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Sojung Bahng (방소정) is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and researcher. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, with a cross-appointment to the DAN School of Drama and Music at ���ϳԹ���Դ in Canada. Her work explores cinematic media through digital technologies, reflecting on aesthetic and narrative experiences within cultural and philosophical contexts. Sojung holds a PhD from SensiLab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Australia. Her doctoral thesis, Cinematic VR as a Reflexive Tool Beyond Empathy, received the 2020 Mollie Holman Medal for the best thesis of the year. She also served as a postdoctoral fellow and contract instructor in the Media Production and Design program at Carleton University in Canada. She earned her master’s degree in Culture Technology from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and a BFA in TV & Film Production and Art Theory from Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts, 한국예술종합학교).

Sojung’s works have been showcased and recognized at numerous prestigious festivals and symposiums worldwide. Her animated VR films have received international recognition, with Wired winning Second Prize in the VR Section at Digital Arts Zurich and Anonymous being exhibited at BIAF (Bucheon), TSFM (Torino), TIAF (Tbilisi), and ANIMAZE (Montreal). Her interactive VR project Sleeping Eyes received the Award of Excellence in Experience Design at the Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories. The 360° autobiographical documentary Floating Walk was nominated for the Social Impact Media Awards (SIMA) in Los Angeles, and her dance film Poetry of Separation was selected for NDC in New York. Her experiments in expanded cinema, performance, and digital storytelling have been presented at international venues and conferences including the McCord Stewart Museum (Montreal), Heide Museum (Melbourne), Arts and Technology (Istanbul), ICLC (Barcelona), ICMC (New York), and ISEA (Dubai and Brisbane). She also curated and directed Somplexity, a multidisciplinary art project funded by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.

She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles as first author in internationally recognized conferences and journals such as SIGCHI, ISEA, ArtsIT, HCII, TEI, ICIDS, Frontiers, and ACM Interactions. She is currently running research practice, a collaborative framework exploring intersections between research and practice, and leading an SSHRC-funded research project titled Meta-Metaverse: Digital Art-Based Research on Reflective Approaches to the Metaverse.

Artist website:
Research practice website:

Nasrin Himada is a Palestinian writer and curator currently based in Kingston, on Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory. Their writing on contemporary art has appeared in many national contemporary art publications, including Canadian Art, C Magazine, MICE, and Fuse. They have collaborated with film festivals and art institutions in Canada and the US, among them the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Trinity Square Video, Toronto; Fondation PHI pour l’art contemporain, Montreal; Mercer Union, Toronto, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal; and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal. Dr. Himada’s recent project For Many Returns typifies their current curatorial interests. The series is designed to explore the possibilities of art writing as a relational act. Since its debut at Dazibao in Montréal, it has toured across Canada, the US and Europe. From 2019–21, Nasrin held the position of curator at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, in Winnipeg on Treaty One Territory. 

Dr Qanita Lilla is a South African curator, researcher and writer with a PhD in Visual Arts from Stellenbosch University. She is currently Associate Curator, Arts of Africa at Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queens University situated on Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee Territory. At Agnes, Qanita cares for the Lang Collection of African Art, one of the largest collections of its kind in Canada. She is interested the life and after-life of objects in collections, representations of racialised minorities and depictions of traumatic histories. Qanita is the curator of With Opened Mouths and the associated podcast. She has published in various peer-reviewed publications and has also contributed book chapters to anthologies.

Neven Lochhead is an artist, filmmaker, curator, educator and PhD candidate in the Screen Cultures and Curatorial studies program. His research and theoretical writing examine the relation between art and knowledge, the open possibilities of curatorial education, and artist-led pedagogy and workshops.

Prior to beginning his degree at ���ϳԹ���Դ in 2020, he worked as Director of Programming at SAW Video Media Art Centre from 2016-2020. At SAW, he founded and operated  – a discursive venue through which he engaged local, national, and international artists to present a series of interrelated exhibitions, performances, lectures, learning contexts, residency platforms, and off-site public art projects. Central to his curatorial practice is a pursuit of how exhibition-making acts as a tool for creating novel forms of collective inquiry, and generates vocabularies that can expand an organisation’s operational structures and imaginative capacities.

As an artist, he often works collaboratively with other artists, writers, and theorists, including the artist and choreographer Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he produced various moving image works from 2017-2022, which were presented at Toronto Biennial of Art, SFMOMA, New Museum, Tate Modern, and other institutions. His solo exhibition at Agnes Etherington Art Centre, From the vibe out (2021) took shape as an video installation, four-part radio art program, music album, online performance and learning platform. The exhibition explored a quasi-fictional archive of “grey literature” belonging to an imagined artist-led research institute in Kingston. Other projects with Agnes Etherington include the co-curated exhibition a guest + a host = a ghost (2022), for which he designed an artistic learning platform called Paranormal Curation, and which won Exhibition of the Year at Galeries Ontario Galleries awards in 2022.

As an educator, through two Teaching Fellowships at ���ϳԹ���Դ in 2021 and 2023, he developed an undergraduate course, Sound + Synthesis, at the Department of Film and Media, which attends to sound as an integral but often overlooked aspect of film and video production and reception. In 2022, Lochhead was awarded a grant from ���ϳԹ���Դ Library to develop his course into an Open Educational Resource, and he subsequently received the Dean’s Teaching Fellow Award in 2023, in recognition of innovative curriculum design and teaching excellence.