John Robert Matz is a composer, performer, and music educator based in Chicago. In 2023, he composed the score to the action-adventure game Tchia in collaboration with Awaceb, inspired by the developers’ familial and cultural ties to New Caledonia. Matz’s score combines influences from popular and traditional Indigenous musical traditions and provides a model of ethical cross-cultural collaborations.

These events are hosted in partnership with the Department of Digital Humanities.

Jaumes Privat is a visual artist and poet from Aveyron in the South of France. He has been engaged in exploring his creative process since 1968. He publishes his written work in Occitan magazines and writes texts for contemporary Occitan music composers, such as Nicolas Wohred and Luc Aussibal. Privat also creates hand-bound artist books (“los faisses”), which he produces in his studio in La Taillade.

Stuart Reid has over 30 years of experience as a senior manager in the not-for-profit sector. He joined Community Foundation Grey Bruce, Owen Sound, Ontario as Executive Director in 2016 after serving for over four years at Brock University as director of Rodman Hall Art Centre. An award-winning writer, Reid has published numerous articles and exhibition catalogues.

Catherine Parayre is the Director of Studies in Arts and Culture and a faculty member in both STAC and the Department of Modern Languages.

Georgette LeBlanc was born in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and lives in Moncton (le Coude), New Brunswick. She holds a Doctorate of Letters from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is the author of cycle of novels in free verse, including Prudent, a finalist for the 2014 Governor General’s Prize in Poetry and Le Grand Feu (2016). Her literary translation Océan from English into Acadian French won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 2020. Her poetry collection Petits poèmes sur mon père qui est mort was launched in spring 2022. She is director of the Acadie Tropicale collection at Éditions Perce-Neige, member of the editorial board of the creative literary journal Ancrages and of the Editorial board of UL Press in Louisiana. Georgette LeBlanc is a lecturer in creative writing in the French studies department at the Université de Moncton.

Julien Besse (Montreal, Quebec) is an English-French translator specializing in the translation of graphic novels, essays, novels and short Stories, screenplays and subtitling, as well as oral history. In 2018, his translation of Seth Tobocman’s Quartier en guerre was part of the official selection at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, France. He is a member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada / Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada (ATTLC/LTAC).

The Creative Salon offers an opportunity for artists and authors based in St. Catharines and the Niagara Region to meet with peers and discuss creative practice. Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin will moderate a shared conversation about the experience of art-making as “utter chaos; a mess of happy little accidents.”

The Creative Walk will be an experience of “accidental details,” during which participants are invited to document their observations in any creative form they wish (drawing, creative writing, sound recording, photography).

Marc-Alexandre Dumoulin (active in Montreal, Canada and Vienna, Austria) is a Franco-Ontarian. He studied Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montréal and at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London, Great-Britain. In 2022 he obtained a Ph.D. in Art and Cultural Science from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe, North America, and North Africa. Dumoulin’s paintings, drawings, and etchings are thoughts that reveal their complexity through the sensual connection of colors, themes, and formats.

Artist’s website: https://www.marcalexandredumoulin.com/

The Small Walker Press publishes collaborative work that brings together authors and artists from the Niagara Region as well as Canadian or international contexts. Fields covered include creative practices taught and researched at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts as well as creative writing. Join us for the launch of the 2023-2024 Small Walker Press series, Blurs and Vagueness, featuring two new publications: Midnight Deer Abstractions (Geoff Farnsworth / Erin Knight) and A Glossary of Illegibility (Linda Carreiro / Lan “Florence” Yee). Geoff Farnsworth and Lan “Florence” Yee were guests of the 23-24 Walker Cultural Leaders series.

Jani Lauzon is a multidisciplinary artist of Métis/ French/ Finnish ancestry with numerous recognitions to her credit, including a Gemini Award and multiple Dora Mavor-Moore and Juno nominations. Establishing her company Paper Canoe Projects to support original work, Lauzon’s longstanding and diverse experiences include puppeteer, director, actor, writer, singer and songwriter. She co-authored the play 1939, which takes place in a fictional residential school in Northern Ontario as five Indigenous students put on a production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.

Her work with Dramatic Arts will engage students, faculty, and theatre production staff in workshops on Indigenous production dramaturgy preparing for the 2025/26 mainstage production led by Métis faculty member Matthew MacKenzie. Lauzon will reflect on the implications of her process for theatre education in a talk with MacKenzie at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in March.

Camille Turner is an artist/scholar whose work combines Afrofuturism and historical research. She is a Provost’s postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, and her award-winning artworks are held in collections across Canada and internationally. Her most recent explorations confront Canada’s entanglement with the transatlantic trade in Africans, approaching colonial archives from the point of view of a liberated future.

Turner’s Afronautic methodology centralizes Blackness to expose silenced histories and explore potential futures. The Afronautic Research Lab is an innovative social practice project that offers the public an immersive art experience.