Introducing the 2023-2024 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows

Carolina Bergonzoni

Host Department: Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies

Carolina Bergonzoni (she/her) is a dance artist, somatic educator and practitioner, and emergent scholar. Carolina holds a Ph.D. in Arts Education, a BA and MA in Philosophy, and an MA in Comparative Media Arts. She is the 2023 recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award for the Arts & Inquiry in the Visual & Performing Arts in Education SIG of AERA. Her practices span between dancing, writing, and teaching from the body.

Carolina is the Artistic Associate of All Bodies Dance Project (ABDP), an inclusive dance company that brings together dancers with and without disabilities. She has directed two audio-described movies and has been part of Translations, a dance piece created in collaboration with blind and partially sighted consultants, to be experienced with the non-visual senses, created by ABDP. These projects have shaped her research and current interest in audio description (AD) for live dance and, particularly, how dancers describe themselves in the dancing. 

Bergonzoni's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2023 to April 2024.

Germaine Koh

Host Department: Urban Studies

Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer based on the west coast in traditional Coast Salish territories, and active across Canada and internationally. Her work ranges widely across media and disciplines, thinking about the relationships between systems and patterns. She adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that consider the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. Koh is a 2023 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. She has served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20 and as the 2021 Koerner Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia, where she continues to teach sessionally.

Koh’s research on "Home Made Ways" will focus especially on cross-disciplinary experimentation and play, D.I.Y. tendencies, the potential of non-specialist activities, experiential learning and traditional ways of knowing, and the role of committed amateurs within communities. Her visits to classes and her hands-on work at SFU may connect to several of her ongoing related projects, such as Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of building and housing; League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice; and the Hemlock Micro Studio rural artist residency centered on land-based and sustainability practices. 

Koh's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2023 to April 2024.

Ghinwa Yassine 

Host Department: Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies

Ghinwa Yassine is an anti-disciplinary artist based on the land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people, so-called Vancouver. She was born in Beirut at the end of the Lebanese Civil War and raised in a traditional Shiite Muslim family where she witnessed the entangled historical traumas in Shiism and war narratives. For the past three years, she has been creating a series of works about the bodies of women in the 2019 uprisings in Beirut, looking at what she calls an agentic gesture or gestural agency through re-enactment and storytelling. Besides making art, Ghinwa is co-founder and co-director of the Middle East and North Africa Film Festival in Vancouver.

During her time as a Shadbolt Fellow, she will develop Invisible Ink, a series of workshops leading to an anti-disciplinary co-created performance with students from Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and the School for Contemporary Arts. Invisible Ink is an investigation of freedom futurity through the lens of feminist and queer theory. It will navigate two aspects of freedom, one external, concerned with claiming power, and the other, internal, concerned with shedding an embodied warrior.

Yassine's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September to December 2023.

jaye simpson

Host Department: Indigenous Studies

jaye simpson (she/they) is an Oji-Cree Saulteaux Indigiqueer from the Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. simpson is a writer, advocate and activist sharing their knowledge and lived experiences in hope of creating utopia. 

She is published in several magazines including Poetry Is Dead, This Magazine, PRISM international,  SAD Magazine: Green, GUTS Magazine, SubTerrain, Grain and Room. They are in four anthologies: Hustling Verse (2019), Love After the End (2020), The Care We Dream Of (2021), and Queer Little Nightmares (2022). Their first poetry collection, it was never going to be okay(Nightwood Ed.) was shortlisted for the 2021 ReLit Award and a 2021 Dayne Ogilvie Prize Finalist while also winning the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Published Poetry in English. Their next collection of poetry, a body more tolerable, is forthcoming Fall 2024.

simpson is a displaced Indigenous person resisting, ruminating and residing on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) First Nations territories, colonially known as Vancouver. 

simpson's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from September 2023 to August 2024.

Sam Wiebe 

Host Department: English

Sam Wiebe is the award-winning author of the Wakeland novels, one of the most authentic and acclaimed detective series in Canada, including Invisible Dead, Cut You Down, Hell and Gone, and the latest, Sunset and Jericho. Wiebe’s other books include Never Going Back, Last of the Independents, and the Vancouver Noir anthology, which he edited. His work has won the Crime Writers of Canada award and the Kobo Emerging Writers prize, and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus, and City of Vancouver book prizes.

During his time as a Shadbolt Fellow, Wiebe will research and write a historical novel about the early days of harm reduction in Vancouver, and to present this work in ways that foster connections between genres, and between local communities. Vancouver is a city defined by its relationships to both addiction and recovery. In the 1980s, the debates over where to set up recovery services such as needle exchanges led to protests and clashes between the city's addict population (and its allies) and Chinatown's residents and small business owners. Wiebe’s forthcoming novel attempts to unpack the complex dynamics behind addiction and recovery, using a key moment in Vancouver history to hopefully explain our current attitudes and difficulties in a credible, nuanced, and dramatically honest way.

Wiebe is currently the Department of English’s 2023 Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence. 

Wiebe's term as a Shadbolt Fellow runs from January 2023 to April 2024.