People

Jessa Agilo (she/they) is Founder, President, and CEO of ArtsPond / Étang d’Arts. She is a queer, disabled, integrated arts producer and entrepreneur with a three-decade career in Canadian arts and culture.

Based in T’karon:to, Jessa is a passionate advocate for critical access and inclusion with, by, and for equity-seeking groups of all kinds. She is contributing to positive systemic change in Canadian arts and culture through the founding of many initiatives, including DigitalASO, Groundstory, Hatch Open and Artse United, two editions of the Digital Arts Services Symposium, I Lost My Gig Canada, Together There, and more.

She was a fellow of Toronto Arts Council’s Leaders Lab in 2019 and Wolf Willow’s Positive Deviants in 2021-22. She is in demand as a mentor to young changemakers from Humber College, University of Toronto, York University, Toronto Metropolitan University, and more. Among others, she has been featured in stories by The Canadian Press, CBC, CityTV, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Feral Arts (Australia), and Culture24 (UK).

Sania Khan (they/she) is a social-digital futurist, cultural strategist and award-winning filmmaker based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their interdisciplinary practice leverages digital innovation to build just and liberated futures, with particular focus on the nexus between healing justice, equitable placemaking and collective care ecosystems.

Sania is the Founder and Executive Director of Solar House Productions, a nationwide platform that offers professional development opportunities for pre/emerging filmmakers from historically marginalized backgrounds so that they may claim their creative sovereignties as visual storytellers. Beyond this, Sania also serves as Founder and Core Organizer of Scarborough Mutual Aid, a digital mutual aid collective invested in cultivating interdependent care systems for Scarborough communities to ensure that the needs of systematically marginalized communities that have been disproportionately affected by the covid-19 pandemic are prioritized throughout and beyond this moment.

Veronique West (she/they) is a non-binary artist, arts worker, and disability advocate of Polish descent, based on the occupied and unsurrendered lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Their practice draws from their lived experience of mental health disability and chronic physical illness.

Veronique collaboratively creates in-person and digital performances. Through fragmented aesthetics, their work explores how disability and madness can be generative disruptions, which reshape understandings of self, kin, and community. Through multimedia design, their projects incorporate various artist and audience entry-points, interweaving accessibility with formal experimentation.

As an advocate, Veronique contributes to disability-led consulting, community organizing, and peer support initiatives. They are inspired by the teachings of Deaf, disabled, mad, and neurodivergent activists who affirm that all liberation movements are connected. They strive to play a part in cross-movement solidarity.

Danielle Hyde is a multi-disciplinary Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) artist of Garden River First Nations and a person with a disability (OCD). Their work blends traditional with non-traditional mediums; painting, photography, public art and performance.

They are a principle artist member of the Red Urban Nation Artist Collective (RUN) that creates Indigenous murals and supports emerging Indigenous artists and place-making.

Danielle is also a member of the Toronto Indigenous Business Association, founder of CoCreations Art, and is on the Board of Directors at Tangled Art and Disability Gallery.

Emkay Adjei-Manu (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, community-arts facilitator, and researcher. Their professional work and creative practice are rooted in arts-based research, storytelling, and community building as a method of relaying truths as a catalyst for social and political transformation. They have completed their Bachelor of Social Work at Toronto Metropolitan University and is in the process of pursuing an MFA.

Emkay also works as a Digital Storyteller at the ReVision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph where they utilise various arts methods as a medium to explore conversations around systemic injustice(s) through workshop facilitation and digital storytelling.

Emkay is a founding member of the Brampton Black Arts Collective, an emerging arts-based collective focused on showcasing, sustaining, and supporting Black artists within the city of Brampton, Ontario. Through community arts leadership, it is their goal to connect and build spaces outside of the central core that support Black artists and cultural workers who are under-resourced and multiply marginalised.

Art Proctor is an Afro-Métis and neuro-diverse artist, activist, technologist, community builder.  Based in Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta in Calgary, Art is an outspoken cultural catalyst and socio-political unwilling profit. His focus and passion is exploring the intersection and connection between Art, Business and Technology; specifically, within film, digital and immersive media through the lens of unrepresented diverse voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.

Art is currently a digital transformation consultant, emergent technology nerd and digital justice advocate, whose focus is on Social Responsible Technology Policy (Data Sovereignty, Digital Privacy), how it pertains to personal / body autonomy, and how this may impact the building of the Web 3.0 ecosystem.

Inga Petri is based in has designed and implemented strategies for organizations in the private, not-for-profit and public sectors for more than 30 years.

In 2006, Inga founded Strategic Moves, an independent consultancy that thrives at the crossroads of research, strategy and marketing. With experience in diverse sectors – from the performing and visual arts, national museums, publishing and arts service organizations to government, international trade promotion organizations, technology companies and advertising / digital agencies – clients benefit from an uncommon breadth of experience and expertise.

Starting in 2011, she’s been putting digital conversations in the performing arts on the agenda through the seminal Value of Presenting: A Study of Performing Arts Presentation in Canada (©2013, CAPACOA/Strategic Moves). In 2015 she co-founded the Digital Innovation Council for the Performing Arts  and co-authored Digitizing the Performing Arts: An Assessment of Issues, Opportunities and Challenges (©2017, CAPACOA/Strategic Moves). Since 2017, Inga has consulted on dozens of digital projects across Canada.

Inga is a Certified Analytics and Insights Professional (CAIP) and holds a professional certificate in strategic management from the Schulich School of Business.

Margaret Lam (MISt) is a published information science researcher, a seasoned print and digital designer, and an advocate for independent artists. Her SSHRC-funded research on music knowledge-sharing platforms and the design of domain-specific information systems has been published as journal articles, a book chapter, and presented at conferences on knowledge management, information professionals, ethnomusicology, and digital futures around the world.

As the Design Research Lead at Octagram (octagram.net), a software consultancy in Canada, she consults and advises on numerous strategic digital initiatives, where she brings a nuanced understanding of how human-centered design practices can inform social innovation and digital transformation within the arts and culture sector. Select projects include CAPACOA’s Linked Digital Future Initiative, ArtsPond’s Hatch Open, ThePitch.ca, Creative Users Projects’ Accessing The Arts, Audience Experience Lab and Twillingate’s Digital Arts and Culture Strategy.

She is the founder of BeMused Network (bemusednetwork.com), and also the co-founder of the Digital Arts Services Symposium and DigitalASO with Jessa Agilo.

Kelsie Acton is a neurodivergent access consultant, researcher and choreographer.

She is currently the Inclusive Practice Manager at Battersea Arts Centre, the world’s first Relaxed Venue. Her PhD research into the accessibility of timing in disability dance rehearsal was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and she completed a residency at Siobhan Davies Dance Centre (UK).

She was the plain language translator for MsSweeney’s The Audio Issue. She is a member of the Critical Design Lab, a multi-national, multi-institutional collective focused on access, disability and design. As an access consultant she has worked with the Edmonton International Fringe Festival (Canada), the Citadel Theatre (Canada), Arts Pond (Canada), the Young Vic (UK), Hot Coals Productions (UK), and Freelancers Make Theatre Work (UK).

As a Métis environmental artist and scientist, with deep family roots in northern British Columbia and having grown up in a W̱SÁNEĆ (Salish) community on Vancouver Island, Brent experiments with inter-cultural conversations around land, language, Indigenous ecological legacies, gender, sexuality, and traditional knowledge. He sometimes works with the Indigenous languages that were around him growing up: Chinook Wawa, SENĆOŦEN, and Michif.

Educated as a photographer, (BFA San Francisco Art Institute) and then in digital, environmental, and public art (PhD University of California College of Environmental Design) with over twenty solo and group exhibits and performances, he works in digital practices combining multimedia storytelling with homages to Métis and North-West Coast material traditions, such as basket weaving.

Some of his artistic practices involve field research and new kinds of archives linked to the land. In conversations on digital justice, Brent often thinks about isolated and under-served Indian Reserve communities, supporting the survival of Indigenous languages, and experimenting with apps and technologies that allow people to express their cultures more fully in their territories.

Rachel is a theatre professional with experience as a Stage Manager and Educator, in Box offices and Front of House and so much more!

Currently her artistic practice centres around creating sensory immersive theatre for Disabled children & youth. Rachel is thrilled to be the Network Coordinator for Réseau SPARC Network (Supporting Performing Arts in Rural & Remote Communities). The SPARC Board of Directors will be adding their immeasurable experience in rural and remote arts to support Rachel in this exciting project.

Sha is a queer Tagalog transdisciplinary artist whose work/play is devoted to unraveling borders between art, life, ritual, and healing.  She is the primary steward of Greenhouse Theatre  an interdisciplinary arts ecology led by Scarborough and translocal artists of the global majority.

Her film work has been showcased at the international forums including Queer Women of Colour Film Festival in San Francisco and McGill University in Montreal. She is a published author in print publications such as and Feel Ways: A Scarborough Anthology and 2SLGBTQIA+ FilipinX Femme, North of the 49th Parallel. and digital publications including Tilting, Re: Asian, and Briarpatch Magazine.

She has facilitated and curated community based rituals merging ritual, art. food, land connection, and interdisciplinary creative practise across Turtle Island and in the archipelago known as the Philippines.

Carla Jacobs (She/ Her) is a graduate of York University and Sheridan College’s joint Bachelor of Design program, with plans to continue her studies in the Fall in Schulich School of Business’ Masters in Marketing program.

Her professional experience lies mainly in graphic design and design production, with her passions lying in the visual arts, music, and social equity. Her academic studies into the field of Research Design alongside her graphic design studies have drawn her to the equity-seeking initiatives run by ArtsPond.