Kathleen Vaughan
MFP, PhD, Facilitator of Studio Re-Imagine kathleen.vaughan@concordia.ca
Concordia University Research Chair in Socially Engaged Art and Public Pedagogies
Professor, Art Education
Kathleen a visual artist, writer, scholar, and educator whose work comprises multiple approaches, studio-based, collaborative/ participatory and community-based. Kathleen uses textile practices, painting, drawing, photography, installation, audio and video. She also draws on oral history and storytelling techniques. Active within her Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-St-Charles, Kathleen has worked with seniors, adults and children in social housing, schools and community agencies. She has developed creative projects in Toronto, Iceland, Latvia and the Netherlands, oriented to cultivating knowledge and awareness of environmental and social themes, and to building community.
Betty-Jo (BJ) McCarville
MA student (Art Education)
Research Assistant
B.J. is a multi-discipline artist and educator dedicated to arts accessibility and finding creative ways to inject art into public life. Her artwork taps into the power of art and storytelling to connect, restore, inspire and transform. Her research interests include socially engaged art, arts accessibility, oral history, and leadership education.
Emily O’Brien
(she/her), MA Student (Indi-Research-Creation)
Research Assistant, Teaching Assistant
Emilie is an INDI MA student with many years of experience in community, activist and fine arts organizations. Based in embodiment studies, her research-creation thesis What The Body Knows is built from and lives within the praxis of somatic justice as social justice as planetary justice. With a focus on embroidery and plant medicine, she is creating written and textile works that critically examine the fascia of connectivity between individual, community and planetary wellness.
Jacky Lo
(he/him), MA Student (Art Education)
Research Assistant
Jacky is a Chinese Canadian artist, researcher, and educator from Vancouver living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. His work examines themes surrounding social connections, memories, and identities. His research interest explores the materiality of silk in art creation, production, and history and how it can inform the past, present, and a re-imagined future. His current projects have been navigating his Canadian-Chinese identity, reconnecting lost narratives of his great-grandmother, accessibility in the arts and sustainable art practices.
Joanna Donehower
PhD Candidate (Humanities)
Research Assistant
Joanna has been working in professional theatre in Montréal and in the United States since 2005, and, since 2012, has been artistic director of a theatre company in Montréal which features site-specific performance collaborations between university students and theatre professionals. Her dissertation Performing Curiosity: A Research-Creation Inquiry into Urban Performance in Montréal explores the relationship between performance and its city of situation, putting into practice a spectrum of historical and contemporary performance techniques for engaging critically and creatively with contested urban spaces. Curiocité, the creative component of her doctoral research, is a multimodal urban research platform and theatrical device, based on the curiosity cabinet and popular street theatre forms. Abattoir de l’est, is the street performance event issuing from the Curiocité platform, an urban fable that engages the histories and presents of Montréal’s rue Ontario and the east end district of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where Joanna lives.
Melissa is a digital media artist, educator, technician and researcher whose interests are in creative curriculum in Museum Education and community teaching through digital media practices. She teaches children, young adults and seniors in community and classroom settings in Montreal and abroad.
Sharmistha Kar
(she/her), PhD Candidate (Art Education)
Research Assistant
Sharmistha Kar is an artist from India and currently living in Montreal, Quebec to pursue her doctoral studies in Art Education. Her artistic projects have revolved around themes of cultural history, material culture, intangible cultural heritage, cartography, transnational identity, labor, and landscapes. Her art-based research and creative projects reflects her positionality where hand embroidery becomes a subversive act for identity.
Vanessa Randall
(she/her/elle), MA (indi)
Research Assistant
Vanessa aka “Van” is currently in Concordia’s Individualized Master’s program in Fine Arts, working across the disciplines of Art Education, History and Geography. Following completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, she found work in the textile industry of her new home setting of Estrie, Quebec. Originally from Maine, her research aims for deeper understanding of the meaningful connections between work, migration, and place-making via an interdisciplinary study of the wool industry in ‘the Maritime Peninsula’. She is passionate about sourcing wool from local farmers to support a ‘farm to yarn’ methodology in her handspinning workshops and studio art practice.