People
Bart Simon
Bart Simon is the director of Milieux, TAG research centre co-founder and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His areas of expertise include game studies, science and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game studies and design research crosses a variety of genres and platforms looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday life. His current research on the Immersive Theatre and Games, materialities of play, and player-makers in Minecraft is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada. Other projects include work on indie game scenes, solar media, social theories of play, and modding cultures. Concordia Explore Page
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Alice Jarry
Artist & researcher Dr. Alice Jarry is the Associate Director of Milieux and the Director of the Milieux 'Speculative Life' BioLab. She is the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality and Assistant Professor in Design and Computation Arts. Alice specializes in site-specific responsive works, socio-environmental design, digital arts, tangible media, and community-oriented projects. Her research brings concerns about sustainability, aesthetics, and politics to bear critically upon materiality, material production, and contemporary matters-of-concern regarding urban communities and infrastructures. With matter inseparable from both form and practice, her installation work examines how materiality - engaged in constant processes of transformation and circulation with site, technology, and communities - can provoke the emergence of adaptive forms and resilient socio-environmental relations. Alice Jarry Website Concordia Explore Page
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Darren Wershler
Darren Wershler is the upcoming co-Director of the TAG Research Cluster, was interim director of Milieux for the first half of 2023 and co-director of the Media and Materiality Research Cluster from 2015 - 2018. He is also the Director of the Residual Media Depot at Milieux and a co-founding member of the Media History Research Centre. Darren is an Associate Professor in English and the Concordia University Research Chair for Media & Contemporary Literature. He recently co-authored The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies, with Lori Emerson and Jussi Parikka, published in 2022. Dr Wershler specializes in media history and media archaeology, with a particular interest in the material culture of analog and early digital technologies. Concordia Explore Page
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Ann-Louise Davidson
Ann-Louise Davidson Ph.D. is the Director of Concordia University's Innovation Lab and is the Innovation Strategic Advisor for the Faculty of Arts and Science. She is also Associate Director of the Milieux Institute for Art, Culture and Technology, where she directs #MilieuxMake, the institute's makerspace. She is also a Full Professor in the Department of Education and she teaches in interdisciplinary programs. From 2017 to 2024, Dr. Davidson held the Concordia University Research Chair in Maker Culture. During that time, she created the Education Makers research group, which brings together a community of educators, students, and community members working together to push the boundaries of knowledge of the maker movement in education. Dr. Davidson is recognized internationally for her groundbreaking work in integrating innovation across various fields, including artificial intelligence, global issues, health, sustainability, and motivation among young people. As a researcher, she is engaged in co-designing learning experiences and workshop concepts that draw inspiration from these crucial themes, driving forward disruptive pedagogies with emerging technologies. Her contributions to innovation span disciplines, shaping the future of higher education and beyond.
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Jill Didur
Jill Didur is Co-Director of the Speculative Life research cluster at Milieux and Professor in English at Concordia University. Didur is also the Director of the Critical Anthropocene Research Group (CARG), a collaboration with faculty in Geography Planning and the Environment and English that investigates the cultural, historical and political roots of human-induced climate change with an emphasis on its origins in the history of empire, race,and globalization. She is co-editor of Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities:Postcolonial Approaches and author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. She is completing a co-edited volume with Nalini Mohabir, (Post)Colonial Ports: Place and NonPlace in the Ecotone (forthcoming, 2024). Didur supervises graduate students working in a wide range of areas, including the environmental humanities, critical Anthropocene studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, contemporary literature and theory, South Asian literature in English, and critical posthumanism and plant studies. Jill Didur Website Concordia Explore Page
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Stefanie Duguay
Stefanie Duguay is the director of the Digital Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality (DIGS) Lab and Director of the Media and Materiality Research Cluster at Milieux. She is a Concordia University Research Chair (New Scholar) and Associate Professor in Communication Studies. Her research focuses on the influence of digital media technologies in everyday life, with particular attention to sexual and gender identity and social media. This has included studies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people’s social media use, dating apps, self-presentation, and everyday activism with the use of mixed traditional and digital research methods. Her research and teaching demonstrate a commitment to fostering inclusive spaces for knowledge exchange and producing research that reveals power relations in sociotechnical systems. Stefanie Duguay Website Concordia Explore Page
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Marco Luna Barahona
Based in Montreal, Marco Luna is a filmmaker, cinema instructor, and researcher with a Master's degree in Fine Arts from Concordia University. As a Part-time Faculty at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, he teaches courses on montage, filmmaking, and interactive documentary VR cinema. Marco also contributes to conferences, exploring themes like immersive technology and social documentary filmmaking. Currently, he serves as a Technologist at Milieux, Immersive Reality Lab, showcasing his commitment to blending traditional filmmaking with cutting-edge technologies in his diverse filmography.
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Jason Edward Lewis
Jason Edward Lewis is the co-director of the Indigenous Futures Research Centre. He is a full Professor of Design and Computation Arts, a digital media artist, poet and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research / creation projects using virtual environments to assist Aboriginal communities in preserving, interpreting and communicating cultural histories, devising new means of creating and reading digital texts, developing systems for creative use of mobile technology. He was the director of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, a seven-year SSHRC-funded Partnership focused on how Indigenous communities imaging themselves seven generations hence. Lewis co-founded and co-directs the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network that investigates how Aboriginal people can participate in the shaping of our digital media future, and he co-directs workshops combining traditional stories and game design at the Kahnawake First Nations' high school. He is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, creative and technical levels simultaneously. Lewis' creative work has been featured at the Ars Electronica Center, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, Urban Screens and Mobilefest, among other venues, his writing about new media has been presented at conferences, festivals and exhibitions on four continents and his work with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace has won multiple awards.
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Lynn Hughes
Lynn Hughes is a digital media researcher, artist and teacher who holds the Chair of Interaction Design and Games innovation at Concordia University. She was instrumental in the founding and financing of the Hexagram Institute for Media Art and Technology which is the largest new media hub in Canada. In 2008 she co-founded the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) research group (now a formal Research Centre). Lynn’s production currently focuses on the design of full body, sensor based games. In 2012 she curated (with Heather Kelley and Cindy Poremba) a major, fully playable exhibition on game culture at the Gaîté lyrique in Paris. Joue le jeu / Play Along set out to position game culture as absolutely central to contemporary Culture -as the broad, diversified, exceedingly dynamic and evolving cultural field it is becoming. Concordia Explore Website
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Fenwick McKelvey
Fenwick McKelvey is an Associate Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He is co-director of the Applied AI Institute and leads Machine Agencies at the Milieux Institute. He studies digital politics and policy. He is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) winner of the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award. He is co-author of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang, 2012) with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois.
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Eldad Tsabary
Dr. Eldad Tsabary, Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Fine Arts, leads the SSHRC-funded Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE) project, which aims to explore cataclysmic scenarios through mini-operas, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and critical public discourse. Alongside his work with RISE, Dr. Tsabary is actively engaged with an extensive international network of researchers and artists, particularly within South and Southeast Asia, supported by his eight-year chairmanship of the International Conference on Arts and Humanities. With a Doctorate in Music Education from Boston University, his scholarly pursuits in improvisation and electroacoustic performance have led to the founding of the Concordia Laptop Orchestra (CLOrk), which has performed at prestigious venues such as the Cambridge Festival 2022 and Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, among others. Among other leadership roles, Dr. Tsabary has previously served as Chair of the Music Department, as co-founder/director of the Performing Arts Research Cluster (Le PARC) at the Milieux Institute, and as president of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC).
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Kathleen Vaughan
Dr. Kathleen Vaughan is Co-Director of the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology. She's a professor in Art Education, Concordia University Research Chair in Art + Education for Sustainable and Just Futures (Tier 1) A visual artist, writer, scholar, and educator Dr. Vaughan’s work reflects a trans-disciplinary orientation to questions of place and belonging and the theme of ‘home’. She aims to balance her love for post-industrial sites, urban forests and green spaces with critical engagement, and often uses walking and mapping as method and form. Kathleen uses textile practices, painting, drawing, photography, installation, audio and video. Her work comprises multiple approaches, studio-based, collaborative/participatory and community-based. Active within her Montreal neighbourhood of Pointe-St-Charles, Kathleen has worked with seniors and children in social housing, schools and community agencies. She has also developed creative projects with children, adults and seniors in Toronto, Iceland, Latvia and the Netherlands, oriented to cultivating knowledge and awareness of ‘place’ and building community. Kathleen Vaughan Website Concordia Explore Page
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Kregg Hetherington
A political anthropologist, Kregg Hetherington is the Co-Director of Speculative Life Research Cluster at Milieux and Director of the Concordia Ethnography Lab. He's Associate Professor in Concordia’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Science. His research is specialized in environment, infrastructure and the bureaucratic state. Kregg's long-term ethnographic work in Paraguay chronicles how small farmers caught in a sweeping agrarian transition have experienced that country's halting transition to democracy, showing how activists create new ways of thinking and practising government. His recent book, The Government of Beans (Duke 2020) was awarded the Book Prize in Critical Anthropology from the Association of Political And Legal Anthropology, and the Julian Steward Award from the Environment and Anthropology Society. He supervises graduate students working ethnographically in a wide range of areas, including environment and infrastructure studies, Science and Technology Studies, Latin American agrarian politics, and the ethnography of bureaucracy. Concordia Explore Page
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Hannah Claus
Hannah Claus is the Co-Director of the Post Image Research Cluster at Milieux, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Studio Arts. A transdisciplinary artist and researcher of Kanien’kehá:ka / English heritage, her practice-based research engages with the idea of space shaped by language, material culture and place as transversal living concepts. She employs Onkwehonwenéha [Indigenous methodology] to critique dominant colonial narratives and give voice to Indigenous histories, teachings and cosmologies. Claus is a member of the Board of Directors of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and a co-founder of daphne, a new Indigenous contemporary arts centre based in Tiohtià:ke [Montreal]. Hannah Claus Website Concordia Explore Website
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Miranda Smitheram
Design researcher, educator and artist, Dr. Miranda Smitheram is the Co-Director of the Textile and Materiality research cluster and Director of MaSH Lab at Milieux. Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Miranda is currently Assistant Professor of Material Futures in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. Her research practice is tactile, haptic and embodied, and incorporates ancestral and speculative methods to work with ecosystems, socio-cultural matter, and nonhuman collaborators. Through this she explores developing new remediated and hybrid materials, to contribute to sustainable, relational and Indigenous futures. Her current research explores decolonizing matter, and centres an ethics of care and relationality. Through unraveling ontologies and kinship of invasive plant species, Miranda frames possibilities of rematerializing these unwanted invaders through soft surface, biofabrication and textile applications to propose localized solutions through materiality. Miranda’s research moves between digital, virtual, and physical, with a particular interest in the ontologies and critical materiality that is revealed through the flux of these processes. Both her field research with flora and her digital research with materiality follow an ontological design approach. These mediated materials take shape as textile forms, structures and digital artworks that question the interaction and agency of human and more-than-human, place, and space in a post-anthropocentric context. Concordia Explore Page
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Lília Mestre
Lília Mestre (she, her) is a performing artist, dramaturge and researcher working in collaborative formats mainly in the fields of contemporary dance and choreography. She is interested in forms of organisation created by and for artistic practice as alternative study processes for social-political reflection. She has been working on the concept of ‘artificial friendship’ which has been the source for the creation of methodological structures (scores) for exchange and collaboration in artistic research settings, which have been documented in various publications. She was artistic coordinator of a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) in Brussels and is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary Dance and Co-director of the Performing Arts Research Cluster (LePARC) within the MILIEUX Institute for Arts Culture and Technology at Concordia University. Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She was granted the The Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award 2023 for her research on expanded choreography “Through Materialities, Movement and Description”.
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VK Preston
VK Preston is a cultural historian of performance traversing artistic and critical practices (movement, texts, images, cultural expression). Their research includes performing arts and archives, improvisation, and intersectional historiography. VK works alongside artists and scientists in dance studies, health, and research creation, investigating histories of the senses in experiential, often narrative approaches to embodiment and artistic practices. VK’s recent research addresses performance and early modern archives entangled with France, the Atlantic world, Turtle Island (North America), and long histories of French colonization in the Americas. This work is a practice of reckoning with performing arts archives and institutions; it reflects on practices of lived inheritance from movement techniques to material culture, economics, and world-building. They are currently working on their first book manuscript, and they are working on the concept of danceways as analogues to foodways and folkways. VK is currently interim director of the Honours undergraduate program in History at Concordia and Co-director, with Lilia Mestre and Meghan Moe Beitiks, of LePARC, the Performing Arts Research Cluster at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.
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Rilla Khaled
Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where she teaches interaction design, design theory, programming, and more. She is the director of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, Canada’s most well-established games research lab, in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. Dr. Khaled’s research is focused on the use of interactive technologies to improve the human condition, a career-long passion that has led to diverse outcomes, including designing award-winning serious games, developing a framework for game design specifically aimed at reflective outcomes, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, working with Indigenous communities to use contemporary technologies to imagine new, inclusive futures, and establishing foundations for materials-based game design research.
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Mia Consalvo
Mia Consalvo is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University. She is the co-author of Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames (2019) and Players and their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to Sunset (2015). She is also co-editor of Sports Videogames (2013) and the Handbook of Internet Studies (2011), and is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (2007) as well as Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Context (2016). Mia runs the mLab, a space dedicated to developing innovative methods for studying games and game players. She’s a member of the Centre for Technoculture, Art & Games (TAG), she has presented her work at industry as well as academic conferences including regular presentations at the Game Developers Conference. She is the Past President of the Digital Games Research Association, and has held positions at MIT, Ohio University, Chubu University in Japan and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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Haidee Wasson
Haidee Wasson (PhD) is currently the Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Inclusion in the Faculty of Fine Arts. She brings a wealth of experience to this role, having previously served as Associate Dean, Research (Faculty of Fine Arts), Area Head and Graduate Program Director (Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia), and member of Faculty Council (Fine Arts), University Senate, and the Board of Governors, among other administrative and leadership roles. Dr. Wasson was recently named a Distinguished Research Professor (2023) in recognition of her multiple international awards, and her ground-breaking and influential scholarship. She has published 5 books, with an additional one in production, and dozens of articles, lecturing internationally on film and media history. She is currently working on a 5-year SSHRC funded project examining the important role of small format film technologies in seeding cultures of creativity across cultural and industrial sectors.
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Pippin Barr
Pippin Barr is a video game maker, educator, and critic who lives and works in Montréal. He is a prolific maker of videogames, producing games addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to contemporary art and has collaborated with diverse figures such as performance artist Marina Abramovic and Twitter personality @seinfeld2000. Pippin is a well-known figure in the independent games world, serving as a judge or juror for many festivals, and his games have been covered in publications from the New York Times to Slate to Kotaku. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Lab, and a visiting lecturer in the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand on the subject of "videogame values." Pippin also writes a blog of game and game design criticism at www.pippinbarr.com and his book, How to Play a Video Game, introduces the uninitiated and culturally curious to the world of video games.
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Jonathan Lessard
Game designer, professor, and researcher, holder of the Behaviour Interactive Research Chair in Game Design. I have been exploring the playful affordances of various technologies and concepts such as natural language processing and possible worlds theory for the past decade. My main research interests include emergent narratives, complex simulations, natural language interactions, and game design history.
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David Howes
David Howes is a Canadian anthropologist and legal scholar. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, and an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. Howes is best known as a pioneer of the anthropology of the senses and theorist of the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. He has authored, co-authored or edited 15 books, ranging from The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991) to Sensorium (2024). He has published numerous journal articles in such fields as medical anthropology, perceptual psychology, sensory museology, material culture, and cross-cultural aesthetics as well as Canadian legal history and constitutional studies, legal pluralism and cross-cultural jurisprudence. Howes has conducted field research on the social and cultural life of the senses in Papua New Guinea, Northwestern Argentina, and the Southwestern United States. He recently wrapped up a project on "Law and the Regulation of the Senses" and is currently directing a project called "Explorations in Sensory Design.
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Juan Ortiz-Apuy
Juan Ortiz-Apuy is a Canadian-Costa Rican artist who has been living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal since 2003. Ortiz-Apuy has a BFA from Concordia University (2008), a Post-Graduate Diploma from The Glasgow School of Art (2009), and an MFA from NSCAD University (2011). His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally in venues such as Les Abattoirs Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (France), IKEA Museum (Sweden), Pamflett (Norway), DHC/ART Fondation Phi pour l’art contemporain (Montreal), Owens Art Gallery (Sackville), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa), MOMENTA Biennale de l’image (Montreal), Quebec City Biennial: Manif d'art 7 (Québec), Truck Contemporary Art (Calgary), Museum London (London), Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography (Toronto), VOX Centre de l’image Contemporaine (Montreal), and The MacLaren Arts Centre (Barrie).
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Olivier Charbonneau
Olivier Charbonneau is associate Director of the TAG Research Centre. As an Associate Librarian at Concordia University and compulsive blogger, Olivier is fascinated by how law and information mingle. He is a doctoral student at the Faculté de droit at Université de Montréal. He has over 15 years of professional involvement in library or cultural communities. He holds two masters degrees from Université de Montréal, one in information sciences and another in law, as well as an undergraduate degree in commerce from McGill University. He has kept a research blog since 2005 in French at www.culturelibre.ca and a work blog since 2011 in English at OutFind.ca. His interest centre around copyright, cultural economics, open access and any social media trend.
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Marisa Portolese
Marisa Portolese is a member (and past co-director) of the Post Image Research Cluster and is an Associate Professor in the Photography Program in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. Portraiture, representations of women, narrative, autobiography, the figure in nature, cultural heritage and immigration are major and recurrent subjects in her practice. She often produces large-scale color photographs, rich in painterly references that concentrate on elucidating facets of human experiences in relation to psychological and physical environments, relating to larger themes concerning identity and spectatorship. She attempts to weave together gesture, affect, and the nuances of the gaze, to create an immersive and emotional landscape for the viewer. Her current research focuses on the cultural legacy of the Goose Village and how the hallmark event of Expo 67 caused the demolition of this working-class neighbourhood and displaced an entire community mostly made up Irish and Italian immigrants that included her parents.
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