isacsson, Peter Raymont, and Tanya Ballantyne Tree. Born in Montreal, Duckworth moved to Halifax at the age of 14. He moved back to Montreal at 30 to join the NFB, after spending his earlier adulthood teaching. He is the father of seven and grandfather of ten. (PF)
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Martin Duckworth
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A bold and expressive newcomer to the world of contemporary dance, Dana Michel brings a high standard of athleticism to her creative movement. Prior to shifting her life into dance at the age of twenty-five, she was a track-and-field competitor. A graduate of the Concordia dance program, she has distinguished herself as mesmerizing soloist who brings a warped and frenetic body language to the stage. In 2005, Michel stirred the Montreal scene by winning the Studio 303 Best Dance Production prize at the Montreal Fringe Festival. The following year, The Globe and Mail named her “Best Emerging Choreographer.” Since then, her career has taken off internationally, and her film The Greater the Weight won the jury prize for Best Performance at the International Festival of Video Dance and Performance in Lisbon. The year 2009 was her busiest yet, with engagements at Montreal’s Place des Arts and New York’s Performance Mix Festival. (DN)
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Penny Lang
Mathew Biederman
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Born in Chicago and a resident of Montreal since 2004, artist Many artists are lucky enough to have one go at success, but Mathew Biederman works with electromagnetic impulses to folk-singer Penny Lang was fortunate enough to have two create phantasms of bright colour that often shift and shape chances. Born in East-end Montreal, Lang’s folk music caught before the viewer’s eyes. A director of Artists’ Television Access on at clubs and festivals in New York and Montreal, building from 1995, in 1999 he jump-started his own artistic career by a strong following. At her peak, she was invited to record a winning the Bay Area Artist Awards, and followed it up the next version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” for her US major-label year with the first prize at Slovenia’s Break21 Festival. Since debut. But the stars were not on her side, and soon after, Lang’s then, he has undertaken artistic residencies in Scotland, New album, career, and personal life began to fall apart. By 1970, York, and England, and mounted exhibits in Peru, New Zealand, she left performing altogether. Moving to rural Quebec, she lived the US, and at Montreal’s own Oboro Gallery. Biederman’s in artistic exile until 1988, at which point she decided that multimedia work also takes him into the realm of performance, she was ready to give music a second chance.Since then, Lang many of which have been featured at international digitalhas been accepted back into Canadian music as a folk pioneer, arts festivals such as Austria’s Ars Electronica, England’s and she has toured internationally numerous times. Her debut Futuresonic, the Nuit Blanche in Paris, and Montreal’s MUTEK. album finally came out in 1991, and seven more records have With so many accolades already under his belt, is it possible followed suit. (DN) that Biederman came to Montreal to complete an MFA at Concordia? That is precisely what he just finished in 2009. (DN)
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Jo Leslie has been a powerhouse in theatre and dance, having contributed to over 120 productions across the country. In theatre, she has worked out of Canada’s premiere houses, such as Stratford, Shaw, and the National Arts Centre. Her collaborations with director Micheline Chevrier include the award-winning Vaudevilles of Chekhov at the NAC, where she was also movement director on Marty Maraden’s creative team for Hamlet, Love Labour’s Lost, and A Winter’s Tale. She has collaborated with other top names in theatre, including Peter Hinton, Jackie Maxwell, and Peter Wylde. Leslie was principal teacher and coach at the National Theatre School of Canada from 1991 to 2001, where she developed a three-year pedagogy for actor movement training. Prior to her life in the theatre, Leslie toured her solo, contemporary dances to critical acclaim. She is also co-founder of Studio 303, a Montreal dance hothouse, and a long-time writer on dance. (PF)
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Jo Leslie
Carlos and Jason Sanchez
Sandy Silva
Sandy Silva has been teaching and performing percussive dance for Brothers Carlos and Jason Sanchez, whose work together over 20 years. Many companies have sought out her unique talents, is often signed simply as The Sanchez Brothers, are young including La Bottine Souriante, with whom she tours regularly, and photographers who blow up the dimensions and conduct of Les 7 doigts de la main, for their ongoing Fibonacci project. The an image to the size of the silver screen. Staging meticulously Montrealer has also been an artistic counsellor and coach in body orchestrated scenarios in which every detail is scrutinized percussion for various Cirque du Soleil productions. She spends for its synchronicity, the brothers excel at the exploration of a lot of her time teaching and working with both professional complexities within psychological landscapes. The conspicuous and amateur modern dancers, tap dancers, buck and step stillness of their work is both stark and universal, brimming dancers, circus artists, schoolchildren, hip hop dancers, vocalists, with references to the paintings of the Old Masters and always percussionists, and musicians. Since 2006, she has been teaching encapsulating a story. At 33 and 28 respectively, Carlos and music and rhythm at The National Circus School of Montreal. Silva Juan are two Quebecers who have wasted no time gaining a began studying with master dancers, having travelled to Budapest foothold on the international arts scene. Their first exhibition to learn legenyes, North Carolina for buck dancing, and Cape Breton opened in 2002 at Montreal’s Espace 306, and since then they for step dancing. She has performed internationally at festivals have held celebrated exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, including the WOMAD Festival in Australia, the Lincoln Center in Madrid, Brussels, Strasbourg, and Amsterdam. The brothers New York, and the Galway Arts Festival in Ireland. (PF) look forward to moving their tableaux into film soon. (DN)
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A regular on screen and stage, actress Leni Parker spent 10 years working with Pigeons International Theatre, travelling around the world with this acclaimed company and, following that, four years as the character Da’an in Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict. In her 23 years as a stage actress, she has appeared in numerous productions, including Inherit The Wind at the Segal Centre, Age Of Arousal at the Centaur Theatre, and Bye Bye Baby, with Imago Theatre. She has several film and television credits, including Choice: The Henry Morgentaler Story, Mambo Italiano, and Emily Of New Moon. She won the 2007 MECCA Award for Best Actress in Michel Tremblay’s Assorted Candies and, in 1992, won best supporting actress for her role in the Pigeon International production of Perdus dans Les Coquelicots. She was born and raised in New Brunswick and received her BFA in Theatre Performance from Concordia University in Montreal, the city where she now makes her home. (PF)
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Karen Trask
The Besnard Lakes
Fronted by the husband-and-wife duo of Jace Lasek and Olga Authors take the book form for granted as a vehicle of ideas, Goreas, art-rock band The Besnard Lakes has been playing but for visual artist Karen Trask the potential of a book’s paper, Montreal’s stages to ever-growing fanfare since 2001. Formed as print, and binding are themselves the centre of a thriving a sideline to Lasek’s main gig as an in-demand producer and cobody of work. Weaving her unique vision of concrete poetry owner of Breakglass Studios, The Besnard Lakes were linked with a through mediums such as sculpture, photography, and video, number of other hotly tipped locals – Arcade Fire, The Dears, Wolf Trask explores the materials we use to communicate abstract Parade, and the Stars. As Lasek began to work with many local thoughts, turning her subjects inside out. Installations, such as bands and a stream of critically acclaimed Montreal rock albums Touch Wood, highlight books in their natural element as wood with his production credits began to see release, The Besnard forms, while web works such as The Elm Tree deconstruct the Lakes’ stock became the subject of much discussion. Due to many tree itself into a series of elusive photographs that disappear lineup changes early on, the band were slow to come out of the once the cursor has moved on. Born in rural Ontario, she arrived gates. The year 2003 saw the release of Volume 1 and it would to Quebec City in 1980, where she lived for 15 years before be four more years before The Besnard Lakes Are the Dark Horse moving to Montreal, where she currently resides. In the late appeared. This year, The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night sees eighties, Trask began exhibiting her work in both Quebecois them back on track with a firm lineup. (DN) galleries and those abroad. Since then, she has remained prolific on the Quebecois scene, exhibiting in numerous galleries across the province and leading a series of workshops throughout the regions. (DN) 42
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Elin Soderstrom
Margie Gillis
John C. Dinning
Internationally acclaimed modern dance artist Margie Gillis John C. Dinning is a celebrated scenographer who has been has been creating original works for over thirty-five years. Born designing theatre sets, props, and costumes for three decades. He in Montreal to a family of accomplished athletes, Gillis began has worked across Canada with many theatre companies, including taking ballet and gymnastics lessons at the age of three. In the Shaw Festival, Alberta Theatre Projects, and the Grand Theatre. 1981, she founded the Margie Gillis Dance Foundation in In Montreal, he has regularly designed sets for the Centaur Theatre Montreal as a platform to develop and perform her own work. and the Segal Centre, and has been the scenographer of choice Since then, her projects have taken her to Asia, Europe, and for many premieres, including Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure the Middle East, as well as across North and South America. of Seeing Her Again and Assorted Candies; Steve Galuccio’s In In 1997, her life was the subject of Veronica Tennant’s Piazza San Domenico and Mambo Italiano; and Vittorio Rossi’s The documentary film, Wild Hearts in Strange Times, for which Carpenter Trilogy. He has also been a set designer for Les Grands Gillis was awarded a Gemini for Best Performing Artist on Ballets Canadiens for productions of Giselle, Swan Lake, and Le Film. In 2006, the Cirque du Soleil commissioned her to do Tricorne. Dinning, who graduated from the National Theatre School the Las Vegas production of LOVE, a tribute to the legendary of Canada in 1980, lives in Montreal and teaches design at NTS. Beatles. The world premiere of M.Body.7, a group piece He has also taught at McGill, Concordia, and Bishop’s Universities. Margie Gillis created to celebrate her thirty-fifth anniversary (PF) season, was performed in January 2008 at the Montreal Highlights Festival. (DN) 43
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An aficionado of the viola de gamba ever since she attended a recital by Catalan composer Jordi Savalla, over the years Elin Soderstrom has become one of Canada’s foremost appreciators of the instrument. With a postgraduate degree from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in Netherlands, the Montreal-based musician frequently performs throughout Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Near East with a variety of ensembles. Soderstrom specializes in what is called consort playing, a genre she has perfected during her time with the Montreal ensemble, Les Voix Humaines Consort de Viols. Over the course of numerous albums for labels such as ATMA, Dorian, Astrée, and Wereldomroep, Soderstrom’s approach to the viola de gamba has veered away from tradition and towards the contemporary and improvised capabilities of the instrument, which she is currently exploring as part of a doctorate at the Université de Montréal. (DN)
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With 25 years of experience under her belt, independent film and video curator Anne Golden has forged a significant presence in the shaping of the contemporary Quebecois cinematic arts. An active filmmaker whose interest in film and video began during her studies at Concordia University, Golden has made 12 videos since 1991, including Fat Chance (1994), Big Girl Town (1998), Somme (2005), and From the Archives of Vidéo populaire (2007). Working with various provincial arts organizations, Golden’s programs have been presented at Musée National du Québec, Edges Festival, Vtape, and Queer City Cinema. Golden is also the Artistic Director for Groupe Intervention Video, an artist-run distribution centre that works to put the channels of artistic control back in to the hands of Montreal’s filmmakers and video artists. An influential voice in her community, she has also programmed for the Image+Nation Festival, as well as portions of The Montreal International Festival of Films. (DN)
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Arcade Fire
Ann Charney
Named an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Of all the bands that shaped the Montreal rock zeitgeist of the government of France in 2006, novelist and essayist Ann Charney “noughties,” Arcade Fire was the most celebrated. Formed in has spent the past 35 years cultivating a broad literary career. 2003 around the songwriting core of Texan-born transplant Her 1975 debut novel, the widely translated Dobryd, has been Win Butler and Haitian-Montrealer Régine Chassagne, Arcade reissued by the French publisher Hachette as a foreign classic. Fire was rounded off by ex-Ontarians Richard Parry and Tim She has written two other novels: Rousseau’s Garden (2001) and Kingsbury of the New International Standard, as well as Win’s Distantly Related to Freud (2008). In the 26-year gap between brother William Butler. Working with various drummers, this her first and second novels, Charney published a continuous lineup recorded and self-released an eponymous EP the same stream of short stories, winning her a Chatelaine Fiction Prize year. Based on the strengths of their live show, they garnered a along the way. Noted as well for her non-fiction, Charney deal with major American indie label Merge for their first fullhas written extensively for publications such as Maclean’s, length album. Released in 2004, Funeral became one of the Chatelaine, Saturday Night, and others, resulting in numerous biggest albums of the decade, catapulting the band from local prizes including two National Magazine Awards. Defiance in their cabaret act to international festival headliner. After touring Eyes: True Stories From the Margins (1995) was a finalist for the the world several times, Arcade Fire bought an old church in QWF Non-fiction Prize. Charney is an honorary board member of the Quebec town of Farnham to record follow up, Neon Bible. the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival and a member of the Conseil Released in 2007, the album debuted at #1 in Canada and des arts de Montréal. (DN) Ireland, and #2 in the U.S. and U.K. (DN) 44
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From 2004 to 2006, Emma Tibaldo was dramaturge-inresidence for the Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal, a national script development house and Montreal cultural institution since 1963. She became PWM’s Artistic and Executive Director in 2007. Tibaldo is also a founding member of Talisman Theatre, a company dedicated to the production of Quebec plays in translation. For Talisman, she has directed Rock, Paper, Jackknife... by Marilyn Perreault (translated by Nadine Desrochers), as well as Down Dangerous Passes Road by Michel Marc Bouchard (translated by Linda Gaboriau), which won the 2008–09 Best English Theatre Production from the Association québécoise des critiques de théatre. She says bringing francophone writers to anglophone audiences can help chip away at the barrier separating the two traditions. Fluent in English, French, and Italian, she is a graduate of Concordia’s Theatre Department and the National Theatre School’s directing program. (PF)
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Emma Tibaldo
Alexis O’Hara
Cynthia Scott
Filmmaker Cynthia Scott has managed on several occasions to find Quasi-cabaret singer and avant-noise performer Alexis O’Hara wide audiences for artistic and innovative films. She won the 1983 thrives on being the kind of artist who is not easy to pin down. Academy Award for her short documentary, Flamenco at 5:15. In Arriving in Montreal in 1997, O’Hara began fusing spoken 1990, she made the feature-length semi-documentary/semi-fiction word and poetry with flashes of theatrical excess at local film, The Company of Strangers, about a group of eight, mostly cabaret nights. By 1999, she found herself in the top ten elderly women stranded in a remote cottage. It was a box-office at the 1999 National Poetry Slam. Thereafter, she bought a hit in Canada and the U.S. Many of Scott’s films have been set sampler and a few other electronic toys and debuted her new in the dance world, including For the Love of Dance, Gala, and hybrid performance at the national zine fair, Canzine. That Jack of Hearts. She began her career at the CBC, where she would performance was aired in its entirety on CBC’s Brave New eventually produce the progressive social affairs program, Take 30. Waves, introducing O’Hara’s flare to the country’s alternative She was then hired by the National Film Board, where she worked culture cognoscenti. In 2001, she published a book of poetry on several films, including the Oscar-nominated, First Winter with Filthy Lies and the following year saw the release of her debut Gloria Demers, which she researched and co-wrote. Scott has won album, In Abulia. Since then, she has performed around numerous awards for her films, including the 1991 Alberta/Quebec the world and her work has become increasingly difficult to Award for Innovation in Cinema. (PF) categorize, drawing from aspects of video and installation art. These days, O’Hara’s own description of “interactive live art” suits her work best. (DN) 45
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Montrealer Dimitri Nasrallah is a novelist, short story writer, and music critic. His novel, Blackbodying, about two Lebanese citizens and their differing routes to Canada, was co-winner of the Quebec Writers’ Federation McAuslan First Book Award and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montreal. The QWF jury called it “a work of remarkable scope,” noting that it wove together “themes of emotional and geographic exile.” His short stories have been widely published and in 2006, he won the CBC Quebec Writing Competition. As a music critic who focuses primarily on electronic and experimental genres, he is an editor at Exclaim!, Urb and Resident Advisor. He also writes extensively about books for the Montreal Review of Books, The Gazette, Maisonneuve and The Globe & Mail. Born in Beirut, Nasrallah has been living in Canada since 1989. He attended both York and Concordia Universities and has been a Montreal resident since 2001. (PF)
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Anna Papadakos
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Anna Papadakos is an innovative artist and producer whose Exploding onto the international scene in 1996, turntablist work has left its mark on the Montreal theatre scene, as well as Kid Koala (aka Montrealer Eric San) became the first North being presented nationally and internationally. Born in Montreal, American to sign with legendary British label Ninja Tune. He Papadakos moved back in her twenties to study Literature at brought with him an unabashedly original DJing style, in which Concordia University. In 1992, she appeared on the theatre scene he used elements from hip hop scratch and musique concrete as co-founder and artistic director of the tightly knit Dummies to weave an aural landscape that was immensely detailed and Theatre, whose six groundbreaking, site-specific productions in surreal. What’s more, San could replicate the complexity of his vacant stores along boulevard Saint-Laurent rapidly gained public turntable skills live, in real time, and this allowed him to garner and critical acclaim. In 1997, Dummies was the first Quebec a wide audience outside the genre. An unerringly meticulous anglophone theatre company to present at the prestigious Festival composer, it took four years for Kid Koala to release his debut de Théâtre des Amériques with Go Weast. In 2008, she held her album, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (2000), which came with a first group showing in visual arts and was one of a dozen artists 32-page comic book hand-drawn by San himself. Comics have commissioned to create for The Factory Project. Her work PEEP! long been part of his artistic persona. In 2003, he published combined theatre,video and installation to explore themes of the 350-page comic, Nufonia Must Fall. Later that year, Kid intimacy, alienation, exhibitionism and voyeurism and in 2010 Koala released his second album, Some of My Best Friends Are she co-created the installation piece Montréal Love. Papadakos DJs, and his third album, Your Mom’s Favourite DJ, followed in is now concentrating on painting and investigating installation/ 2006. (DN) performance pieces. (PF)
Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles!
Danette Mackay
47
Phot
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e Ch
In just a few years, dancer and choreographer Lara Kramer The body figures prominently in celebrated painter Marion has built an impressive career, working with several Montreal Wagschal’s work, but it’s often one that appears wrinkled, aged, artists, as well as creating a successful full-length work of her and tired. In paintings such as the seventies-era Backyard own. For her creation of Fragments, Kramer was inspired by her and The Birthday Party, she foregoes the monumental to paint mother’s stories of her time at two Manitoba Indian residential the everyday. Her work integrates dark references, even in schools. In order to physically understand the environment, her her playful pieces. She has also looked closely at art itself, research involved a residency at the Indian Residential School particularly in the 1993 piece, Limelight Loom. Her work Museum of Canada in Portage la Prairie. Fragments premiered has been shown in several museums and galleries, including at the Gesù in Montreal in 2009, in partnership with The First the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Peoples Festival, and has since been presented at the MAI Museum of Fine Arts, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the and the Festival Vue Sur la Relève. Kramer has been granted Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown. Wagschal, a mentorship project with Catherine Tardif for 2010/11 and a whose parents fled Germany in 1938, came to Canada in creation residency with Usine C and the Gesù for 2011, and 1951 from Port of Spain, Trinidad. She completed both her she has been invited to debut a new creation at Tangente the undergraduate and graduate training at Concordia University, following season. A Montreal resident, Kramer was honoured the same institution where she taught studio art. She recently with the James Saya Memorial Bursary for Excellence in 2006 retired after 37 years. (PF) from Concordia University, where she graduated in 2008 with a BFA in Contemporary Dance. (PF)
2010
Lara Kramer
neau
Marion Wagschal
arbon
Phot
o Cre
dit: A ndre as
Aper
Blue be Phot ard’s Cas o Cre dit: C tle, acryli c hristi ne G on canva uest s.
gis
Actress Danette Mackay is the creator of Kiss My Cabaret, a notorious evening of alternative entertainment that ran at the Sala Rossa from 2001 to 2008. She introduced audiences to clowns, comics, contortionists, musicians, magicians, drag kings and queens, and along with actress Danielle Desormeaux created the wildly popular characters, Madame et Matante. Kiss My Cabaret raised tens of thousands of dollars for small local charities. As an actress, she worked with director Peter Hinton in The Comedy of Errors, which was presented at the Centaur Theatre and the National Arts Centre in 2010. She originated the role of Ricotta in Bryden Macdonald’s With Bated Breath, which premiered at the Centaur, and she performed in the English language premiere of Jean-Marc Dalpe’s August, at the 2008 Playrites Festival in Calgary. She and Montreal playwright and actor Harry Standjofski are longtime musical collaborators. Born in Toronto, Mackay studied theatre at Concordia University and has been living in Montreal since. (PF)
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Jeanie Riddle
Califo
rnia,
2009 , Jea
nie R iddle , Pho to C
redit:
Guy
L’Heu r
eux
Director and curator of the Parisian Laundry Gallery, since 2005 Jeanie Riddle has steered this fledgling cultural venture, found along the northernmost reaches of St. Henri, into one of the city’s top hubs for daring creativity that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. A sculptural installationist in her own right, Riddle uses the techniques and ideals of modernist painting in the grander context of three-dimensional space. Playing with the blurred lines between reality and artifice, the settings for recent projects such as California (2009) make use of a gallery’s entire expanse, cultivating an architectural environment that invites the viewer to literally walk through the strict formalism of a painting built to revise the parameters of a California bungalow from the fifties. A finalist for the 2008 Royal Bank of Canada Canadian Painting Competition, Riddle’s paintings can be found in the collections of ALDO Group and The Canadian Art Foundation. (DN)
Ezra Soiferman
Lorne Elliott
48
Phot
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Turnb
ull
The Montreal Mirror called Lorne Elliott a “national treasure.” Filmmaker Ezra Soiferman finds iconic street-level subjects For 11 seasons (1995–2006) he hosted CBC radio’s Madly and tells their stories in humorous documentaries. After Off in all Directions, which criss-crossed Canada showcasing looking at the mythologized Montreal diner, Cosmos, in Man local comic and music talent in every corner of the country. of Grease (2000), a documentary film nominated for a Jutra Each week, Elliot gave national audiences a wickedly warped Award for Best Documentary in 2001, Soiferman paid tribute stand-up comedy portrait of the region in which the show was to Simcha’s, an old-European oasis for St. Laurent fashionistas, recorded. Since 2006, the Hudson, Quebec resident has gone in Posthumous Pickle Party (2007). He has also hung out with madly off in more southwardly and easterly directions with his the hearty Quebecers that sell Christmas trees on New York own shows, taking them to the U.S., Australia, and Asia. Closer City street corners in Tree Weeks (1998) and documented a to home, his play Culture Shock was turned into a musical struggling fishing village on Quebec’s Lower North Shore in Cod titled Hyllliard for the Stephenville Theatre Festival. His play, Help Us (2005). His documentary films have played at over The Fixer-Upper, was published in 2009. A perennially popular 30 film festivals worldwide and appeared on CTV, CBC, Radioentertainer at home in Quebec, Elliott has been featured at Canada, TV5-France, TVOntario, and National Geographic. He the Centaur Theatre, galas at the Just for Laughs Festival, and is currently the Director of CinemaSpace at the Segal Centre numerous other popular venues. (PF) for Performing Arts and the Director and Co-Founder of the Montreal Film Group, a 2000+ member film and TV industry networking group. (PF)
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Merrily Weisbord
joyx.b logsp ot.co www .xlow
Darsha Hewitt
49
Elect
ronic
Ouija
, 200
7, Da
rsha
An aficionado of technological detritus, handmade Blending pop art and surreal comic elements into the world of electronics, and the pure tones of electricity, Ottawasilk-screening, recent Concordia Fine Arts graduate Walter Scott native Darsha Hewitt recycles a century’s worth of has come out of the gates abuzz with productivity. His visual mechanized innovation to create her sound installations. work, which often employs an indie/punk aesthetic similar to Using amateur electronics, she conceives devices that that of fellow Montrealers Seripop, has graced promotional tap into the electronically mediated aura of everyday posters of local music promoters Blue Skies Turn Black. But environments. The end results question the effects of those who look deeper into his already broad body of design will automation in our lives by using low-tech materials note a larger Aboriginal metaphysical ideology underlying his and methods to critique the polished high-tech realm. use of imagery. In addition to silk-screening, Scott also serves Whether she’s using crystal radios in Ethereal Computing as drummer in the no-wave punk trio, Dead Wife. These two (2008), rotary telephones in Rotarian Choir (2007) or disciplines intertwine in Scott’s involvement with the St. Henri magnetic stripe cards in Magnetic Identity Liberation DIY music collective Pirates of the Lachine Canal, who have Front (2005), in Hewitt’s conception of the world, invigorated the Southwest Montreal scene through a series of DJ everything low-tech can be made new again. Currently nights, arts shows, and concerts across Pointe St. Charles, St. carrying out her studio practice in Montreal, Hewitt Henri, and Griffintown. (DN) uses the city as a platform to the rest of the world, with residences in Mexico and Banff and exhibitions and performances across Canada, in Sweden, France and Norway. (DN)
Hewi tt
Walter Scott
m
Active on both page and screen for over three decades, Montreal-born writer and broadcaster Merrily Weisbord’s broad cultural contributions include four books, five television shows, and a slew of journalism, short fiction, and poetry. In 1983 she emerged with the non-fiction book, The Strangest Dream: Canadian Communists, the Spy Trials, and the Cold War, as well co-wrote the NFB documentary, Margaret Atwood: Once In August, which was aired on CBC, BBC, and PBS. Since then, she’s continued to break ground on both literary and broadcasting fronts with as the book Our Future Selves (1991) and the Gemini-nominated 2001 television program Ted Allan: Minstrel Boy of the Twentieth Century. Her dual trajectory culminated with Dogs With Jobs (2000), a book highlighted by Oprah Winfrey, published in seven countries and adapted into a TV series shown in 57 countries. A founding member of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, Weisbord has also been instrumental in developing a viable platform for the province’s anglophone writing community. (DN)
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Ian Ferrier
Two b
y Two
, oil o
n can vas,
2009
Blending elements of poetry, song, and spoken word, Ian Ferrier’s one-of-a-kind performance art delivers a medley of literariness and popular culture. Musically rooted in bluesdriven inquiries into love, sex, and death, and poetically rooted in the cosmology of the Beats, Ferrier is also a founder of the spoken word label Wired on Words. He performs both as a solo artist and with the trance/improv music project Pharmakon MTL, mixing whispered and sung vocals, multiple guitars and drums into an absorbing voyage. Ferrier has released a CD/book Exploding Head Man (2004) and two CDs, What Is This Place? (2007) and To Call Out in the Night (2010). His poems have also been set on the page in anthologies from Montreal presses, such as Conundrum’s Impure-Reinventing the Word and Vehicule’s Poetry Nation. An active contributor to Montreal’s literary community, he is a past president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. (DN)
Krista Muir
Accid
ental
Railw
ay, 2
Krista Muir is a composer and musician who Lorraine Simms has painted subjects as diverse as mechanical performed under her alter ego Lederhosen Lucil for hearts to portraits of women wanted for fraud. Firmly committed six years until she fell in love with the ukulele in to painting as a means of engaging with the world, her practice 2006. As Lucil, she played vintage keyboard electro has been developed in thematic series that are linked formally pop and released several independent singles and and conceptually. Her ongoing series The Real Imaginary is two full-length albums, Hosemusik (2002) and Tales inspired by the spectacular beauty of covert photography. From The Pantry (2003). She toured North America, Based on surveillance photographs, these paintings explore the Australia, New Zealand, and Europe with DJ Kid gulf between direct and technologically aided vision. In other Koala. Once she became a ukulele convert, Muir recent paintings she focuses on people dressed in masks and composed a collection of whimsical tunes recorded costumes; game-show sets; and images of startled deer. These with Toronto’s Fembots and Montreal producer diverse subjects allow her to engage with several interconnected Shane Watt for the CD Leave Alight (2007) and the themes that touch on identity, “human nature,” and our concept album Accidental Railway (2008) about an relationship to the natural world. These paintings reference art, imaginary city, which The Hour called “ a multilingual popular culture, mythology and children’s fables. The recipient pop gem.” A classically trained musician, she has of numerous arts grants, Simms has been featured in solo and composed music for several films. She is the founder group exhibitions across Canada and the U.S. Born in Montreal, of the Montreal Ukulele Bizarro Festival, teaches she is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Concordia private lessons, and programs a monthly ukulele playUniversity where she earned an MFA in 1990. She is currently in at a Montreal cafe. (PF) Chair of the Fine Arts program at Dawson College. (PF) 50
008
Lorraine Simms
Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles!
Paul Litherland
Force
of At
tracti
on, 2 003, video
Photographer and multimedia performance artist Paul Litherland incorporates themes of masquerade, vulnerability, and machismo into his visual art projects, which involve creating self-portraits and assuming characters. As The Globe and Mail’s Leah Sandals writes about the video Force of Attraction: “Seeing the artist’s skin and cartilage turn to mere putty in the atmosphere’s hands is by turns amusing and anxiety-provoking - Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraiture meets extreme-sports risk.” His work, Fall Out, was welcomed at the University of Toronto’s Blackwood Gallery in 2009, while Wood vs. Wood played Berlin’s Studio 54 in 2008 and Faking Death at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2006. Litherland was born in Vancouver and received his MFA from Concordia University. His work can be found in private and public collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank and the Musée du Québec, and has been reviewed in numerous publications, including The Globe and Mail, ARTnews, and The New Yorker. (PF)
Stéphanie Breton
George Stamos
51
Clara F Phot urey in R o Cre dit: F eservoir P ranci s Du neumatic charm . e
George Stamos is a contemporary dance choreographer and Montreal Gazette’s Bill Brownstein called Stéphanie Breton performer whose vivid imagery and physical performances are “one of the hardest working actors in this city” and her often laced with humour. Stamos’ work has been presented performance in the 2007 Centaur production Trying was seasonally in Montreal since 1998 and he has toured Canada nominated for a Masques Award. In the 2009 Fringe Festival and Europe, receiving critical acclaim. In 2009, his 50-minute hit comedy, 13th hour, she spoofed a Quebec culture critic duo, Cloak, played in New York, Nanaimo, and Montreal, while and then at the Segal Centre Lab she explored the destructive side of mental illness in Sarah Kane’s darkly dramatic 4.48 his six-person piece, Reservoir, played Vancouver, Edmonton, Psychosis. Breton also jumps easily from French to English Calgary, Ottawa, Halifax, and Montreal. The Globe and Mail and, as a professional figure skater that toured with Disney On wrote: “His challenging, episodic, prop-filled, imaginative works Ice’s Toy Story, she is perfectly comfortable performing in front follow a logic all their own . . . Stamos is continuing to follow of an arena full of boisterous kids. Born in London, Ontario his own original choreographic pathway.” Several companies, to francophone parents, Breton moved to Montreal as a child, including New York’s The Baryshnikov Arts Center and the attending French schools until she switched to English to study Mabou Mines, as well as Berlin’s Tanzfest Im August, have theatre at John Abbott College. She later trained in French at invited him for residencies. Stamos is originally from Nova Jean Asselin’s École de Mime. (PF) Scotia. He studied in Amsterdam and settled in Montreal in the late nineties because of its thriving dance community. (PF)
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Véhicule Press A regional literary institution, Véhicule Press is Montreal’s premiere house of independent English-language literary publishing. Whether it’s the poetry of Don Coles, Stephanie Bolster, and Geoffrey Cook; the fiction of Jaspreet Singh and Liam Durcan; or the non-fiction of Mary Soderstrom and Bill Brownstein, the press has been home to many of the city’s most talented writers. Beginning in 1973 as part of an artist-run gallery, by 1975, Véhicule Press had spun off as part of an independent publishing co-operative run by a group of the city’s writers and publishers. In 1981, the co-op dissolved, and Simon Dardick and Nancy Marrelli became its sole publishers and editors. That year, they began the influential Signal Editions poetry line, edited by poet Michael Harris until fellow poet Carmine Starnino took over in 2001. In 2003, Véhicule founded the Esplanade Fiction line, which has since become – under the editorship of Andrew Steinmetz – an award-winning and nationally recognized imprint for talented new fiction writers. (DN)
www.vehiculepress.com
Blue Metropolis
www.metropolisbleu.org
52
A one-of-a-kind event unique to Montreal’s multicultural pedigree, Blue Metropolis is the only literary festival in Canada that bridges the French-English language divide. Begun in 1999 as the brainchild of writer Linda Leith’s Blue Metropolis Foundation, it sought to bring readers of different backgrounds together under one umbrella of cultural exchange. The annual festival has in just over a decade become the central platform for Canada’s English and French writers to discover each other’s work. Featuring a series of readings, on-stage interviews, and panel discussions, in recent years, Bleu Metropolis has extended its charitable and community endeavours by branching out into the city’s libraries and schools, as well as exporting Quebecois talent to the international festivals who serve as the organization’s partners. In 2008, the foundation started an annual children’s literary festival to complement the original Blue Metropolis, and this development has proven immensely popular with parents who wish to introduce their children to bilingualism. (DN)
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CKUT 90.3 FM A vibrant home for Montreal’s myriad arts, activist, and ethnic communities, during its 51 years on the air, CKUT 90.3 FM has injected a refreshing breath of multiculturalism into the city’s airwaves. Formed in 1960 as a student club, the station then known as Radio McGill originally broadcast on a closed circuit across campus before switching to cable radio in 1982, when it became known as CFRM. In 1987, the station was finally granted a license by the CRTC and CKUT community radio was born. These days, the CKUT signal can be heard as far as upstate New York, the Laurentians, the Eastern Townships, and Eastern Ontario. Whether highlighting music, arts and culture, or current issues, CKUT aims to be an up-to-date anglophone reflection of its community base. Throughout the years, the station has given an early and essential first voice to many of Montreal’s musicians and artists, and its programmers have regularly sought to support the city’s marginalized groups. (DN)
Image by Nick Keupfer
Mauro Pezzente and Kiva Stimac
www.casadelpopolo.com
53
In the decade since they first opened, the Sala Rossa (4848 St. Laurent) and Casa del Popolo (4873 St. Laurent) have become the preferred venues for practically every independent artist looking to make an impression on the Montreal arts community. Opened by local artists Mauro Pezzente and Kiva Stimac in 2000 as a means of investing his financial gains from Godspeed You! Black Emperor (the group he founded in 1994) into more durable projects, Casa del Popolo was originally slated as a vegetarian restaurant that featured bands on the weekends. Soon after the venue opened, it was hosting events every night of the week, and a year later, the pair bought the 300-person capacity Spanish Cultural Centre across the street, calling it the Sala Rossa. Eager to give some of his success back to the Montreal arts scene, in 2000 Pezzente founded the avantgarde festival Suoni del Popolo, which currently stands as one of the country’s top showcases for the cutting-edge jazz, ambient, and noise scenes. In 2004, Pezzente and Stimac opened their third venue, El Salon, but that venture only lasted three years. The pair has since set their sights on Little Italy, where in 2008 they opened the popular concert hall Il Motore (179 Jean Talon). (DN)
film
CHO, Karen............................................... 12 CROSS, Daniel............................................ 2 CYMERMAN, Alana.................................... 36 DAVID, Ellen............................................. 13 DEER, Tracey.............................................. 8 DUCKWORTH, Martin................................ 39 GELBART, Arnie.......................................... 4 ISACSSON, Magnus..................................... 5 LOW, Colin................................................ 19 MCKENNA, Brian...................................... 10 NERENBERG, Albert................................. 15 OBAMSAWIN, Alanis.................................. 18 POTTERTON, Gerald.................................. 13 SCOTT, Cynthia......................................... 45 SMITH, John N......................................... 17 SOIFERMAN, Ezra..................................... 48 TIERNEY, Kevin......................................... 31
c
KALDOR, Connie....................................... 29 KID KOALA............................................... 46 LANG, Penny............................................ 40 LANZA, Alcides......................................... 20 LEE, Ranee............................................... 31 THE DEARS.............................................. 24 LUTES, Rob................................................ 5 MAURO PENZENNTE / KIVA STIMAC, Casa del Popolo................ 53 MILLER, Joel.............................................. 4 MISSTRESS BARBARA.............................. 35 MOORE, Katie........................................... 13 MUIR, Krista (Lederhosen Lucil)................. 50 Payne, C.M., Trevor W. (& Jubilation Choir)... 32 PLANTS AND ANIMALS............................. 11 PRIESTESS.............................................. 26 RED MASS............................................... 22 SELIGMAN, Dan (Pop Montreal)................. 28 SODERSTROM, Elin (classical)................... 43 STUBLEY, Eleanor V................................... 25 THE BESNARD LAKES, Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek..................... 42 THEE SILVER MT ZION.............................. 23 THINK ABOUT LIFE.................................. 33 WING, Courtney......................................... 20 YANOFSKY, Nikki...................................... 11 YAPLE-SCHOBERT, Derek.......................... 34 DISALVIO, James......................................... 6
re
BENSKIN, Tyrone...................................... 36 BOLAM, Elsa............................................. 17 BRETON, Stephanie.................................. 51 CHRISTODOULOU, Stacey........................... 6 CHUIPKA, Chip........................................... 5 CURRAN, Colleen...................................... 30 DAVIS, Eric............................................... 14 DINNING, John......................................... 43 FAJRAJSL, Diana....................................... 38 FUERSTENBERG, Anna............................. 32 GALLUCCIO, Steve.................................... 10 GOULEM, Alain......................................... 39
theat
musi
c
ARCADE FIRE........................................... 44 ARIOLI, Susie........................................... 15 AUF dER MAUR, MELISSA.......................... 8 BRADYWORKS, Tim Brady......................... 30 CARGNELLO, Paul..................................... 38 CKUT 90.3 FM.......................................... 53 DOXAS, Chet............................................... 2 FREEDMAN, Lori......................................... 7 JENSEN, Christine....................................... 9
INDEX
musi
danc e
BARBUTO, Gioconda................................. 15 DAVIDA, Dena........................................... 35 DUNN, Deborah........................................ 17 GILLIS, Margie.......................................... 43 HATCHER, Benjamin................................. 22 KRAMER, Lara.......................................... 47 LANGLEY, Elizabeth..................................... 7 LESLIE, Jo................................................ 41 MICHEL, Dana.......................................... 40 RABIN, Linda............................................ 29 SILVA, Sandy............................................ 41 SINHA, Roger........................................... 27 STAMOS, George....................................... 51 TURNER, Andrew...................................... 18 WADGE, Chanti........................................... 3
HOPKINS, Paul......................................... 19 LEMIEUX, Catherine.................................. 34 MACKAY, Danette...................................... 47 PAPADAKOS, Anna.................................... 46 PARKER, Leni........................................... 42 PERRON, Michel....................................... 31 RIDEOUT, George...................................... 37 ROSSI, Vittorio.......................................... 37 TABLEAU D’HOTE..................................... 23 TIBALDO, Emma....................................... 45 VALDEZ, Liz................................................ 3 VARMA, Rahul.......................................... 16
theat re
BADAMI, Anita Rau................................... 11 BOLSTER, Stephanie................................. 14 CARPENTER, Jessica Ruth......................... 29 CHARNEY, Ann......................................... 44 DI MICHELE, Mary.................................... 16 FERRIER, Ian........................................... 50 FONDATION METROPOLIS BLEU, Linda Leith............................................ 52 GOLLNER, Adam Leith.............................. 38 HAGE, Rawi.............................................. 19 HOLTZ, Nairne.......................................... 32 HOMEL, David.......................................... 12 KIDD, Catherine........................................ 21 MOORE, Jeffrey......................................... 10 MOURE, Erín............................................ 33 NASRALLAH, Dimitri................................. 46 NAVES, Elaine Kalman............................... 21 NAWROCKI, Norman.................................. 27 POLAK, Monique......................................... 9 ROTHMAN, Claire Holden.......................... 23 SARAH, Robyn.......................................... 34 SIBLIN, Eric............................................... 2 SMITH, Neil................................................ 4 SOLWAY, David.......................................... 24 SOUAID, Carolyn Marie.............................. 25 STARNINO, Carmine.................................. 27 VEHICULE PRESS, Simon Dardick, Nancy Morelli......................................... 52 WEISBIRD, Merrily.................................... 49 YANOFSKY, Joel........................................ 28
mult
idisc
iplin
ary
visua
l arts
writin g
BACHMANN, Ingrid................................... 35 BIEDERMAN, Matthew............................... 40 BRAGANZA, Cheryl.................................... 12 BURNHAM, Anthony Mark.......................... 39 CHARNEY, Melvin........................................ 9 EVERGON................................................... 3 FUGLEM, Karilee....................................... 21 GOLDEN, Anne......................................... 44 GOULD, Trevor.......................................... 25 HANNAH, Adad......................................... 28 HENRICKS, Nelson................................... 36 LEONG, Rick............................................. 28 LITHERLAND, Paul................................... 51 LONDON, Naomi....................................... 30 MACLEOD, G. Scott..................................... 7 MYRE, Nadia............................................ 16 O’HARA, Alexis......................................... 45 OLSON, Daniel.......................................... 24 REWAKOWICZ, Ana................................... 14 RIDDLE, Jeanie......................................... 48 ACKERMAN, Marianne................................. 6 SANCHEZ, Carlos and Jason....................... 41 AIDS WOLF / SERIPOP.............................. 26 SCOTT, Walter........................................... 49 BOWSER AND BLUE................................. 37 SIMMS, Lorraine....................................... 50 ELLIOTT, Lorne......................................... 48 SZILASI, Andrea........................................ 20 HEWITT, Darsha........................................ 49 TRASK, Karen........................................... 42 MCLEOD, Dayna.......................................... 7 WAGSCHAL, Marion................................... 47 Nawrocki, Norman.................................. 27 WIDGERY, Catherine.................................. 26 O’HARA, Alexis......................................... 45 WONG, Mary Sui Yee................................. 22 RASTELLI, Louis....................................... 33
INDEX
PRODUCTION TEAM
Guy Rodgers Emily Pelstring Elizabeth Woodyard Red Dream Studios Dimitri Nasrallah & Philip Fine Amanda Kelly Sebastien Chorney Geneviève Letarte
ELAN Executive Director ELAN Office Manager RAEV Project Manager Graphic Design Writers English proofreader
Translator French proofreader
The English Language Arts Network 460 Sainte-Catherine west suite 610 Montreal, Qc, HSB 1A7 (514) 935-3312 www.quebec-elan.org
Recognizing Artists: Enfin Visibles!