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Montreal, Quebec
Canada

Our Team

Phase Two of Hybrid Bodies Two is comprised not only of returning collaborators from the first phase of the project, but new additions as well.


INGRID BACHMANN

Artist and Principle Investigator

Concordia University

INGRID BACHMANN has explored generative media, installation, and what she calls “pathetic technologies” that interface with studio and textile practices for over twenty years. Her work explores kinetics, sound, video, interactivity, code, micro-controllers, live hermit crabs, and other devices such as live Internet avatars. Using both redundant and state-of-the-art digital technologies, her projects create visually rich, immersive and interactive environments—spaces of encounter activated by the viewer—where various interactions and interventions can take shape. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in exhibitions and festivals in Canada, Europe, the United States, Asia, and Latin America, including The Patient, University of New South Wales (2016); Flesh of the World, University of Toronto Art Centre (2015); the 11th Havana Biennial (2012), Manifestation International d’art 6, Quebec City (2012); Lab 30, Augsburg (2010); and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2010). She is an Associate Professor in Studio Arts at Concordia University and is the Director of the Institute of Everyday Life, an art/ideas lab.


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ANDREW CARNIE

Artist 

Winchester School of Art

ANDREW CARNIE is an artist and academic with cross-disciplinary training in fields as diverse as chemistry, painting, zoology and psychology. His practice frequently considers neurology and the brain, specifically how the sense of self is constructed. Carnie’s work often evolves from meaningful interactions with scientists. He explores innovative ways to portray the data, processes and cultures that his scientific and medical collaborations reveal. Carnie’s work is typically time-based, involving slide projection, dissolve systems and/or video projection onto complex screen configurations. In a darkened space layered images appear and disappear on suspended screens, the developing display absorbing the viewer into an expanded sense of space and time through the slowly unfolding narratives that evolve before and around them. His work has been featured in exhibitions internationally, including the Science Museum, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Wellcome Trust, London; Morevska Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic; Exit Art, New York City; the Pera Museum, Istanbul; and the Daejeon Museum of Art, Daejeon, South Korea. Carnie is represented by GV Art London.


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ALEXA WRIGHT

Artist 

University of Westminster

ALEXA WRIGHT is an artist based in London, U.K. She works with photography, video, sound and objects. Alexa has worked at the intersection of art and science since the mid-1990s, when she became known for her award-winning photographs of people with phantom limbs titled After Image. Many of her projects involve collaborations with medical scientists and/or people with medical conditions or disabilities. Her work asks philosophical questions about human identity and otherness, and also aims to reduce stigma around difference.

Recent exhibitions include: Phantom Limb, Victoria Museum and Gallery, Liverpool (2016); Piecing it Together, St Pancras Hospital, (participatory project), (2016); Hybrid Bodies, KunstKraftWerk, Leipzig, Germany (2016); The Flesh of the World, Justina M Barnicke Gallery/University of Toronto Art Centre (2015); Slippage, The Unstable Nature of Difference, Chester University Gallery (2015); NordArt2015, Büdelsdorf, Germany; Crafting Anatomies, Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham (2015); Hybrid Bodies, Centre PHI, Montreal (2014).
Alexa is Reader in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Westminster.


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HANNAH REDLER

Curator

HANNAH REDLER is an independent art curator and science communicator working with international artists, researchers and organisations. She specialises in developing projects exploring intersections between art, science, technology and people for galleries, museums, and digital and public space. She is currently Associate Curator in Residence at the Open Data Institute (ODI) and is working on projects with Science Gallery, London, the London Digital Catapult, The Natural History Museum and FACT Liverpool. Previous projects have been with Tate Modern, The Institute of Physics and the Wellcome Collection. She combines these roles with teaching commissioning and curating contemporary art, histories of art and technology, interdisciplinary programming, arts fundraising and informal learning in museums. From 2005-2014 Hannah was Head of Arts Programme at the Science Museum, London. Hannah trained as a fine artist achieving her BA (Hons) from Norwich School of Art in 1991 before completing the Royal College of Art MA in Curating Contemporary Art in 1996.

Photo Credit: Jennie Hills


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SUSAN ABBEY

Director, Medical Psychiatry

Toronto University Health Network

SUSAN ABBEY, Director, Medical Psychiatry University Health Network, Toronto, is a psychiatrist with particular interests in the psychiatric care of patients with complex medical and surgical illnesses as well as the psychiatric aspects of high technology medical and surgical interventions including solid organ transplantation. She is the Director of the Program in Medical Psychiatry at the University Health Network and a Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.


DANA DAL BO

Artist


Concordia University

DANA DAL BO is a multi-disciplinary artist that works in and between photo, video, performance and the net.  She is unsettling how the construction of identity and self are influenced by popular culture, social media, and medicine. Her interests span surveillance practices, reality television, re-enactments, D.N.A., and the super-natural.  She looks back at the history of science, medicine and psychology and disrupts the empire of the empirical as the only measure for determining the healthy from the aberrant. Her work follows voyeurism, exhibitionism, narcissism, and hysteria into contemporary phenomena like selfies and drones.  

Dal Bo has an extensive exhibition history including a recent collaboration with Joe Davis at Ars Electronica : Radical Atoms and the Alchemists of Our Time in Linz, Austria (2016), and Onufri XXI at the National Gallery of Tirana, Albania (2015).  She has been an exhibiting artist and lecturer at the International Symposium for Electronic Art- ISEA in Kowloon, Hong Kong (2016) and Vancouver, Canada (2015). She was also commissioned by the International Motion Festival of Cyprus to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland. 


ENZA DE LUCA

Advanced Practice Nurse

Toronto University Health Network

ENZA DE LUCA is an Advanced Practice Nurse.  She has 20 years of experience in the field of pediatric transplantation, both in the clinical and research realms.  In 2007 she started working as a Clinical Research Associate at the University Health Network's Cardiac Transplant Program, focusing primarily on the PITH (Identity, Embodiment and Transplanted Hearts: A Phenomenologically Informed Exploration) and GoLA (Gifting Life: Exploring Donor Families’ Embodied Responses to Anonymous Organ Donation in Canada) research projects.


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TAMMER EL-SHEIKH

PHD.  Associate Professor, Art History, Studio Arts 

Concordia University

TAMMER EL-SHEIKH received his PhD in the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He received his BA (Philosophy, Art History) from the University of Toronto and his MA (Art History) from Concordia University. He is dissertation is on the reception of Palestinian-American critic Edward Said within the discipline of art history since the 1970s. The dissertation evaluates Said's strategies of post-colonial critique through case studies of selected contemporary Egyptian art and curatorial practices. Dr. El-Sheikh's research for the dissertation was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and conducted at Columbia University's Rare Books and Manuscripts Library where "Edward Said's Collected Papers" are housed, and in Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt. Dr. El-Sheikh's writing on contemporary art and cultural politics has been published in the Canadian periodicals Parachute, CMagazine, Canadian Art and ETC, and internationally in exhibition catalogues produced by the Kunsthalle Wien.


EMILY JAN

Artist 

Concordia University

EMILY JAN is a Montréal-based artist and writer. Originally hailing from Northern California, Jan has traveled to 33 countries and lived in four, including South Africa and Mexico. Her biophilic sculptures and installations combine everyday found objects with meticulously worked raw materials to evoke the faraway and the fantastical. As a wanderer, naturalist, and collector of objects and experiences, she is guided in her work by the spirit of exploration, kinship, and curiousity.

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Harcourt House (Edmonton, AB), Union Gallery (Kingston, ON), OPTICA Gallery (Montreal, QC), Artcite (Windsor, ON), the M.A.I. (Montreal, QC), and Latitude53 (Edmonton, AB). Curated group exhibitions include Grandeur Nature at Art Mûr (Montreal, QC), the 6th World Textile Art Biennale (Oaxaca, Mexico), and the Fiberarts International Triennale 2016 (Pittsburgh, PN, USA), where Jan won the People’s Choice Award. Jan has written and illustrated two books; still life (2014) and A Denali Book of Hours (2017). She has been working as the coordinator for the Hybrid Bodies Project since 2011.


PATRICIA McKEEVER

Senior Scientist

Bloorview Research Institute

PATRICIA McKEEVER instigator of the PITH and Hybrid Bodies projects, is a Sociologist with a background in nursing. Currently, she is Professor Emeritus, L.S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, and Adjunct Scientist, Bloorview Research Institute, Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. She has spearheaded many interdisciplinary and interprofessional initiatives; pertaining to the body, music, art, architecture, design and technology. She has supervised graduate students and fellows from many disciplines and professions and has published widely.


JENNIFER POOLE

MSW, PHD.

Associate Professor & Academic Director, School of Social Work
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada 

JENNIFER POOLE MSW, PhD, Associate Professor and Associate Director, School of Social Work, Ryerson University, Toronto, is a social scientist with a PhD from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. She is an Associate Professor and directs the Graduate Program at Ryerson’s School of Social Work, where she has been recognized as an outstanding educator. She is an Adjunct Faculty at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, an Academic Fellow at the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research and Editor of the Journal of Critical Anti-Oppressive Social Inquiry (CAOS). With a background in community work and mental/health, Jennifer’s interdisciplinary research program is centred on madness, health and heart break, taking up theoretical, practice-based and policy concerns. Current projects focus on the experiences of Mad people in the helping professions and post-secondary education, sanism, racism and decolonization, as well as critical approaches to grief, death and transplantation. Author of Behind the Rhetoric: Mental Health Recovery in Ontario (2011), she is particularly interested in Foucauldian notions of discourse/critical discourse analysis, and visual methods as well as critical social work practice/pedagogy, critical disability, community-based research and anti-oppressive practice(s).


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ELLIOTT RAJNOVIC

Researcher

Concordia University

Originally hailing from the great city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania {the city with the most bridges in the world} ELLIOTT RAJNOVIC is an artist, writer and and scholar living and working in Montreal, Quebec. Working interdisciplinarily across visual media, design, art theory, writing, performance, public speaking, private speaking and teaching- he is endeavoring to think about it all, all at once. Intrigued by the notions of authority and knowledge transfer in both the pedagogical and medical systems, Elliott is thinking through patterns of normativity inspired by and perpetuated by the institutions of both the Academy and the Hospital. His current research and practice interests look to the role of creative and artistic output as methods and strategies of coping with, and resistance to, the reign of the medicinalized body and erasure of the soul. He is interested in work which confronts impressions of illness as transgression and/or retribution with a specific lens to discourses on the 'un-well'. Elliott has been working as a researcher and designer for the Hybrid Bodies Project since 2015.


HEATHER ROSS

MD, MHSc, FRCP(C)

Director of Cardiac Transplant Toronto, General Hospital
Toronto, Canada

HEATHER ROSS Chief of Cardiology, Munk Pediatric Centre UHN, Toronto is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. She is the Ted Rogers and Family Chair in Heart Function and the Head of the Ted Rogers Centre of Excellence in Heart Function. Dr. Ross is the site lead for the Ted Rogers Centre for Heart Research at the Peter Munk Cardiac Centre. She is the Director of the Cardiac Transplant Program at Toronto General Hospital. Dr. Ross received her medical degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada, her cardiology training at Dalhousie University, Halifax, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Cardiac Transplantation at Stanford University, California. She earned her Masters Degree in Bioethics from the University of Toronto. Dr. Ross was Associate Editor for the American Journal of Transplantation (2007-2010) and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation. She served five years on the Canadian Cardiovascular Society Council, and three years on the Canadian Cardiovascular Society Executive and on the Board of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society Academy. She was the Secretary Treasurer of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society (Academy 2010-2012). Dr. Ross is currently on the executive of the Heart Failure Society of America and President of the Canadian Cardiovascular Society. She has published over two hundred articles and won numerous teaching awards.


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MARGRIT SHILDRICK

Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Linköping University

Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto. 

MARGRIT SHILDRICK is Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Linköping University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor of Critial Disability Studies at York University, Toronto. Publications include Leaky Bodies and Boundaries:Feminism, (Bio)ethics and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1997), Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Sage, 2002) and Dangerous Discourses of Disability, Sexuality and Subjectivity (Palgrave, 2009), as well as several edited collections, and numerous articles. Shildrick defines herself as a body theorist, combining post- conventional philosophy, cultural studies, critical theory and psychoanalysis to investigate the question of corporeality.

Her major research centres on a longstanding project looking at questions of identity and intersubjectivity as expe- rienced by organ transplant recipients and those using various forms of prostheses, as well as exploring the effects of intersectional differences on bioethics and health. Other ongoing research projects revolve around disability and sexuality, and on the concepts of immunity and microchimerism as they operate in the medical humanities, specifically in Sweden on the interface of disability and structural and symbolic violence in a neoliberal context, particularly with regard to the expression of sexuality and the question of what sexual citizenship might mean.



former team members

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CATHERINE RICHARDS

Catherine Richards is a visual artist working in old and new media art. Her work explores the volatile sense of ourselves as we are shifting our boundaries - a process in which new technologies play a starring role. 

She has exhibited within and without North America at major venues including: the sole Canadian selected for the Sydney Biennale, 2004, considered by the Canada Council for the Arts as in the top three international art venues; more recently, Transitio_MX 05, Mexico, 2013; ZERO1 Garage, USA, 2013; AV Festival, UK, 2012.  Her work has been discussed in publications by major theorists in the field including Frances Dyson (2009) and Katherine Hayles (2006), and has been included in key surveys such as the recent Art & Science Now, Thames & Hudson (2010), edited by Stephen Wilson and Art and Electronic Media, Phaidon (2009), edited by Edward Shanken. Richards is well known for collaborating with scientists and won the Artist in Residence for Research Fellowship (AIRes), at the National Research Council of Canada, 2002-2005. Her work has been supported by such foundations as the Daniel Langlois Center for Art, Science and Technology, Montreal, and received awards such as the highest media prize in Canada from Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts.