Convening: An Arrival, A Grounding, A Departure – Day 1

Bert Whitecrow is a Two-Spirit Anishinaabe artist, educator, and facilitator from Seine River First Nation (Chiima’aaganing), currently based in Toronto. Their multidisciplinary practice brings together beadwork, visual storytelling, and digital media to imagine Indigenous futurisms and trace relationships between land, memory, and community.

A graduate of OCAD University’s Indigenous Visual Culture program, Bert received the Program Medal for academic and artistic excellence in 2022. Their work extends across public art, museum education, and collective organizing, including their role as an Indigenous Museum Educator at the Royal Ontario Museum and the founding of Indigenous collectives that create spaces for community-led initiatives and cultural programming

Bonnie Devine is a visual artist, writer, curator, and educator. Born in Toronto and raised as an off-reserve member of the Anishinaabek of Serpent River First Nation, Genaabaajing, Devine’s work emerges from the storytelling and object-making traditions that are the root of Anishinaabe culture. Her cross-disciplinary practice engages sculpture, painting, writing, and video to express her preoccupation with land and story. Though formally educated in sculpture and installation art at the Ontario College of Art and Design and York University, her most enduring learning came from her grandparents who were trappers on the Canadian Shield in northern Ontario. Devine’s installation, video, and curatorial projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian Institute’s National Gallery of the American Indian, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the 2026 Venice Biennale. She is an Associate Professor Emerita at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and the Founding Chair of OCAD University’s Indigenous Visual Culture program. Institutional recognition of Devine’s practice includes an Ontario Lieutenant Governor’s Heritage Award and OCAD University’s Distinguished Research/Creative Practice Award in 2019, and a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2021.

Jamie Whitecrow is an artist, performer, independent filmmaker, screenwriter, and film director, based out of Toronto, ON, She is Muskrat clan and grew up in Seine River First Nation, Treaty #3. Jamie studied Philosophy and Indigenous Community Development before completing an MFA in Film Production at York University. She has written and directed several short independent films, and a short documentary with the National Film Board called “That Old Game La Crosse”.

Mikinaak Migwans is a member of Wiikwemikoong Unceded Territory, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.

Rebecca Belmore (b. 1960, Anishinaabe) creates sculpture, installation, video, photography and performance. Central to her work is the body in relation to history, place and Indigeneity. Recent monographic exhibitions include Turbulent Water, Griffith University, Brisbane; and Facing the Monumental, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Recent major international exhibitions include the 2022 Whitney Biennial, 2019 Istanbul Biennial, and documenta 14. Belmore has been awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, among many others. She holds honorary doctorates from Université Laval, Quebec City; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver; and Ontario College of Art & Design University, Toronto.

Taqralik Partridge (b. 1975) is an Inuk and Scottish curator, artist and writer originally from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik. She is the former director of the Nordic Lab at SAW Gallery in Ottawa, and has worked as a curator for the Art Gallery Of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Guelph and independently for various galleries.

Taqralik is the former Editor-at-large for the Inuit Art Quarterly. She has performed at festivals in Canada and internationally for more than 20 years; as both a spoken word poet and Inuit throat singer; and her visual and film work has been shown at exhibitions in North America, Australia, Norway, New Zealand and the UK. She currently lives with her family in Ottawa.