Artspeak

• Rob Brownie

  Rob Brownie is a teacher and writer with a degree in urban geography and philosophy from the University of Victoria. He has co-written articles for Artspeak, West Coast Line and Vancouver Matters (Vancouver: Blueimprint, 2008) with Annabel Vaughan on themes related to the cultural interface of art and architecture in Vancouver.

• Kim Collier

  Kim Collier is a director/creator/actor living in Vancouver. For the past twelve years, she has been the co-artistic director of Electric Company Theatre, a creation based ensemble, and has directed almost all of their productions, ranging from smaller installation performance works to large-scale visually driven theatre pieces and a film for CBC Opening Night.

• Kate Fowle

  Kate Fowle is the Executive Director of iCI in New York. She was International Curator for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing from 2007 to 2008, the Chair of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts in San Francisco from 2002 to 2007, and co-director of smith + fowle, a curatorial partnership based in London, from 1996. Her essays have appeared in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, ed. Ted Purves (New York: SUNY Press, 2005) and Cautionary Tales, ed. Steve Rand (New York: Apex Art, 2007). Fowle has also written for numerous magazines, including Parkett, Modern Painters, Manifesta Journal, and Frieze.

• Ruba Katrib

  Ruba Katrib is the Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami and an Adjunct Professor at the New World School of the Visual Arts in Miami. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. Recent curatorial projects include two group exhibitions—Dark Continents and The Possibility of an Island—at MOCA in 2008. Katrib is currently curating Convention, an exhibition at MOCA about fairs, festivals, and other social and professional gatherings.

• Melanie O’Brian

  Director/Curator of Artspeak 2004–2010.

• Lani Russwurm

  Lani Russwurm holds degrees in political science and history from Simon Fraser University and is currently writing a book on policing Vancouver in the interwar period. He procrastinates by researching, writing, and consulting on the history of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where he has lived with his daughter since 2002.

• Althea Thauberger

  Althea Thauberger is an artist based in Vancouver. Her internationally produced and exhibited work typically involves collaboration with a group or community that result in performances, films, videos, audio recordings, and books. Thauberger gravitates towards social enclaves—groups of people who exist or develop in some form of seclusion and are often perpetuated by social controls—that are both coercive and voluntary. Her work provides constraints for her subjects to work within which may echo the ones they live within. These may be structural imperatives or conventions of particular film or photographic media, allegory, seriality, or other containers. Thauberger’s performances have involved diverse groups including young Canadian female singer/songwriters, U.S. military wives, Canadian tree planters, Vancouver-based reserve soldiers, and male youth in the German civil service. These amateur performers express concepts of self-definition, alienation, and community through their stories.

  Thauberger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work has been presented at Manifesta 7, Trento, Itlay; the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2008; Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008; BAK, Utrecht, 2007; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2006; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, 2006; Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, 2006; Singapore History Museum, 2006; Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, 2005; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, 2005; Berkeley Art Museum, 2005; Insite, San Diego/Tijuana, 2005; White Columns, New York, 2004; and Seattle Art Museum, 2004. In 2008 she will be traveling to the Canadian Forces Base in Kandahar, Afghanistan to work on a collaborative photograph with military members there. She has upcoming projects with BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands, the Gaungzhou Triennial, China and Artspeak in Vancouver.

• Annabel Vaughan

  Annabel Vaughan is an intern architect working in Vancouver. She is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. Her practice works to understand how Vancouver has come to be the city it is, where it is headed in the future, and how the culture of art and architecture will affect the outcome. She has co-written articles for Artspeak, West Coast Line, and Vancouver Matters (Vancouver: Blueimprint, 2008) with Rob Brownie.

• Jonathan Young

  Jonathan Young is an actor, playwright, and current Artistic Director of Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver. He has performed in theatres across Canada, including the National Arts Centre, Centaur Theatre, the Citadel, Vancouver Playhouse, and the Belfry Theatre. The Electric Company has been producing original live theatre since 1996 and has toured across Canada, to Scotland and the United States. The company is currently working on a large-scale film/theatre hybrid for Vancouver’s Stanley Theatre.

• Jerry Zaslove

  Jerry Zaslove is a writer and teacher living in Vancouver. He taught literature, humanities, and the social history of art at Simon Fraser University for many years. His recent work includes a gallery installation on Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, diverse essays on the city in history, the university as a failed institution, anarchism and the city, photography, and memory.