Marilyn is the New Media Program Officer at the Canada Council for the Arts. She is also a media artist, independent curator and feminist scholar of Cultural Studies. Her video works have shown internationally and are in the collection of the Art Bank, the National Gallery of Canada. A former professor of Film Studies, her writings on women, media and displacement have appeared in numerous scholarly journals in Canada. Her latest exhibition, "Indian Princesses and Cowgirls: Stereotypes from the Frontier" co-curated with Gail Guthrie Valaskakis is on a three-year Canadian tour. Mare holds a Ph.D. in Communications Studies.

 

Skawennati is an artist and an independent curator who holds both a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Design Art Major) and a Graduate Diploma of Institutional Administration (Arts Specialization) from Concordia University. She served for four years as a board member at Galerie Oboro in Montreal and is the co-founder of Nation to Nation [www.nation2nation.org], a First Nations artist collective established in 1994. During her recent curatorial residency at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre for the Arts she mounted "Blanket Statements," an exhibition of art quilts, and "The People�s Plastic Princess," a survey of more than thirty years of Barbie art. In July 1999 ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology, http://www.anat.org.au) invited Skawennati to Darwin for a month to tutor at the National Indigenous School for New Media. Her most recent projects include "Artist for the Ethical Treatment of Humans", her own personal subvertisement campaign, and "Imagining Indians in the 25th Century", net.art created for "I, Witness" at the Edmonton Art Gallery. Please visit www.skawennati.com to learn more about all these projects.

Jason brings ten years' experience in a wide variety of research environments to bear on the question of how to enrich and extend the user's experience of digital media. He is a practicing artist, designer and technology developer, and recently founded the Arts Alliance Laboratory in San Francisco. His work has appeared at Ars Electronica, ISEA and SIGGRAPH, and he currently has a piece, TextOrgan, on two-year display at the Ars Electronica Center. He has spoken at the Banff Centre for the Arts, SFMoMA, and the UCLA Department of Design, and worked at Interval Research Corporation, the Institute for Research on Learning, Fitch, and USWest Advanced Technologies. He holds a BS and BA degree from Stanford, and an M.Phil. from the Royal College of Art, London. Please see www.aalab.net/projects for more information.

Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew was born in McLennan, Alberta in 1958. He graduated in performance art and installation from Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver, British Columbia in 1985. Since that time, he has attended numerous workshops in video production, audio production, creative writing and arts administration. Maskegon-Iskwew was a participant in the Equity Internship Program at the Canada Council in Ottawa from 1992 to 1994, where he received training in the Media Arts and Visual Arts Sections, and the Art Bank at Council, as well as with the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College and Circle Vision Arts Corporation, Regina, and the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance, Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta. In Regina, he then became Program Coordinator for Circle Vision Arts Corporation (1994-1995) and later developed the position of Production Manager for SOIL@Neutral Ground Digital Media Production Suite (1996-1998). Maskegon-Iskwew has participated on many panels and symposia addressing issues of new media. He has also been a member of numerous arts juries and arts advisory committees. He was artistic director, writer, and producer for Isi-pikiskwewin.

Ayapihkesisak (Speaking the Language of Spiders), a 10-artist collaboration to produce a World Wide Web site art work (www.snacc.mb.ca/projects/spiderlanguage/), supported by the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Canada Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board (1996). He has created many video-integrated performances including Mestih'kusowin (Holocaust), Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, (1990); Sakehi'towin Onipowak, Western Front Gallery, Vancouver, (1992); and Hunter, Pitt Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia (1993).

More recently, Maskegon-Iskwew created new digital work for Nation to Nation's CyberPowWow 2 (1999), and was director and videographer for an interdisciplinary community video production with Common Weal Community Arts Inc., Regina, Saskatchewan (1999). His critical writing has been published in Mix - the magazine of artist-run culture, and Fuse Magazine. A new article will be published by the St. Norbert Arts Centre in the up-coming anthology The Multiple and Mutable Subject: Postmodern Subjectivity and the Internet edited by Vera Lamecha and Reva Stone with writings by participants in the symposium of the same name (St. Norbert Arts Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 1999). Maskegon-Iskwew resides in Winnipeg and works as the Web Development Coordinator for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (www.aptn.ca).

snenkwen aliya / Michelle Nahanee is a Squamish Nation member and mother of a beautiful four year old girl named Paisley. As a graduate of BCIT media program, Michelle has been melding art, business and culture since 1995. The primary clients of her graphic design company imagiNative studio have been First Nations organizations and government/corporate groups. Working in print communications, web design and digital video has allowed Michelle to focus her time and creative energy entranced by her passion for colour.

Travis Neel is non-status, thirteenth generation hereditary carver from the Kwakiutl Nation. Travis has been working with multimedia and Internet technologies for over five years and has a strong technical knowledge of how new media should be developed and delivered.

He would like create a multimedia website that encompasses the traditional music and art of his family with the contemporary music and art that he has been creating through technology.

Archer Pechawis is a media-integrated performing artist, New Media artist, writer and curator. He has been creating solo performance works since 1988. His current practice investigates the intersection of Plains Cree culture and digital technology. In the last year Archer has had New Media artist residencies at TechnOboro, AALab, the Surrey Art Gallery and Sakewewak First Nations Artist Collective.

Archer is currently working on "Nation", a New Media performance that investigates First Nations sovereignty, autonomy and self-government through the voices of Aboriginal youth. "Nation" will debut in 2001. In addition to his New Media work Archer is a member of the Spoken Word performance trio "White Trash, Red Trash, Rock Trash".

"My current fascination is what I call "transitional Cree culture", the place where Cree culture meets the onrush of millennial technology. I explore this fascination in performance. Using digital technologies I attempt to locate and query this meeting place, however fleeting. My work is a temporary roadmap. These maps are signposts of the moment, which I create to share."

r e a* is an artist | curator | activist | academic | cultural educator | creative thinker who is engaged in an arts-lead, research-based practice. r e a is a descendant from the Gamilaraay/Wailwan/Biripi Indigenous nations of Australia located in the central western region of New South Wales. r e a has received numerous scholarships and grants throughout her creative and academic career. These include: a Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship; a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts; and a Fulbright Scholarship. She has completed a B.F.A from the University of NSW, School of Art and Design; an M.A. in Visual Arts from Australian National University; a M.Sc. in Digital Imaging and Design from New York University; and a Doctorate in Visual Anthropology at UNSW Art & Design.

r e a's ongoing research and creative practice continues to focus on Indigenous histories and archive collections; new Indigenous perspectives that disrupt the colonial gaze; and how technology can challenge historical images of Indigenous representation and thereby offer new forms of representation.

Additional works created by r e a can be viewed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/reanoir. r e a's contact is: reanoir@gmail.com

*[r e a is the artist's professional name, which is written in all lowercase with a space between each letter.]

Trevor is a visual artist, a new media designer and an educator who has lived and worked in North East Arnhemland for a number of years. Trevor's recent work includes; video and live vision mixing for the Indigenous opera 'Trepang', interactive computer based works, as well as two collaborative projected environments 'Immerse' and, more recently, 'Resite' at 24hrart Gallery in Darwin, Australia.

His involvement in numerous cultural heritage projects using new technologies, in particular the Yolngu literature CD-ROM produced with the Faculty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders at the Northern Territory University, has lead to an interest in database and interface design and how they may relate to cultural and representational specifics.

Trevor is currently working as a designer with the Qantm cooperative multimedia centre in Darwin but will be moving to take on a similar role with the Yothu Yindi Foundation (www.yothuyindi.com). See some of his work at http://www.qantmnt.com/tvw/

All the way from Wishart, Saskatchewan, Sheila Urbanoski is a media artist who has pushed the envelope in video, performance and new media.

She has a long history with Canadian artist-run access centres, has served on the boards of over thirteen arts organizations, was Programme Coordinator at EMMEDIA (an artist-run media centre) and the Prairie Region Representative on the Canadian national Independent Film and Video Alliance She has received a number of grants and awards for her work and has been active in the creation of artist-driven websites and internet-based projects since 1990. Additionally she is committed to the development of an informed audience for new media through lecturing, workshops and writing. She has collaborated on a number of projects with other artists and has an extensive background in training people within her field. Her artists' projects have received over seventeen awards and have been selected for numerous international festivals and exhibitions, as well as being a regular attendee and panelist of numerous media festivals.

Sheila Urbanoski is the founder of Cyberfemme, channels the Mystress Cybernoski and is the originator of shera.org. She is currently based in London, England where she is the Head of Interface Development at Razorfish London. In her spare time, she continues to create websites, write and lecture about new media, and strives to become a Renaissance woman, a socialite, a Good Daughter, a Bad Girl, various kinds of Madonnas and assorted whores, a drag queen trapped in a woman's body, and the perfect...