Biographies
Featured Artist: Lou Sheppard
Lou Sheppard works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation based practices. His work focuses on climate crisis, loss, queer bodies and ecologies, responding to the
material and discursive histories of sites, bodies and environments.
Lou has performed and exhibited across Canada, notably at The Art Gallery of York University, The Confederation Centre for the Arts, and as part of the first Toronto Biennial, as well as internationally, at Kumu Kunstimuuseum in Estonia, in the Antarctic Biennial, and at Titanik Gallery in Finland.
Lou has participated in numerous residencies, including the International Studio Curatorial Program in Brooklyn, NY., La Cité des Arts in Paris, and as participant and faculty at The Banff Centre, Banff AB.
He has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2018, 2020 and 2021, and was the winner of the Emerging Atlantic Artist Award in 2017.
Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia.
Featured Artist: Jessica Karuhanga
Jessica Karuhanga is a first-generation Canadian artist of British-Ugandan heritage whose work addresses the cultural politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lensbased technologies, writing, drawing and performances. She explores individual and collective concerns of Black subjectivity and embodiment through her practice.
Karuhanga has exhibited her work at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (2023), Mitchell Art Gallery (Edmonton, 2022), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa, 2021), Varley Art Gallery (Markham, 2020), The Bentway (Toronto, 2019) and Nuit Blanche (Toronto, 2018). She has performed at Remai Modern (Saskatoon, 2023), Pallas Art Projects (Dublin, IE, 2022), WNDX Festival of Moving Image (Winnipeg, 2020), Long Winter (Toronto, 2019), Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, 2018), Cooper Cole (Toronto, 2017), Goldsmiths (London, UK, 2017) and DoubleDouble Land (Toronto, 2016).
C Magazine, BlackFlash, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Blackwood Gallery and Founderie Darling have published Karuhanga’s writing. She has been featured in AGO’s Artist Spotlight, i-D, DAZED, Visual Aids, Border Crossings, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, ESSE, and the Globe and Mail. She earned her BFA from Western University and MFA from the University of Victoria. She is an Assistant Professor in Studio Art in the Visual Arts Department at Western University (London, ON, Canada).
Workshop Facilitator: Elian Mikkola
Elian Mikkola is a Finnish Moving Image Artist (of Karelian descent), and a white settler currently based between Treaty 4, Regina, and Montréal (Tiohtià:ke), Canada. Originally from Turku, Finland, Mikkola holds a BA in Journalism from Tampere University. They completed their MFA in Media Production in 2019 at the University of Regina.
Mikkola works closely with both analogue and digital images and explores themes such as memory, spatial dependencies and queer belonging. They’ve done extensive research in the field of eco-processed film since 2017. Mikkola’s experimental work has been showcased in several film festivals in Canada and internationally including 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.
Mikkola has been a part of La Lumière Collective based in Montréal and is a current board member of the WNDX Festival of Moving Image.