The Board of Directors can be reached by email at bod [at] yyzartistsoutlet [dot] org
Amanda White
Amanda White is a Toronto-based artist who’s current research interests include: cultural imaginations of nature, interdisciplinary and collaborative art practice, art and the environment, posthumanities, issues in agriculture and food, and urban ecologies. She is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s, holds an MFA from the University of Windsor and a BFA from OCADU. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, SSHRC, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council among others. She has exhibited in galleries such as the Harbourfront Centre, The Walter Phillips Gallery, PlugIn ICA, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, as well as independently producing many independent public interventions and engagements. Recent publications include; feature articles in esse- Art and Opinions, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, chapters for edited collections; Perma/Culture: Imagining Alternatives in an age of Crisis, and Why Look at Plants? (forthcoming).
David Yu (Secretary)
David Yu is a Canadian multimedia, installation, and performance artist. He received a Masters in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art in London, UK and received a Bachelors in Fine Art from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Some highlights from his exhibition record include: a city-wide art installation commissioned and curated by the Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design, funded by the Scottish Arts Council (2010); a Triangle Arts Trust residency and solo exhibition at the Kuona Trust Gallery in Nairobi, Kenya (2010); participation with Flux Night 2012, Atlanta, Georgia, with a multi-channel video installation; MART Gallery Dublin, Ireland (2015); Locust Projects, Miami, Florida (2018); YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, Canada (2018); Orleans Gallery, Ottawa, Canada (2018). Currently, I am working on performance-based research which investigates the role of the viewer as “performer” within installation practices, which has been generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan (Chair)
Shalon T. Webber-Heffernan is a curator and doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at York University. Her work broadly explores contemporary site-specific and feminist performance projects that respond to issues surrounding disappearance, disposability, and space throughout the Americas. She is currently taking part in the Curatorial Incubator program at Vtape and was Curator in Residence at the Curatorial Lab @ Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology (2019-2020) and recently worked with Toronto’s 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art.
Jordache A. Ellapen
Jordache A. Ellapen is an interdisciplinary and transnational Black Studies scholar and visual artist who grew up in South Africa. He is currently Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies in Culture and Media at the University of Toronto. He researches and writes primarily in two areas: Afro-Asian queer and feminist aesthetic practices and Black Sexual Cultures in South Africa and the diaspora. He is currently writing a book titled Sticky Erotics: Afro-Indian Intimacies and the Queer Aesthetics of Race in South Africa, and has two journal articles, based on the Black queer and femme South African performance duo FAKA, forthcoming in the journals Feminist Studies and Feminist Formations. In his practice-based research he is interested in queering family narratives and histories by positioning the family archive as a counterintuitive, yet generative, archive in producing knowledge about marginalized subjects and experiences that have been strategically “forgotten” within normative and hegemonic narratives of nation, community, and family. His short film cane/cain premiered at the Durban International Film Festival and the 3rd i San Francisco South Asian International Film Festival in 2011. His ongoing project, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy has been exhibited in Durban (KwaZulu Natal Society of the Arts), Johannesburg (The Point of Order, Wits University), and Cape Town (Michaelis Galleries) in 2017 and 2018. An image titled Queering Africa, Queering Picasso was selected for the Kinsey Juried Art Show in 2015. Ellapen continues to work with family archives. In his latest creative-based project, Ellapen curates a collection of his mother’s professional studio photographs shots in rural KwaZulu Natal between the 1950s and 1960s. This project asks: How do we read the photo-archive of an Indian woman one generation removed from the sugarcane plantations and coal mines where her parents were indentured as part of an imperial labor force? How do we read her performances alongside the experiences of gendered based violence within the home-space exacerbated by colonial and apartheid era politics? This visual essay, titled “The Brown Photo Album: An Archive of Feminist Futurity,” has been published in Kronos: Southern African Histories (2021). Ellapen has a BA (Dramatic Art) from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, MA degrees from Wits University and New York University (Tisch School of the Arts), and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. Before joining the University of Toronto, he was an assistant professor at the University of Oregon. He was also a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.