Team

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EDITORIAL COMMITTEE
Julie Alary Lavallée
Amber Berson
Esther Bourdages
Christina Haralanova
Corina MacDonald
Katja Melzer
Candace Mooers
Deanna Radford

EDITOR IN CHIEF
Sophie Le-Phat Ho

BLOG COORDINATOR
Michelle Dobrovolny

WEB AND DESIGN
Stéphanie Lagueux

GENERAL COORDINATOR
Ximena Holuigue

 

Julie Alary Lavallée is completing a B.F.A. in Studio Arts from Concordia University and is currently preparing her doctoral thesis in Art History at Université de Montréal (UdeM) on Chinese and Indian contemporary art, with a focus on the art market and museum studies. She is a teaching assistant in the Department of Art History at UdeM and is doing an internship in the archives of the artist-run centre Optica, where she is also employed as a writer. In addition, she works as a freelance writer for Art Mûr gallery, and at the Centre d’exposition of Université de Montréal as a communications & educational activities assistant. As well as presenting her academic research here and abroad, Julie Alary Lavallée has contributed to publications on contemporary art, conservation and heritage. Since 2012 she sits on the Board of Directors at Studio XX and is a member of their programming committee. Alary Lavallée won esse arts + opinions magazine’s Young Art Critic award in 2011 and is also an independent curator. She is one of the founders of Ex-Situ, a journal published by students in the Art History program of Université du Quebec à Montréal. A polyglot, she is passionate about local and global art phenomena and wishes to travel the world!

Amber Berson is passionate about art and its potential for social change. Her current research focuses on art and mourning, museum practises, narrative theory, artist-run culture, the mythology of national art and vernacular collections. Her Master’s thesis at Concordia University considered how missing and murdered Aboriginal women have been depicted in Canadian art. She works in and with artist-run-centres and most recently curated several editions of the SIGHT & SOUND festival, the Salon : Data series, the exhibition Département des Nuisances Publiques, and other projects at Eastern Bloc; The Wild Bush Residency at a cottage in Val David, Quebec; In Your Footsteps at the VAV Gallery, The Magpies Nest at the Wenger Homestead in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and “We lived on a map…” at the CEREV (Centre for Ethnographic Research and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Violence) exhibition space. She helped to coordinate the Quebec Quilt Registry, to organize the Guido Molinari painting archive, to research Métis clothing in European collections and generally wants you to let her go through your stuff.

Esther Bourdages works in the visual arts field as a writer and curator. She holds an MA in Art History from Université de Montréal, where she wrote about the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely and the relationship between sculpture in the broad sense (in situ art, installation) and sound and digital art. Performing under the name Esther B., she plays toy turntables to manipulate vinyl records and audio samples of field recordings to create new sounds. Her practice as a musician centres around improvisation - to create a raw, non-linear music, punctuated by abstract sounds such as those produced by altering the record (sanding, cutting, etc.). She is part of the turntablist trio Vinyl Interventions with Carrie Gates (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan) and Marinko Jareb (St Catherines, Ontario). Together they developed the workshop series Vinyl Interventions, where she presents Echo of the Vinyl Record, Between the Sound and the Visual, Between the Past and the Present. Since 2002 Esther has organized A Microphone in a Noize Storm, a concert series dedicated to new music. She is actively involved in artist-run-centres and independent structures for many years, such as Quartier Ephemere (since 1996), Agence Topo, Eastern Bloc and CKUT radio.

Michelle Dobrovolny began her professional career as a writer for the Encyclopedia of Manitoba, a monumental publishing project that had her expounding on everything from history to politics to geography. Moving overseas, she wrote for The Prague Post and the political journal Pritomnost in the Czech Republic before returning to school to earn an MA in Journalism through Swansea University and the University of Amsterdam while working for the English news desk of Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Following graduation, she took on a position as a media trainer with the Canadian NGO Journalists for Human Rights in Malawi. She stayed on in Africa as a freelance journalist before returning to her native Canada. She enjoys cycle touring, and once rode a bicycle 3,000 kilometres on a self-supported trip from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Galveston, Texas. 

Christina Haralanova is a feminist, a Free Software activist and trainer in strategic use of information and communication technologies. Christina has been working for the past 10 years with the feminist movements around the world for the appropriation of information and communication technologies through principles of solidarity, software freedom and privacy of information. In her recent Master's thesis research, Christina has focused on women's contribution to Free and Open Source Development, highlighting examples of women contributors and challenging the technological gap between men and women. Since fall 2010, she is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University.

Ximena Holuigue is Programming Coordinator and Coordinator of .dpi at Studio XX. Based in Montreal, she holds a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University, where she began her practice in documentary film and photography. Since then, her work explores various modes of expression going from photography to film and from ceramics to silk-screening through a process called “cineramic”. Her works are part of a series of auto-biographical narrative explorations produced in Canada, the US, Chile and Cuba. In recent years, she took part in producing cultural events including Art Matters Festival, Pop Montreal, the 2007 and 2010 editions of the HTMlles biennale, as well as Studio XX’s Cross-Canada Pipeline.

Stéphanie Lagueux is Webmistress at Studio XX since 2002. She is also web manager, graphic designer and trainer for organizations such as 3e impérial and RAIQ. She completed her BFA in Art and Design at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in 1998 and began her new media art practice through her involvement in artist-run-centres Axe NÉO-7 and DAIMON. For the past few years, she has been working on The Sensible Lab –The Social Body, a participatory video and web installation. She has received support for her creations from numerous art centres across Québec such as Vidéographe, Vidéo Femmes and the Musée régional de Rimouski. She is Matricules’ Project Director, an online archive created over a period of three years.

Sophie Le-Phat Ho is a researcher and cultural organizer from Montreal. Trained as an archivist, she has also completed an MA in Anthropology of Health and the Body in the 21st Century at Goldsmiths College (University of London) in the UK, following her studies at McGill University in Environment and in the Social Studies of Medicine. On top of having served as the Artistic Director of The HTMlles 10 | RISKY BUSINESS, the international feminist festival of media arts + digital culture, she has worked at the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as Studio XX as Programming Coordinator and Editor-in-Chief of .dpi in its early stages. She was one of the curators of UpgradeMTL (Montréal), as part of the Upgrade! International network on technology, culture and politics, and has been invited to co-curate events by artist-run-centres such as Skol, DARE-DARE and Eastern Bloc. Her individual and collaborative writings have been published in Vague Terrain, esse arts + opinions, Inter art actuel, ETC, livedspace, Le Merle, among others. She has also served as Guest Editor for FUSE and No More Potlucks. As a co-founding member of the Artivistic collective (artivistic.org), she works at the intersection of art, science and activism.

Corina MacDonald is an information specialist, developer, DJ and music producer. She completed a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies in 2008 at McGill University, with a specialization in knowledge management. Her professional interests include the role of open content, technologies and standards in community and capacity building, systems of knowledge representation, electronic publishing and digital heritage. She worked as a heritage information analyst at the Canadian Heritage Information Network from 2008 to 2010 before beginning work as an independent consultant for digital cultural projects. Under her musical alias Cyan she hosts the radio program modular systems on CKUT 90.3 FM. She has been actively involved in Montreal’s independent electronic music community since the late 1990s and was a founding member of collectives phoniq, Women on Wax MTL and dark disco. She has blogged and written about digital art, music, and information practices for Vague Terrain, Artengine, art press 2, Leonardo and other scholarly and professional journals.

Katja Melzer is a curator and project manager with an interest in photography, public art, and artistic collaborations. She has completed her MA in Art History, Business Studies and Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. After her studies she received a scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) to work at the Ludwig Museum for Contemporary Art in Budapest, followed by various positions in the non-profit and commercial art sector in Berlin and Budapest. From 2010 to 2012 she has been working for the German Foundation Robert Bosch Stiftung in Pécs, Hungary. In this capacity she initiated and managed numerous artistic, educational and interdisciplinary projects, which aimed to support the visibility, mobility and cooperation of young academics, artists and cultural workers in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2011 she co-founded Igor Metropol in Budapest, a non-profit association with a focus on the intersections of visual art, music and pop-cultural phenomena. Since summer 2012 she is based in Montreal, exploring the city and its artistic and cultural diversity.

Candace Mooers has worked in alternative media since 1995. Writing zines, hosting community radio shows, and organizing all-ages punk concerts, have all figured part of her DIY counter-cultural ethic. Her art practice explores gendered divisions of labour and digital cultures of communication via the mediums of embroidery, scavenged objects, and paper. She is a former President of the National Campus and Community Radio Association, past Executive Director of Gallery Connexion (Fredericton) and past Production Coordinator for The HTMlles 10: Feminist Festival of Media Arts + Digital Culture, produced by Studio XX (Montreal). In 2010, she co-founded the G20 Alternative Media Centre in Toronto, a temporary autonomous workspace for over 100 independent journalists to cover the protests from social justice perspectives. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in History and French Literature at the University of New Brunswick and studied in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities.

Deanna Radford is a poet and author with a passion for sound art, experimental music and text. She completed her BA in English and Political Science at the University of Winnipeg, and is carrying out studies in the domain of digital art and design. She published a book of poetry in 2011 entitled Building Ground. She has contributed to MUTEKMAG, MusicWorks and Herizons magazines, among others, and joined the .dpi Editorial Committee in 2011. She served as an administrator for several arts-based cultural organizations and is a strong believer in community-based efforts.