YYZLAB

Mona Lisa Ali Alzghoul

Mona Lisa Ali Alzghoul is an interdisciplinary artist working in 3D media, between virtual and physical space. Her process moves through repetitive actions and growth over time, dissolving and rebuilding visuals that are actual or imagined. Primarily working in CGI, video, and sculpture, Ali Alzghoul navigates voids in personal and collective identity, collective memory, loss, legacy, modes of mourning, nation-belonging, and the effects of displacement in the transmission of these threads. She attempts to reconcile the notion of belonging in a third space, not that of her ancestors of current place of being, but a mobile center that has no physical space.

Born in 1990 and currently residing in Toronto Ali Alzghoul obtained a Bachelor’s of Media Arts with a focus in Animation from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2014. Her films have been screened in numerous international film festivals including the Karama Human Rights Film Festival in Gaza, Zürich Art Fair, and AVIFF Cannes Art Film Festival in France. In 2016 she received the Vancouver Contemporary Art Society’s Emerging Artist Award. She is currently participating in Spring Sessions, a communal artist residency in Amman, Jordan.

Stephanie Duran Castillo

Stephanie Duran Castillo was born in Lima during Peru’s Internal Conflict (1980-1992). At 18 she starts studying in a technical school in Lima where she spends her time writing and learning animation by herself. She directs three early experiments, which gain her some student awards, then gets involved with self-educated critics, filmmakers, and cultural workers that are outside the official film Lima circuit. As they all share a desire for a new cinema, the group gets involved in several initiatives to change the film scene. In 2011 Stephanie collaborates in launching the first Lima Independiente Film Festival and travels to Canada where she would expand her practice to video-art, experimental film, installation and performance. She has been invited as an artist to participate to the Emergent Latin American Artist Mentorship at Sur Gallery, YYZLAB at YYZ Gallery, the Thunderbird Woman Session of the Wood Land School. As media scholar she has been invited to the Decolonizing Conference of University of Toronto and the IX Visual Anthropology Symposium of University of Tarapaca. Her work has been showed in different exhibition and festivals in Peru, Chile, Mexico, Canada, and USA.

Amanda Foulds

Amanda Foulds is a recent Drawing and Painting graduate from OCAD University.

She is interested in lens-based processes as mechanisms for re-contextualizing

and reviving the educational family album or art history textbook. In confronting these unfamiliar stories, her intention is not to change the source materials she is using; rather, to offer a nostalgic comfort in alternative narratives.

Monica Gutierrez

Monica Gutierrez is a Colombian film-maker and visual artist based out of Toronto, Canada. Main interests include art for social change, sustainable practices and citizen media. Monica’s artistic practice also focuses on organizing digital storytelling projects in Canada and Latin America.

Kayla Polan

Calgary-born, Toronto based artist Kayla Polan is a multidisciplinary artist working across traditional and new media. She recently graduated from the OCAD University with a BFA major in Drawing & Painting. Her practice melds feminism and popular culture to investigate contemporary ideas about sexuality, fetishism, domesticity, autobiography, and consumer culture through the use of painting, sculpture, and performance. Her work has been exhibited in several group exhibitions in Canada and Europe.

Aitak Sorahitalab

Aitak Sorahitalab is a visual artist, art instructor, and researcher with more than 10 years’ experience in ceramic arts, drawing, mixed media, and design. After graduating from the BA in Applied Arts and during my Master of Design and Production from the University of Art of Tehran, she held exhibitions of her work, and was commissioned to create public art installations all around her native country, Iran. Since immigrating to Canada in 2013, she has participated in six group shows and had a solo exhibition. She continues her research and teaching while maintaining her artistic production in a professional ceramics guild studio. Sorahitalab won an RBC award for newcomer artist, and curated a multicultural art exhibition at North York Arts in 2017. Passionate about social development, she has been involved in community arts, and leading her own non-profit organization, Airsa Art & Thought Association.

Angela Walcott

Angela Walcott is a freelance writer who studied visual art at Humber, Centennial and George Brown Colleges as well as OCAD University, and the Toronto Art Centre. She endeavours to stretch the imagination both literally and figuratively by exploring all reaches of the canvas, camera lens, and the page. From her own Canadian ethno-cultural perspective, she aims to tell the story of the everyday. By situating everyday people in everyday situations and contemplating the result via sculpture, painting, and written word, she believes the most honest narrative will begin to unfold.