Marcus Merasty is an independent multidisciplinary artist with ancestral roots from Wapâwikoscikanihk, Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan and of Asinîskâwitiniwak, Rocky Cree, heritage.

He completed the Professional Program at the School of Contemporary Dancers in Winnipeg, MB, in 2021.

A past artist-in-residence at New Dance Horizons (NDH) in Regina, SK, Marcus’ passion lies in exploring Indigenous contemporary dance performance and creation. In 2024 their work was presented at the Remain Modern (Saskatoon, SK) and at NDH’s Stream of Dance Festival (Regina, SK). Recently Marcus has worked as an interpreter for The Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra, The Globe Theatre, and NDH/Rouge-gorge. He regularly teaches jigging and square-dancing as he believes social and cultural dance forms are an integral part of building a vibrant community.

Elian Mikkola is a Finnish filmmaker (of Karelian descent), currently based between Montréal (Tiohtià:ke) and Treaty 4, Canada. Mikkola holds a BA in Journalism from Tampere University and an MFA from the University of Regina.

Mikkola works closely with both analogue and digital images and explores themes such as trans futurism, counter-archiving and queer belonging. They’ve done extensive research in experimental screenwriting and celluloid cinema since 2017.

Mikkola’s work has been showcased at several film festivals in Canada and internationally, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Oberhausen, and TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten. Mikkola has also showcased their Expanded Cinema work internationally in diverse exhibition environments.

They are part of La Lumière Collective in Montréal and a founder of the trans-projection activist and art collective, "Care Bois" based in Treaty 4, Saskatchewan.

Lichen Bouboushian is a non-binary performance artist based in central Texas, with a history of practice in Chicago and New York City. They build a rhizomatic practice through visible forays into performance, curating, and teaching, and less visible forays into writing, dialogue, mutual aid, and resource sharing.

As a solo performer, they create emotionally jarring juxtapositions of text, experimental voice work, and somatics-based movement practices. They dive into their family history—a blend of heritage from Germany, East Texas, Armenia, and Lebanon—to ask critical questions about ancestry, migration, and social privilege. Their sense of self is carved out by multiplicities that do not synthesize: they are the descendant of both refugees and conquerors, blue-collar criminals and community educators; they experience white privilege as well as the challenges of being first-generation and working-class. This social positioning fuels the personal and collective scrutiny and healing that are central to their work.

They have shared work in New York City at Dixon Place, JACK, Danspace Project, Issue Project Room, Center for Performance Research, and the Queens Museum. They have also presented at Elastic Arts, Constellation, and Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago. They have held residencies at New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks) and Chez Bushwick, Movement Research, Mount Tremper, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Stove Works.

They have also performed in Athens and Beirut, and in festivals including the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, New Genre Festival (Tulsa), Miami Performance International Festival, QueerNY and Queer Zagreb, Inverse Performance Art Festival (Fayetteville, AR), and Month of Performance Art-Berlin.

David Secter is a Canadian film director. He is best known for the 1965 film Winter Kept Us Warm, the first English Canadian film ever screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Widely considered a key milestone in the development of Canadian film, Winter Kept Us Warm was a gay-themed independent film written, directed and funded entirely by Secter, while he was a student at the University of Toronto.

Secter released a second film in Canada, titled The Offering, in 1966; however, the film was more poorly received than Winter Kept Us Warm, and because Secter had largely worked with non-union crew, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees intervened to prevent the film from being screened theatrically anywhere outside of Toronto.

At the time of The Offering's premiere, other projects Secter reportedly had in development included a drama series for CBC Television, a thriller film to be shot in Haliburton County, and a documentary film about the history of IATSE. However, none of the other projects came to fruition, and instead he moved to New York City to pursue opportunities in the much larger American film and theatre industry. He initially was slated to direct Cher's 1969 film Chastity, but dropped out of the project. In New York, he lived with several other experimental filmmakers in a clothing-optional, drug and sex-friendly commune, and worked as a theatre director. He released the low-budget sex comedy Getting Together (also titled Feelin' Up in some releases) in 1976, and later moved to Los Angeles. He did not work on another film until Cyberdorm in 1997.

In the early 1990s, Secter's nephew Joel Secter rented Getting Together from his local video store in Winnipeg, not knowing that his uncle had directed films. After discovering his uncle's name in the credits, Joel contacted David to discuss his career in film. These discussions culminated in Joel Secter's debut as a filmmaker with the 2005 documentary The Best of Secter and the Rest of Secter. In the film, David revealed that he is HIV-positive.

Also in 2005, David Secter directed and released a documentary film on the Gay Games, titled Take the Flame! Gay Games: Grace, Grit, and Glory.

He is interviewed in Matthew Hays' Lambda Literary Award-winning 2007 book The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers.

Chris Dupuis is a writer, curator, and performance maker from Toronto.

Dr. Jonathan Petrychyn is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Regina. His research focuses on the intersections of sex, activism, and media and seeks to explore how media technologies bring queer, feminist, and other marginalized communities together. He received his PhD in Communication & Culture from York University and Ryerson University in 2019. His dissertation, Networks of Feeling: Affective Economies of Queer & Feminist Film Festivals on the Canadian Prairies was awarded the Susan Mann Dissertation Scholarship. His research has been published in Senses of Cinema, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Journal for Media History.

Jes Battis is the author of the Occult Special Investigator series and Parallel Parks series (as Bailey Cunningham) with Ace. Their first novel, Night Child, was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. Jes teaches queer and trans studies, medieval literature, and representations of disability/neurodiversity in pop culture at the University of Regina. They split time between the prairies and the west coast.