Aynur Kadir earned her Ph.D. in 2018 from Making Culture Lab, School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Aynur Kadir’s research focuses on practices and theories of design and the study of interactive multimedia in the humanities, ethnographic practice and museum curation. She works with local communities in northwest China, in the Pacific Northwest and in the Six Nation Territories to develop digital media that document, manage, safeguard, and represent Indigenous cultural heritage. She is exploring how different new media such as interactive documentaries, virtual museums, digital archive databases, interactive museum guides, video games and artificial intelligence systems can be designed using collaborative participatory methodologies in order to preserve and revitalize cultural heritage and heal collective trauma. She is currently the principal investigator for Robert Harding and Lois Claxton Humanities and Social Sciences Endowment awarded project “Alternative Narratives: Dialogue with the History of Waterloo County Murals” in collaboration with the Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum.

Shana MacDonald is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, situated between film, media and performance studies, examines intersectional feminist social and digital media, popular culture, cinema, performance, and public art. She is an internationally curated artist who explores the community-building potential of practice-based, site-specific art interventions in public space. She is founder of the Mobile Art Studio (MAS), a transitory creative lab space that brings art out of the gallery and into public participatory spaces. Her creative and scholarly work is committed to finding new platforms to publicly circulate women’s intersectional lived experiences and histories. She has published in leading journals within the fields of feminist and media studies including most recently Feminist Media Histories, Performance Research, Media Theory Journal, and Ada: Journal of New Media, Gender, and Technology (forthcoming). 

Milena Radzikowska is Full Professor in Information Design at the School of Communication Studies at Mount Royal University. She is a practicing design researcher, teacher, passionate about the potential of design to serve those who are marginalized, vulnerable, or under-represented. She’s designed interfaces to support humanities scholars in their work; to connect breast cancer survivors; to help protect wildlife in provincial parks; and to challenge marginalizing practices in the oil sands. Since 2005, Dr. Radzikowska has collaborated on over 25 interdisciplinary design research projects, four of those with budgets in the millions, extending over longer periods (anywhere from two to seven years). mradzikowska@mtroyal.ca; http://www.milenaradzikowska.com

Jennifer Roberts-Smith (director) is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her research and creative practice focus on performance and digital media, with particular emphasis on theatre, history, design and pedagogy. As principal investigator of a series of funded design research projects, JRS has been evolving, with her collaborators, a feminist approach to project management. Currently, JRS leads qlab’s Theatre for Relationality project, as well as the Virtual Reality Development Cluster of the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project. Her work has been supported by SSHRC, MITACS, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and recognized with an Ontario Early Researcher Award. Jennifer’s book, Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media, co-edited with Janelle Jenstad and Mark Kaethler, was released by Routledge in 2018. jenniferrobertssmith.com

Stan Ruecker is Petullo Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His current research interests are in the areas of experience design, humanities visualization, the future of reading, and information design. He holds a PhD, MDes, MA, BA Hons, and BSc. He has supervised graduate students and led seminars on experimental interface design, organizational innovation, strategic planning, research methods, and interdisciplinary research project management. His work focuses on developing prototypes to support the hermeneutic or interpretive process. His book Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage, co-authored by Milena Radzikowska and Stéfan Sinclair, was released in 2011 by Ashgate Press. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stan_Ruecker/publications; https://www.amazon.com/Stan-Ruecker/e/B004S4ECHQ; http://inke.ca/projects/members

Brianna Wiens is a PhD Candidate in Communication and Culture at York University. She holds an MA in Communication focusing on Rhetoric and Culture (2016) from the University of Colorado Boulder and a BA in Speech Communication and Women’s Studies (2014) from the University of Waterloo. Her research interests sit at the intersection of critical cultural studies, continental philosophy, intersectional feminist politics, affect, and new materialist theories. Her dissertation work takes up these bodies of research to explore and apply feminist practice as a form of techne to ask about the potential of feminist technologies. As first an activist and second a scholar, Brianna is committed to research that challenges relations of power and systems of domination in the pursuit of social justice.