TEAM

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. Read More

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. Read More

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.
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Kenji Maeda – Program Guide
Photo credit – Ervin Wong, CBC

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.
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Meeka Noelle Morgan – Program Guide

Meeka Noelle Morgan is Secwepemc and Nuu-Chah-Nulth woman from the interior of what is now known as BC and Vancouver Island. She is a singer/songwriter, writer, workshop designer, facilitator, and has developed many Indigenous arts projects, many involving youth. Read More

Sidi Chen – Program Guide is a traveling queer artist whose relational practice addresses the intersectionality of the body, community space, and the land. For the creative process, Chen empathizes the body as a unit of measurement, a vessel of relationships, a repository of experience, and an instrument for creativity. Read More

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.
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Phoenix | Sun Park – Program Advisor 

Phoenix a.k.a Sun Park is the Founder of Voice of Purpose. Sun has been a leader in community arts as an artist-educator and organizer since 2005. Phoenix is also the Integration Director and sits on the Board of Directors at Interfusion Festival.Read More

Regan Shrumm – Program Advisor

Regan Shrumm is a queer and disabled artist, curator, and administrator currently based on the traditional and unceded lands of the Lekwungen and W̱ SÁNE peoples (currently Victoria, BC). Born on the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishaabeg (Hamilton, ON), they grew up moving around the West and East Coasts of the United States. Read More

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.
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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.
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