Sessional Instructors & Lecturers
Aram Bajakian
Term Lecturer: Music & Sound
E: aram_bajakian@sfu.ca
The music of guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian music has been called “a masterpiece” (fRoots), “shape-shifting” (FreeJazzCollective), and “sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing” (Chicago Reader). As a guitarist, “the virtuosic jack of all trades” (Village Voice) has toured extensively with Lou Reed, Madeleine Peyroux, John Zorn and Diana Krall. From 2018-2021, Bajakian served as the New Music Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music. Bajakian received his Bachelor of Music degree (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he studied with Dr. Yusef Lateef. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, where his advisor is Dr. Nathan Hesselink. His research focuses on contemporary and historic Armenian communities.
Dorothy Barenscott
Sessional Instructor: Art, Performance & Cinema Studies
Dorothy Barenscott is an art historian whose research relates to the interplay between urban space and emerging technology and media forms in the articulation of a range of identities. She completed her Ph.D. in Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia. Barenscott’s recent publications include "Learning from Las Vegas Redux: Steve Wynn and the New Business of Art” appearing in Spatial Transgressions in the Arts (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) and “Trumpism, NFTs, and the Cultural Politics of 21st Century Kitsch” appearing in the edited collection Interrogating the Visual Culture of Trumpism (eds. Natalie Phillips and Grant Hamming, Routledge, 2024). Barenscott is co-editor of Canadian Culinary Imaginations (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), an interdisciplinary collection that explores how Canadian writers, artists, academics, cooks, performers, and gallery curators are inspired and challenged by the topic of food and her essays have appeared in journals such as Postmodern Culture Journal, Invisible Culture, History and Memory, and Mediascape. Outside of her academic research, Barenscott acts as an art consultant for ArtRow and Openwork Art Advisory and leads interdisciplinary university student groups on field schools to global art cities and art events such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale.
Dave Biddle
Sessional Instructor: Visual Art
Dave Biddle (being me) is an artist and theorist (being conspiracy theorist) who works sometimes with video, music, installation, and text (being that I’m an intersection of various sense organs), and always with performance (being that those sense organs constitute a “body”). His research (being self-organizing so not really "his") constellates various theoretical frameworks such as evolutionary biology, systems theory and cybernetics, communication studies, non-human anthropology, and philosophy of mind. Dave Biddle (still being me) lives in Vancouver (being the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Sel̓íl̓witulh Nations) where he continues to consider the lilies (being being).
Nicole Bond
Sessional Instructor: Dance
E: nbond@sfu.ca
Nicole Rose Bond began her formal training at York University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts-Dance cum laude in 2005. Since that time, Nicole has felt privileged to perform works by many esteemed choreographers including Peggy Baker, Patricia Beatty, Tom Brouillette, Susan Cash, Bill Coleman, David Earle, Danny Grossman, Ryan Graham Hinds, Christopher House, James Kudelka, Learie McNicholl, Andrea Nann, Yvonne Ng, John Oswald, Peter Quanz, Peter Randazzo and Andrea Spaziani. She is currently a company member with Peggy Baker Dance Projects as well as a freelance artist.
As a teacher, Nicole has had the pleasure of working as a course director in Graham Technique and Contemporary Dance at York University, The National Ballet School, Arts Umbrella and Modus Operandi and has taught dance classes and workshops within the Toronto District School Board. As part of outreach initiatives through Toronto Dance Theatre, The National Ballet of Canada’s YOU Dance Program and Peggy Baker Dance Projects, Nicole has taught in Toronto, Dryden, Vancouver, Moncton and Whitehorse. Nicole has also served on the Toronto Arts Council Advisory Panel and as a member of the Dance Collection Danse ‘Encore: Hall of Fame’ Committee.
Nicole’s repertoire with Peggy Baker Dance projects includes: Land|Body|Breath at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in August of 2017; the premiere in Toronto of Who We Are In The Dark and subsequent performances in Montreal, Kingston, Ottawa, Whitehorse and Mexico in 2019 and The Netherlands in 2020, Her Body As Words in September of 2021; and Peggy Baker: A Gala Retrospective in Toronto in 2022.
Through her work as both a performer and a teacher, Nicole’s goal is to empower others to effect conscious change in the world whilst honouring those who have come before us. Nicole is beyond grateful that her vocation encompasses doing what she loves and is humbled by, and indebted to, the unique and beautiful arts community that she calls home.
DeForrest Brown Jr.
Sessional Instructor: Music & Sound
DeForrest Brown, Jr. is an Alabama-raised rhythmanalyst, writer, and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. As Speaker Music, he channels the African American modernist tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu. His written work explores the links between the Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music, and has appeared in Artforum, Triple Canopy, NPR, CTM Festival, Mixmag, among many others. He has performed or presented work at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Camden Arts Centre, UK; Unsound Festival, Krakow; Sónar, Barcelona; Issue Project Room, New York; and elsewhere. Assembling a Black Counter Culture is Brown’s debut book.
Janet Danielson
Sessional Instructor: Music & Sound
E: jrd@sfu.ca
Janet Danielson is a composer whose works have been performed in England, the U.S., and Canada by ensembles ranging from the Vancouver Chinese Instrument Ensemble to the Vancouver Symphony and CBC Radio Orchestras. Her recent commissioned works include an opera, The Marvelous History of Mariken of Nimmigen, commissioned by Music in the Morning; The Occupation, a song collaboration with poet Robert Bringhurst, for baritone, marimba and viol da gamba; and In the Very Highest Place, a setting Wu Li’s poetry for chorus and the Orchid Ensemble (marimba, zheng, erhu) premiered November 2007. Her realization of Verbum Caro, a 17th-century Canadian Ursuline carol, was premiered in Rome at Christmas 2007, and a string quartet for the Royal Society of Canada Symposium on War and Peace in November 2008. She has taught courses related to music theory, analysis, music and culture, and composition at Simon Fraser University and at Regent College, and has authored a text, Basic Organization of Music. Her articles have been published in Musicworks and in the Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Composers’ League. Danielson is former Associate Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music and ChairAssociation of Canadian Women Composers, and has served on the Executive Council of the Canadian League of Composers. Current commissions include a work for string orchestra and erhu for Vancouver Pro Musica, for whom she is 2010 Composer-in-Residence, and a cello sonata for the 2010 Vancouver Music/Grail conference. She is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre.
Alison Denham
Sessional Instructor: Dance
Originally from the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, Alison Denham moved to Vancouver to attend the dance program at Arts Umbrella and the Ballet British Columbia Mentor Program. From 2000 through 2005 she danced with Toronto’s Dancemakers under the artistic direction of Serge Bennathan. Ali has worked with many choreographers in Toronto and Vancouver including Wen Wei Wang, Alvin Erasga Tolentino, Lola MacLaughlin and Peggy Baker, among others. She is the 2006 recipient of the Isadora Award for Excellence in Performance. Ali is currently involved in new creations with Out Innerspace Dance Theatre (Tiffany Tregarthen and David Raymond), Simone Orlando, The Plastic Orchid Factory (James Gnam), and Tribal Crackling Wind (Peter Chin).
Dani Fecko
Sessional Instructor: Visual Arts
Dani Fecko has a long history working in contemporary theatre in Vancouver. She was Managing Producer of Boca del Lupo and spent four years as Associate Curator at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Dani trained as a Stage Manager, working locally and taking shows on the road and more across North America, Europe and Mexico. Dani was on the host committee for WAA Vancouver 2015. She currently sits on the board of the Alliance for Arts and is on the development committee of ISPA. She is one of the 2016 – 2018 APAP Leadership Fellows. Dani is a graduate of Studio 58 and lives in Vancouver with her husband and their pet fish, Dash.
Emmalena Fredriksson
Sessional Instructor: Dance
E: emmalena_fredriksson@sfu.ca
Emmalena Fredriksson is a contemporary dance artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada, as a guest on the ancestral unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples.
Her practice is defined by choreography as a relational practice in the expanded fields of dance, often collaborating with artists of other disciplines, creating choreographic experiences and dance for social events, film, galleries and performance.
Born in Sweden, she received her training at Balettakademien in Umeå and at SEAD in Austria. Emmalena has presented choreographic work, performed and taught internationally with Daghdha Dance Company (IE), Canaldanse (FR), Malta University (MT), Pact Zollverein (DE), and Falmouth University (UK) among others.
Based in Vancouver since 2013 her work has been presented in Dancing on the Edge, The Dance Centre's Discover Dance Series, Dance in Vancouver's Choreography Walk (curated by Justine A. Chambers), Dance Days (Victoria) and at the Audain Gallery. Commissioned by the National Film Board, she co-created Tidal Traces – a VR 360 dance film together with Nancy Lee in 2017. The film has to date had over 35 international screenings.
Emmalena holds an MFA degree from Simon Fraser University and she regularly teaches at Modus Operandi, Training Society of Vancouver, Harbour Dance Centre and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Lisa Gelley
Term Lecturer: Dance
E: lisa_gelley@sfu.ca
Lisa Mariko Gelley (she/her) is an artist working in dance and performance, often in interdisciplinary and intergenerational collaboration. She is a mixed-race settler of Japanese, French, and Polish descent, living, working, and learning on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, including the territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Lisa is Artistic Co-Director of Company 605, an arts organization devising, producing and presenting new dance projects, and centering collaborative processes rooted in community. Together with Artistic Co-Director Josh Martin, they have co-created many works including Inheritor Recordings, Future Futures, Vital Few, Anthem, Loop,Lull, After We Glow, Looping, and lossy. Their works have been presented internationally, at venues and festivals including American Dance Festival (Durham, NC), New York City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, The Cultch, Usine-C and L'Agora de la Danse (Montréal), La Rotonde (Québec City), DanceWorks (Toronto), Live Art Dance (Halifax), The Banff Centre, On The Boards' NWNW and Bumbershoot Festival (Seattle), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Festival PRISMA (Panama), Festival Parentesis (Costa Rica), Tempel Kulturzentrum and Regensburger TanzTage (Germany), and the Sydney Festival (Australia). Through their work, Company 605 has built bridges with artists and audiences across the country and Internationally, reaching outward to connect and situate itself within the context of a global dance dialogue. Some of Lisa's own recent works are centered around intergenerational intuition and ancestral memory, including MIDORI (EDAM Choreographic Series and The Polygon Gallery) Furusato, a film featuring a duet with her grandmother, Lily Yuriko Tamoto, and Paueru Mashup, a community-engaged work calling on traditional Japanese Folk dance and renowned exercise routines, commissioned by the Powell Street Festival. Lisa is the recipient of the 2015 Vancouver International Dance Festival Choreographic Award, and the co-recipient of the 2024 Lola Award. She is the mother of Loa Mayuri and Noemi Yuka.
Farshid Kazemi
Sessional Instructor: Film
E: farshid_kazemi@sfu.ca
Farshid Kazemi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University. His research interests combine an interdisciplinary and theoretical approach to Film and Media Studies/Film Theory, Iranian Studies, and Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on Iranian cinema and second wave psychoanalytic film theory titled: The Interpreter of Desires: Iranian Cinema and Psychoanalysis. He has published several articles and book chapters on Iranian cinema, psychoanalytic film theory/feminist film theory in journals such as Camera Obscura. His book on the film A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night will be published by Auteur/Columbia University Press in 2020.
Sophia Laurio
Sessional Instructor: Dance
Sophia Laurio also known as “Sosa” is a Filipina dance artist and educator based in Vancouver, BC Canada. Sophia consistently trains in New York City also known as the Mecca of Hip Hop, under the guidance of Hip Hop dance pioneers: Elite Force, Dance Fusion and Lite Feet Nation.
Lee Su-Feh
Sessional Instructor: Theatre Performance
Lee Su-Feh is Artistic Director of battery opera. How this happened involved: Childrens’ Theatre with Janet Pillai, traditional Malay and contemporary dance with Marion D’Cruz in Malaysia, contemporary dance with Lari Leong in Paris, contact improvisation with Peter BIngham in Vancouver; and many years of Chinese martial arts with infuriatingly exacting teachers. Before coming to Vancouver in 1988, she lived in Paris, London, Indonesia and Malaysia. She speaks 6 languages badly. In 1998, she won the Prix de Jeune Auteur of the Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationales de Seine-St. Denis for her work Gecko Eats Fly. In theatre, Su-Feh has worked as a choreographer with directors such as Marc Diamond, Donna Spencer and most recently DD Kugler and Steven Hill. She has been nominated twice for a Jessie Award. In 2012, her solo work The Whole Beast won the BOH Cameronian Award for Outstanding Choreography in Malaysia. In 2013 and 2014, she was awarded the Isadora Award and the Lola Award respectively, by the Dance Centre in Vancouver, in recognition of her contribution to the dance milieu through her work as choreographer, dancer, teacher, dramaturge and all-around shit disturber. In 1995, she co-founded battery opera with David McIntosh with whom she has been collaborating ever since she saw him lying, bleeding, in Kota Baru in 1985.
Kenji Maeda
Sessional Instructor: Interdisciplinary
In addition to his role at GVPTA, Kenji is the artsvest B.C. Program Manager at Business for the Arts, a sponsorship training program for arts and culture organizations across the province. He has had the opportunity to lead workshops and work with more than 150 arts and culture organizations to strategize private sector partnerships within the arts. Kenji is also a cultural and organizational development consultant who has worked with arts organizations, government, and educational institutions. He was previously the Executive Director of DOXA Documentary Film Festival, has worked in film, TV, and theatre and is a Jessie Award recipient.
Tatiana Mellema
Sessional Instructor: APCS
E:
Tatiana Mellema is a curator, writer, and PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of British Columbia. Mellema has worked for the City of Vancouver (Public Art), the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, The Banff Centre, The Power Plant, and the National Gallery of Canada.
Nancy Tam
Sessional Instructor: Music & Sound
Sound Artist, Nancy Tam (譚亦斯), works and lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil- Waututh Nations. She works across disciplinary bounds with sound and performance as her primary media. Using multi-channel audio, and musical composition her current research triangulates between sound, space, and body to investigate tendencies of global and local mobilizations of creatures, objects, and events. Nancy is an award-winning composer. Her compositions, audio walks, performances, and collaborations have toured in Germany, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Norway, Hong Kong, the U.S. and throughout Canada. Her work is form-bending and dramaturgically rigorous, often employing task-based performance to bringing the background to the forefront in creating immersive scenographic environments. With Daniel O’Shea and Conor Wylie, Nancy runs the interdisciplinary performance collective A Wake of Vultures.
Alex Tedlie-Stursberg
Sessional Instructor: Visual Art
Alex Tedlie-Stursberg is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working across various mediums with a key focus on sculpture and installation. His work has been exhibited in galleries across North America and Europe; recent exhibitions include, Mass Residue, with Field Contemporary, Vancouver, BC, (2019) and Utopos, with Deluge Contemporary Art, Victoria, BC (2020). This year he was awarded a Digital Originals grant by the Canada Council for the Arts and presented Atmospheric Supply; an online exhibition of activated sculptures (2020). In the past Stursberg has been employed as a Sessional Instructor with SFU Contemporary Arts and the Langara College Visual Arts Program.
In 2021, he will be unveiling public artworks for Ballard Fine Art and will be presenting work at Keep in Touch Gallery, Seoul, Korea, TRAPP Projects, Vancouver, BC, and Plumb Gallery, Toronto, ON.
Daisy Thompson
Sessional Instructor: Dance
E: daisyt@sfu.ca
Daisy Thompson is an English settler living on the unceded territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaɬ and xʷməθkwəy̓əm Nations, also known as Vancovuer. As a dance artist who performs, creates, educates, and writes, she seeks to extend ideas of the dancing body as a key site for the questioning of embodied power relations, and considers how the dancing body interrupts cycles of contemporary logics of control in relation to culture and identity.
After completing her dance training at the Laban Dance Centre in London, Daisy has had the fortune to work as dancer/performer with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (USA), Eva Karczag (Amsterdam), Emmalena Fredriksson (Sweden/Vancouver), Ugo Dehaes (Belgium), Lee, Su-Feh (Vancouver), Mascall Dance (Vancouver), and O’dela Arts (Vancouver), amongst more.
She has presented her own choreographic works internationally and locally, has worked as choreographer/movement coach for theatre including The Frank Theatre Company and Ruby Slippers Theatre, published several articles including the Performance Matters Journal and the Canadian Theatre Review, and regularly teaches in a variety of spaces in Vancouver, including Simon Fraser University, Training Society of Vancouver, WeDance and Polymer Dance. In 2013, she gained an MFA, and is currently a PhD student at Simon Fraser University under the excellent co-supervision of Dr. Peter Dickinson and Dr. Laura U. Marks.
Daisy is the proud mother of Obi and Sola.
Taryn Walker
Sessional Instructor: Visual Art
Taryn Walker is a queer, interdisciplinary Indigenous artist of Nlaka'pamux, Syilx, and mixed European ancestry whose work explores concepts of identity, tenderness, healing, cycles of life and death, spiraling time, and futurity through drawing, printmaking, installation, and video. In 2018 Walker graduated from the University of Victoria's BFA program with a Major in Visual Arts and a Minor in Art History & Visual Studies. Currently, Walker is doing their MFA at Simon Fraser University in Interdisciplinary Contemporary Arts. Walker was awarded the Diane Mary Hallam Achievement Award by the University of Victoria for academic excellence and commitment to the arts in 2018 and in 2017 they were also longlisted for the Philip B. Lind Emerging Artist Prize, presented by the Presentation House Gallery for demonstrating excellence as an emerging video artist and photographer. Most recently, in 2022 they were shortlisted for the ohpinamake prize presented by the University of Saskatchewan. Walker’s work has been presented in spaces, residencies, and events across Western Canada and beyond. Their artistic research has also been granted support from the Edmonton Arts Council, the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, and the First Peoples Cultural Council.
Neil Wedman
Sessional Instructor: Visual Art
E: nwedman@sfu.ca
Neil Wedman was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1954. Making paintings stands at the core of thirty years of studio practice, but he has devoted almost equal attention to producing drawings and works on paper including print editions, book-works and photographs. He has also made a number of short films and musical recordings although not many of the latter.
He lives and works in Vancouver and is represented there by the Equinox Gallery.
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