TEAM

Guides

Our Guide Team works collaboratively to support Pathways participants and one another. Guides act as program companions and accountability partners, offering support without consulting. They bring different perspectives and strengths and are committed to caring for their community, their participants, and elevating others.

Your Guide will support you through the duration of the program: to identify learning goals and opportunities; to reflect on what you are learning and approaching through your work in Pathways; and to support you as you make decisions on how to best implement what you are learning into your work and organization. While Guides provide one-on-one support, they do not act as equity and access consultants or replace the need to hire a professional to do deep policy work or strategic planning.

Each Guide’s practice is deeply rooted in the communities they serve across many disciplines and geographic locations.

Allison Girvan – Program Guide is an internationally respected Canadian singer who has been a featured soloist in performance and on recordings with ensembles ranging from jazz trios to full orchestra and is a studio vocalist for TV and feature film.
She is known for her living sound installations, innovative choral direction, and cross-disciplinary collaborative projects.

Amber Santos – Program Guide is an artist, art educator and curator.

In her art practice she explores themes of identity, land and belonging, drawing on her experience as a German Canadian and Anishanaabe and Metis person. She explores what it means to be rooted and uprooted as a third generation immigrant and an indigenous person reclaiming and practicing culture, while raising a family.

bailey macabre – Program Guide (they/them) is a queer, disabled, and neurodivergent agender nêhiyaw michif Ukrainian born on Snuneymuxw territory, with matrilineal ties to Beardy’s & Okemasis Cree Nation in Duck Lake, SK. Their interdisciplinary practice spans illustration, writing, comics, textiles, poetry, sculpture, painting, and media art, often exploring themes of queer passion, Indigenous joy, intimacy, Indigenous futurism, and healing.

Christine Quintana – Program Guide Born in Los Angeles to a Mexican-American father and a Dutch-British-Canadian mother, Christine grew up as a grateful visitor to the unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people.

Damla Tamer – Program Guide

Damla Tamer is a visual artist and educator living on the unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories. A first-generation immigrant from Istanbul, Turkey, she has called these lands home for the past sixteen years while navigating a complex and ambivalent relationship with belonging.

Jenna Reid – Program Guide is the former Executive Director/Senior Curator of Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture, and is now pausing to focus on her own textile art practice. In 2019, Jenna completed her PhD in Critical Disability Studies at York University and has taught and done research at Toronto Metropolitan University, York University, University of Toronto, and McMaster University. Jenna’s research and studio practice focus on artistic production as a site of critical inquiry, community organizing, and political activism.

Kia Kadiri –⁠⁠ Program Guide is a respected vocalist and workshop facilitator based in Vancouver. For over 20 years her unique style keeps her in demand as a performer, instructor, and recording artist. Kia teaches lyricism and songwriting in marginalized communities, schools, and institutions. Her interactive workshops combine music theory, improvisation, recording techniques, music production, creative writing, and performance skills.

Kingsley Strudwick – Program Guide

I am the parent of two young children, and currently reside on the land of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking Peoples, colonially known as Victoria, BC, with my partner. I am a queer, non-binary trans person of Scottish, English and Irish ancestry. For the past 17 years, I have been in a range of education, facilitation, and consulting roles, many of which have focused on topics of gender diversity, bystander intervention, values-based leadership, and more broadly, on systemic changes in workplace culture.

Miriam Colvin – Program Guide

Photo credit – Katie Wertz

Miriam is a parent and multidisciplinary dance artist living on Witsuwit’en Yintah in Smithers, where she immigrated in 2004 from urban USA. Land, community, and collaboration are central to her life and artistic practice, continually teaching her how to move, listen, and create.

Sadira Rodrigues – Program Guide is an educator, curator, writer and administrator. From social-profit enterprises such as artist run-centres and public galleries, to museums, grant funding and higher education, she has assembled deep knowledge of the arts and culture sector in Canada and beyond. She is committed to working across disciplines and has been fortunate to engage with artists and organisations in dance, theatre, music and the visual arts.

Veronica Buck – Program Guide I’ve been bringing “My whole self” to my guide role in the Pathways program! As a community development practitioner, a mother, a creative, a hiker and scrambler, a writer, and an advocate for representation and systems change, I’m revelling in the opportunities to work with empathy, in relational spaces with stakeholder communities and organizations on their equity and transformational change journeys.

Yun-Jou Chang – Program Guide is a writer, facilitator, cultural producer, and arts administrator. Rooted in grassroots organizing, Yun-Jou situates her work at the intersection of art and community and is deeply drawn to language, the stories that we tell, and how they inform our ability to connect with one another, form groups, and build community.

Staff

Our staff manage the administrative, communications, and facilitation aspects of the Pathways program. These friendly and supportive team members are dedicated to helping participants, guides, advisors, and leadership deliver the program.

Carla Stephenson – Program Director Carla’s work sits at the intersection of arts, systems change, rural innovation and amplification. She is the founder of the Rural Arts Inclusion Lab and the Executive Director of Renascence, a non-profit society in Ymir, BC. She and her husband of 29 years, Shawn, founded the Tiny Lights Festival. Carla is a member of the Arts BC Insight team and an alumna of the Positive Deviants Fellowship. She has presented at the Canadian Arts Summit and the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation Conference, sharing the innovations her organizations have made in equity and sustainability.

Tamar Zehava Tabori – Administrative Manager Tamar Zehava Tabori (she/her) dances, makes videos, and works across artistic and organizational practices in the arts and culture sector.
Her work centres collective decision-making, thoughtful infrastructure, and building systems from the ground up, shaped by the real needs and values of the people they serve. She is drawn to the arts as a place where people gather and make sense of things together.

Bethany Handfield – Program Coordinator is a mixed-race settler gratefully living on the unceded ancestral lands of the Syilx-Okanagan Nation. Her career has spanned the arts, film, and nonprofit sectors and informs a grounded, relationship-centered approach to community. She is an aspiring futures thinker and emergent strategist. Her lived experience with invisible illness grounds her understanding of access and advocacy in a tangible, relational way.

Ingrid Love – Program Coordinator is a dedicated arts sector worker and occasional multi-disciplinary artist. She joins the Pathways team with experience working for small, rural arts organizations and theatre companies in marketing, communications, and administrative support. Organizations she worked with include: Nelson & District Arts Council, West Kootenay Regional Arts Council, Tiny Lights Festival, Elephant Mountain Literary Festival, Ichigo-Ichieh New Theatre, Black Productions and many more.

The Pathways program has been shaped by many brilliant minds and leaders within the sector. We are very grateful to all the program advisors, guides, working group members, and advisory network members who contributed their knowledge, lived-experience, time, and passion to bring Pathways to life.

Pathways Leadership