Faculty Reflections on Research-Creation at Milieux

Join us for a panel discussion featuring Concordia faculty members Kregg Hetherington, VK Preston, Joanna Berzowska, and Rilla Khaled*. Drawing from their diverse backgrounds and experience, the speakers will reflect on the institute’s key role in supporting and fostering research-creation projects. Panelists will share insight into how Milieux’s infrastructure and collaborative culture have supported their respective career milestones, while offering perspectives on the institute’s enduring institutional value.

This panel discussion will be moderated by JoDee Allen*.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

JoDee Allen is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities research/creation program at Concordia University. JoDee’s art practice ranges from dance-on-stage to dance-on-screen. Her roots begin in biomechanics and choreographic practice in breakdance and contemporary performance/fusion, and span to using visual and interactive mediums as a lens through which to interrogate the body in motion.

Her choreographic work has toured Canada and Europe and she has been a movement designer for the production of dance-inspired video games and research. In 2021, JoDee collaborated with choreographer Katie Ward to design a hybrid show—live streaming/live performance with large-scale projections for which she remixed the visuals in real-time. And, in 2023, she produced and was lead-designer for a game-like participatory performance called The Other Market (Montreal), soon to be remounted in London, UK.

Joanna Berzowska is the founder and research director of XS Labs, a design research studio with a focus on innovation in the fields of electronic textiles and reactive garments that can enable computationally-mediated interactions with the environment and the individual. A core component of her research involves the development of enabling methods, materials, and technologies – in the form of soft electronic circuits and composite fibers – as well as the exploration of the expressive potential of soft reactive structures. Her art and design work has been shown in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in NYC, the V&A in London, the Millenium Museum in Beijing, various SIGGRAPH Art Galleries, ISEA, the Art Directors Club in NYC, the Australian Museum in Sydney, NTT ICC in Tokyo, and Ars Electronica Center in Linz among others. She lectures internationally about the field of electronic textiles and related social, cultural, aesthetic, and political issues. She was selected for the Maclean’s Honour Roll as one of “thirty nine Canadians who make the world a better place to live in”. She is the Head of electronic textiles at OM signal, a Montreal startup developing a line of bio-sensing clothes, which connect seamlessly to iPhones and offer a variety of engaging biofeedback to help improve personal wellbeing. She is Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University.

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.

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 co-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.

VK Preston is an artist and cultural historian of performance traversing art and critical practices of enquiry (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 in Francophone, Atlantic-world contexts, Turtle Island (North America), and long histories of French colonization. Their work at intersections of historiography and artistic research reckons with archives, difficult histories, institutions, and the performative. VK is currently working on their first book manuscript and on documentary visual literature, improvisatory writing, collaborative composition, poetry, and illustration. Most recently, their work on health care crises during the pandemic appeared in The Iowa Review (Fall 2025)

VK is a Co-director, with Lilia Mestre, of LePARC, the Performing Arts Research Cluster at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology and visiting artist-scholar at Bennington College’s low-residency Dance MFA. VK was a Core Fellow of the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (Winter 2024). VK is presently a collaborator on the New Frontiers in Research Fund Project “The Sub-Measurable is Not Unreal” with fellow Concordia faculty scientists Re Mansbach (PI) and Claudine Gauthier (PI) and journalist Aphrodite Salas. They also work in collaboration with dance artist Caroline Gravel as dramaturg and as a writing and movement collaborator in Lilia Mestre’s Meeting Through Materialities, Movement and Words.

*Hexagram members

📅 November 4, 2026 

⏱️ 1:30-3 PM 

📍 Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705