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

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

Ann-Louise Davidson

Rilla Khaled

Rilla Khaled 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 is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, where she teaches interaction design, design theory, programming, and more. 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, working with Indigenous communities to use contemporary technologies to imagine new, inclusive futures, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, and establishing foundations for materials-based game design research. Rilla Khaled Website Concordia Explore Page

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

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

Eldad Tsabary

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.

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 

Haidee Wasson

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  

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

Heather Igloliorte

Dr. Heather Igloliorte (Inuk, Nunatsiavut) is the Co-Director of the Indigenous Futures Cluster (IIF) in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology. Through Milieux, Igloliorte works with collaborators and students to explore how Indigenous people are imagining the future of their families and communities. Igloliorte holds the Tier 1 University Research Chair in Circumpolar Indigenous Arts and is an associate professor in the Department of Art History. She also serves as the Special Advisor to the Provost on Advancing Indigenous Knowledges, and in this role contributes to the efforts of the university Indigenous Directions Leadership Group. Her teaching and research interests center on Inuit and other Native North American visual and material culture, circumpolar art studies, performance and media art, the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resurgence. Heather is the Principal Investigator of the 2.5M, 7-year SSHRC Partnership Grant, Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership: The Pilimmaksarniq/ Pijariuqsarniq Project (2018-2025), ​which aims to empower circumpolar Indigenous peoples to become leaders in the arts through training and mentorship. Heather has been a curator for fourteen years, ​and currently has three exhibitions touring nationally and internationally; she is also the lead guest curator of the inaugural exhibition of the new Inuit Art Centre, INUA, opening at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2020. Heather publishes frequently; she has co-edited special issues of journals PUBLIC 54: Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital (2016) and RACAR: Continuities Between Eras: Indigenous arts (2017), and her essay “Curating Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: Inuit Knowledge in the Qallunaat Art Museum,” ​was awarded the 2017 Distinguished Article of the Year from Art Journal.

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

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.

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.

Deanna Bowen

Deanna Bowen is Co-Director of the Post Image Cluster at Milieux and Assistant Professor of Intersectional Feminist and Decolonial 2D-4D Image Making in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University. She is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. Deanna Bowen Website  Concordia Explore Page 

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

Kelly Thompson