Director, The Summer Institute of Interdisciplinary Indigenous Graduate Studies

Coordinator, CanWest Global Centre for Artist's Video

Coordinator, MFA, Creative StudiesProgram

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Stephen Foster is a video and electronic media artist of mixed Haida and European background. His work tends to deal with issues of indigenous representation in popular culture through personal narrative. He has exhibited in solo as well as group exhibitions both internationally and nationally as well as participating in various festivals with video installations and single channel works. In 2007 Stephen received his first opportunity to present a retrospective screening of his video work at the Dawson City International Short Film Festival. In addition to his exhibition record, Stephen is a published author, presented lectures and has participated on panels for new media, video art and contemporary indigenous art at national and international venues. He has taken part in residencies at the Banff Centre For The Arts, Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, Oboro in Montreal and more recently at La Chambre Blanche in Quebec City.

Stephen holds two college diplomas, as well as a BFA and a MFA. For his Masters of Fine Arts degree at York University he received the Master’s Thesis Prize, one of three given University wide, for his thesis exhibition and support paper entitled ‘Behind a Sheet of Glass’. More recently, Stephen was awarded a large Research/Creation Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for exploring interactive and experimental approaches to documentary. In 2009 he was nominated Best New Media Project at the ImagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival for his interactive DVD video project titled The Prince George Métis Elders’ Documentary Project.

Stephen is currently an Associate Professor in the Creative Studies Dept. and is the Director of the Summer Institute for Interdisciplinary Indigenous Graduate Studies at the University of British Columbia – Okanagan. He is also the coordinator of the CanWest Global Centre for Artists’ Video and instructs courses dedicated to video production, digital media and visual and cultural theory.

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Research Areas

Indigenous Media Art; Video Art; Representational Politics; Digital Photography; Interactive Documentary

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Professor; Creative Studies Department Head, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies

Education

• Master of Fine Arts (Theatre Directing), 1997, University of British Columbia

• Diploma, 1984, l’école Jacques Lecoq, Paris, France

• Bachelor of Arts (English), 1986, University of British Columbia

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Neil Cadger is a performer, director and teacher who graduated from l'école Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France. He founded Wissel Theatre in Gent, Belgium in 1984 and created theatre performances which toured extensively in Europe. He recently co-founded Inner Fish Performance Company with Denise Kenney in order to provide an infrastructure for producing and touring devised performances.

Neil teaches an interdisciplinary, physical approach to performance.

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Research Areas

Interventionist Performance; Site-specific performance; Live Art and New Media; Eco-activism

Interactive Media in LIve Performance; Analogue and Digital Representational Technologies

Head, Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Performance; Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies

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Sessional Lecturer, Drawing & 2D, Creative Studies

Matt Rader is the author of four collections of poetry: Miraculous Hours (Nightwood 2005), Living Things (Nightwood 2009) and A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno (House of Anansi 2011), and Desecrations (PenguinRandomHouse 2016). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed collection of stories, What I Want to Tell Goes Like This (Nightwood 2014).

The author of several chapbooks including The Land Beyond (greenboathouse 2004), Customs (Cactus 2010) and I Don't Want To Die Like Frank O'Hara (Baseline 2014), his poems, stories, creative nonfiction, and reviews have appeared in journals and anthologies across North America, Europe, and Australia including the Walrus, Geist, The Lonely Crowd, Wales Arts Review, and several edititons of Best Canadian Poetry. He has been invited to present his work around the world at the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, the Victoria Writers Festival, the Ottawa Writers Festival, The Kingston Writers Festival, the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, the Queensland Poetry Festival, and the Cork International Short Story Festival.

The winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders Prize for fiction from the Malahat Review and the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize for literature from the Canada Council for the Arts, his work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award and longlisted for the ReLit Award and the Journey Prize. His most recent award was the Charles Lillard Founders Prize for nonfiction from the Malahat Review.  

A contribuiting editor of Forget Magazine Rader is a past director of the Robson Reading Series at UBC Robson Square, the Kwantlen Reading Series at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the Write Here Readers Series at North Island College, and Readings from the Book of George, a companion reading series to the posthumous retrospective of the work of sculptor George Sawchuk at the Comox Valley Art Gallery.

His current research areas include disability aesthetics, access poetics, collaborative pedagogies, embodied poetics, and poetics of the Okanagan. 

Assistant Professor, Creative Writing Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies

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Sessional Lecturer, 2D & Sculpture

Degrees

• BA (Carleton University) 

• MA (Carleton University) 

• MPub (Simon Fraser University) 

• PhD (University of British Columbia)

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Research Interests

• Traditional Knowledge  

• Indigenous Rights  

• United Nations  

• Intellectual Property Rights  

• Indigenous Literatures   

• Indigenous Arts

Assistant to the Department Head, Creative Studies

Toby Lawrence is an independent curator, writer, and researcher based between Kelowna and Gabriola Island, on the traditional lands of the Syilx and Snuneymuxw peoples. Her work is grounded in decolonial and feminist methodologies, with ongoing research into collaborative, dialogic, and collective practices. Toby has held curatorial and programming positions with the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Nanaimo Art Gallery, and Studio 111, an experimental arts laboratory supported by the University of British Columbia Okanagan Department of Creative Studies (2016-17) and the Alternator Centre for the Contemporary Art in Kelowna, and is a founder of the Islands Curatorial Collective, an annual gathering and support network that fosters dialogue amongst creative and curatorial practitioners across the Vancouver Island and Gulf and Discovery Islands region. She contributes frequently to artist catalogues and art periodicals, such as C Magazine, BlackFlash, and esse art + opinions. She holds a BA (Hon) in History of Art from the University of Victoria, a MA in Art History from the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia, and is currently working toward a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. https://tobyklawrence.wordpress.com

Coordinator, Summer Intensive; PhD Student, Creative Studies

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Academic Assistant

Creative Studies

Media Technician

Creative Studies

Studio Technician

Visual Arts Technician, Creative Studies

Studio Technician