Mar Dixon
Mar Dixon is a passionate advocate for digital within the cultural sector. She is perhaps best known as the driving force behind acclaimed and world trending social media campaigns including #MuseumSelfie,#AskACurator,#MuseumWeek,#LoveTheatreDay.But while almost always found on social media, she also knows the value of bringing together cultural and digital professionals, and frequently organises workshops and hack events for museums, galleries and arts organisation. Mar speaks at international conferences regularly and is a frequent commentator on culture and digital.
W. Ryan Dodge
As the Royal Ontario Museum's (ROM) Digital Engagement Strategist, Ryan is focused on digital content creation, campaign and community management, as well as building internal digital capacity. Active in the global museum technology community, Ryan presented internationally and been a member of the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report Museum Edition expert panel. He has volunteered with the Canadian Museums Association's Young Canada Works in Heritage Project and sat on the boards of ICOM Canada and the Virtual Museum of Canada. In his spare time, Ryan is a father of three and also the Museum Computer Network's part-time Digital Content and Community Manager and a consultant with Cultural & Heritage organizations across North America. A long time ago, Ryan used to sit on the bench and in the stands for the Halifax Mooseheads and he began his career in the cultural & heritage sector babysitting microfilm readers at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia.
Dr. Sandra Alfoldy, Professor of Craft History, NSCAD University
Dr. Sandra Alfoldy is Professor of Craft History at NSCAD University and Associate Curator of Fine Crafts at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. She is the author and editor of four books including Crafting Identity (2005), NeoCraft (2007), Craft, Space and Interior Design (2008), and The Allied Arts: Craft and Architecture (2012). She is finishing her next book Craftwashing: The Uses and Abuses of Craft in Corporate Culture for Bloomsbury Press. Dr. Alfoldy is the curator of On the Table (2007), Unity and Diversity at the Vancouver Winter Olympics (2010), Naked Craft (2016) and the forthcoming Tortoises and Tulips: A Walter Ostrom Retrospective.
Dr. Rachel Gotlieb
Dr. Rachel Gotlieb is Adjunct Curator of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto who has curated over thirty exhibitions on Canadian craft and design. She also served as the Gardiner’s Chief Curator and Interim Executive Director. She is a sessional instructor at Sheridan’s Bachelor of Design and Craft program. Gotlieb was the 2017 Theodore Randall International Chair in Art and Design at Alfred University in New York and a 2018 Research Fellow at Winterthur Museum in Delaware . She is the founding curator of the Design Exchange in Toronto, where she co-wrote the landmark Design in Canada (Knopf Canada, 2001).
Dr. Lisa Binkley
Lisa Binkley is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. Her work focuses on Indigenous and settler textiles as material culture, and the relationships between Indigenous and settler women during the long-nineteenth century. Her research focuses on object lives and the search for hidden histories of museum objects She has two books forthcoming, Material Identities: Quilts in Canada and their Makers, 1800-1900 (UBC Press) and Stitching the Self: Emergence and Transformation through the Needle Arts, 1850-Present (Bloomsbury Press), co-edited with Dr. Johanna Amos (Queen’s University). As part of her current research, which explores contemporary and historical Indigenous needle-arts practices, she works (and stitches) with makers to reconcile and recoup Indigenous women’s colonial histories and experiences. In addition to this work, she incorporates digital technologies as an aspect of research and research dissemination.
Dr. Carla Taunton
Dr. Carla Taunton is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the department of Cultural Studies at Queen’s. She holds a PhD in Art History from Queen’s University, and a MA in Canadian Art History from Carleton University. Taunton is a white-settler scholar whose areas of expertise include Indigenous arts and methodologies, contemporary Canadian art, museum and curatorial studies, as well as theories of decolonization, anti-colonialism and settler responsibility. Through this work she investigates current approaches towards the writing of Indigenous-specific art histories, recent Indigenous and settler research/arts collaborations, and strategies of creative-based interventions that challenge colonial narratives, national/ist institutions and settler imagination. Her recent collaborative research projects include: Transactive Memory Keepers (2016-ongoing); The Kanata Indigenous Performance, New and Digital Media Art Project (2013-16); Arts East (2014-5); This is What I Wish You Knew: Urban Aboriginal Artists (2015-ongoing) and Theories and Methodologies for Indigenous Arts in North America (2014-ongoing). She is also an independent curator and recently co-curated with Erin Sutherland Memory Keepers: Methodologies of Memory, Mapping and Gender at Urban Shaman Gallery in conjunction with the 30th Anniversary of MAWA (2014), Art in the Open – Indigenizing PEI with Heather Igloliorte in Charlottetown (2014) and co-curated two projects for Inuit Blanche (2016). Her recent publications include “Performing Sovereignty: Forces to be Reckoned With” in More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (2016), and “Embodying Sovereignty: Indigenous Women’s Performance Art in Canada,” in Narratives Unfolding (2017). With Dr. Julie Nagam and Dr. Heather Igloliorte, Taunton co-edited PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art, the first special issue on global Indigenous new media and digital arts. With Igloliorte she is currently finalizing her co-edited special issue of RACAR on Indigenous art histories.
Mary Guildford
Mary Guildford has an MA in the History of Dress from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has done research projects on Nova Scotia businesses and clothing and textile production. Since 2002 she has been working with the Nova Scotia Museum, first as Curator of the Collection at the Museum of Industry and currently as Senior Registrar based at the Museum of Natural History. She is a life-long sewer, knitter and self-confessed “textile nerd”.