Introducing the 2024-2025 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows

Fiana Kawane

Host Department: Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies

Fiana Kawane is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, dance artist, and choreographer. Her research focuses on global Anglophone literature, environmental humanities, and Asian migration. Her dance practice rooted in Kathak spans the Lower Mainland and beyond, and has been supported by the Dance Centre, Dance Victoria, New Works, BC Culture Days, Vines Art Society, Dance West Network, and the AIRS program. Her intellectual community includes the UBC Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice (GRSJ), the Centre for Migration Studies (CMS), and the Global History of Anticolonial Thought Cluster. She is completing a PhD in English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Fiana currently works from the unsurrendered territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, known as Vancouver, BC.

At SFU, her fellowship centres the intersection of sound, performance, poetry, migration, and waterways. Drawing on her embodied and intergenerational knowledge as a heritage speaker of Japanese and Punjabi, she will be immersing herself in sonic, poetic, and embodied archives of migration, and leading public engaged, art-research inquiries of waterways.

Kawane's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2024 to August 2025.

Justin Neal

Host Department: Indigenous Studies

Justin Neal writes offbeat stories that weave comedy with high-stakes drama, creating tales that aspire to uplift and transform. While in San Francisco then New York City (in the late 90s into the 2010s), Justin juggled addiction and subsequent sobriety with day jobs and amateur theatre at night. He moved to his family’s traditional Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw territory to earn a Joint MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre from UBC in 2015. He is a 2022 alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre’s Norman Jewison Film Program Writers’ Lab.

Justin founded Holy Crow Arts, a theatre company grounded on Coast Salish lands. With Holy Crow, Justin premiered his play So Damn Proud in 2021 and will premiere his latest work, Keepers of the Salish Sea, directed by Reneltta Arluk, in November 2024.

As a Shadbolt Fellow, Justin will share space for academic and practicum exploration during the premiere of Keepers of the Salish Sea, a play that celebrates self-discovery whilst honouring a phenomenal cultural practice. He’ll continue developing other projects, including Aunties, based on rarely told stories of families, like his own, descended from Coast Salish women who migrated to Washington State and married Filipino farm managers, many of whom took care of the farms of interred Japanese families during WWII.

Neal's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2024 to August 2025.

Nadine (King) Chambers 

Host Department: History

Nadine (King) Chambers could be described as a wave bound in a gyre first sighted c.1656 in the sea surrounding 17°55'59.99" N -76°50'59.99" W.

Raised by librarians and light engineers; her work tracks the coordination of a double dispossession of rural lands and waters within Indigenous and Black geographies in a ‘networked isolation’ spanning 10,000 km. Her life in unceded Indigenous territories directs Nadine’s examination of Black and Indigenous struggles in the afterlife of an introduction through settler-colonialism and enslavement.

She’s been an Eccles Centre British Library Fellow (2019/20) and was an active member (2019- 2023) of the User Advisory Group for the National Archives (UK).

She did production for Kinesis in the 1990s and is published in Bluesprint (2001), Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies (2019); Memory, Migration and (De)Colonisation in the Caribbean and Beyond (2020) as well as a forthcoming Anti-Colonial Digital Humanities collection of interviews and essays.

Her time as a Shadbolt scholar will be anchored in the SFU History Department and SFU Library to articulate her project Dèyè Mòn, Gen Mòn (Beyond Mountains, More Mountains) querying what constitutes ethical guidelines between racialized communities who are thinking across space, and race before and after the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 

Chambers' term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2024 to August 2025.

Tania Willard

Host Department: Indigenous Languages Program

Tania Willard is a mixed Secwépemc and settler artist whose research intersects with land-based art practices. Her practice activates connection to land, culture, and family, centering art as an Indigenous resurgent act, though collaborative projects such as BUSH Gallery and support of language revitalization in Secwépemc communities.

Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2012-2014) and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe (ongoing). Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project NY, Kamloops Art Gallery, Belkin gallery and the Anchorage Museum, among others. In 2016, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her their VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. In 2023 BUSH Gallery was named as a Future Studies recipient from Ruth Foundation for the Arts. Willard is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan in syilx territories. 

Willard's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from January 2025 to August 2025.