Max and Iris Stern International Symposium 18

Vincent Bonin is an independent researcher, author, and curator. In 2012, with curator Catherine J. Morris, he co-organized Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. In 2014, he organized the exhibition D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant / Actors, Networks, Theories at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery and Dazibao, in Montréal, focusing on the reception of French Theory. In 2014, he curated Passages to abstraction: Geneviève Cadieux at the Musée d’art de Joliette. In 2015, he organized the exhibition Response, a dialogue with philosopher Catherine Malabou, at the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, in Saint-Jérôme. His essays and books have been published by Canadian Art (Toronto), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Fillip (Vancouver), Centre André Chastel (Paris), Fonderie Darling (Montréal), the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Montréal), the MIT Press (Cambridge), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Sternberg Press (Berlin), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Source: Vincent Bonin

Geneviève Cadieux is an artist and associate professor in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. She has also taught at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, the École d’art de Grenoble, Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain), and the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Architecture and the Arts. Her work occupies the intersection between photographic and filmic modes of representation and explores themes such as the human body, language, and the landscape as a meeting place of body and mind. She has presented numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Sagacho Exhibit Space (Tokyo), Centre d’art contemporain Genève, Bonner Kunstverein (Germany), Tate Gallery (London), Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Miami Art Museum, Kunstforeningen Copenhagen (Denmark), and Americas Society (New York). In 1990, she became the first woman to represent Canada solo at the Venice Biennale. Invited by the National Gallery of Canada in 2022, she created Barcelone, a monumental work installed on the building’s south façade. Her work has received numerous awards and has been the subject of extensive exhibition catalogues and critical writing.

Source: Geneviève Cadieux

Abigail E. Celis is an associate professor in art history and museum studies at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on the afterlives of colonialism and decolonial imaginaries as witnessed through contemporary Francophone visual culture, artistic practice, and museums, with a focus on the work of diasporic artists. She received grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds de recherche du Québec for a collaborative digital humanities project titled Afrorescences, and her book, Unlearning the Gaze, will be published by Penn State University Press this fall. In addition to her scholarly publications, Dr. Celis collaborates with artists on curatorial and research-creation projects. She has received several awards and grants for her research and writing.

Source: Abigail E. Celis

Katrie Chagnon has been the director and editor-in-chief of Spirale since 2021. Holding a PhD in art history from Université de Montréal, in 2022 she published Le devenir-femme des historiens de l’art: Michael Fried et Georges Didi-Huberman (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal). Chagnon has also been active in the cultural milieu for the past two decades as an author, art critic, and exhibition curator. From 2015 to 2018, she was the Max Stern curator of research at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University.

Source: Katrie Chagnon

Louise Déry holds a PhD in art history and is the director of Galerie de l’UQAM. Previously, she served as a curator at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the director of the Musée de Rimouski. Déry has also collaborated with many international institutions, including Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Tourcoing), Radio Arte Mobile (Rome), the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris), and Casino Luxembourg. She is responsible for about a hundred exhibitions and publications dedicated to David Altmejd, Nancy Spero, Dominique Blain, Sarkis, Françoise Sullivan, Michael Snow, Jean-Luc Nancy, Enrique Ramírez, Emmanuelle Léonard, and Saodat Ismailova, among others. Her fields of interest involve concepts such as the exhibition worksite, the absent image, the “exposing” work, and the relationship between text and image. She has received several honours, including the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence, the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, and the Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Source: Louise Déry

A Wendat from Wendake, Tsie8ei 8enho8en Guy Sioui Durand is a member of the Yänariskwa’ (Wolf) clan. A sociologist (PhD), engaged thinker, art critic, independent curator, and educator, he focuses on Indigenous contemporary art in Quebec and around the world. He has published many essays and books, including L’esprit des objets (2013), Riopelle, Indianité (2003), and L’art comme alternative: Réseaux et pratiques d’art parallèle au Québec, 1976–1996 (1997), which is a key reference in the field. He has also been an independent curator of over twenty events and exhibitions of Indigenous art since 1994, including YÄ’ATA Art Total autochtone (Sherbrooke, 2022–23). As an educator, from 1978 to 2026, Sioui Durand was a sessional lecturer at Université Laval, UQAC, UQAT, and UQAM, on the FUN MOOC platform (France Université Numérique), and at Kiuna College (a post-secondary institution for First Nations), teaching sociology, contemporary art, and Indigenous art.

Source: Guy Sioui Durand

Olivier Fabry is a PhD candidate in art history at the Université de Montréal. His research focuses on the development of visual arts in Quebec in the 1980s, considered from critical and theoretical perspectives. He is particularly interested in the relationships between artworks, critical discourse, and the tensions in the field of art history. He is also a member of the board of directors of OPTICA and involved in different committees in the contemporary art milieu. He previously served as an associate curator for the art collection of La Caisse.

Source: Olivier Fabry

Ji-Yoon Han has been active as a curator in Montréal for about a decade, and was appointed as a curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in the summer of 2026. Building on her education in literature and art history, her often interdisciplinary projects explore the guiding force of the visual arts within shifting social, cultural, and psychological contexts. Han served as a guest curator for the 2023 MOMENTA Biennale de l’image entitled Masquerades, Drawn to Metamorphosis and has led research and curatorial projects in Quebec, France, Austria, Tunisia, and South Korea. Together with Vincent Bonin and Michèle Thériault, she formed the collective Passages à vif to develop a repertory of oral history on the visual arts in Montréal (1975–2000), which was launched with the support of the Conseil des arts de Montréal and is being produced by the PERICULUM Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Source: Ji-Yoon Han

Marie J. Jean is the executive and artistic director of VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine, and teaches art history and museum studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. For the past twenty years, she has dedicated herself to research focusing on the theory and practices of contemporary art and exhibitions. Since the mid-1990s, she has organized over a hundred exhibitions and in 2013, she received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence. In the course of these achievements, she has collaborated with numerous artists and institutions in Canada and abroad, curating the first solo shows in Montréal of James Benning, Maria Eichhorn, Omer Fast, David Maljković, Ján Mančuška, Jonathan Monk, N.E. Thing Co., and VALIE EXPORT, presenting landmark works by John Baldessari, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, and Jan Švankmajer, as well as highlighting the works of established Quebec artists including Sorel Cohen, Angela Grauerholz, Diane Landry, Serge Tousignant, and Irene F. Whittome. She has also developed exhibitions for the Guido Molinari Foundation, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Germany), and Villa Arson, Centre national d’art contemporain (Nice).

Source: Marie J. Jean

Johanne Lamoureux holds the Canada Research Chair in Civic Museology and is principal investigator of the SSHRC Partnership project New Uses of Collections in Art Museums. She has curated several exhibitions, including Irene F. Whittome: Bio-Fictions in 2000 and Doublures in 2003 at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, as well as Emily Carr: New Perspectives in 2006 at the National Gallery of Canada. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Histoires sociales de l’art : une anthologie critique, co-edited with Neil McWilliam and Constance Moréteau and published by Les presses du réel in 2016, and Réinventer la collection : l’art et le musée au temps de l’évènementiel, co-edited with Mélanie Boucher and Marie Fraser and published by the Presses de l’Université du Québec in 2023. From 2014 to 2017, she was director of the Department of Studies and Research at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris.

Source: Johanne Lamoureux

Gabrielle Larocque trained in visual arts and anthropology in Montréal, Mexico, and Spain and is an artist and research professional. Under the supervision of Anne Bénichou, she wrote and is preparing to defend a doctoral dissertation on collaborative dynamics in heritage-making in the context of the live arts. Among her recent projects, her work was presented by the artist-run centre Atelier de l’Île as part of RACONTER-RENCONTRER. 50 ans d’art imprimé, and her writing has been published in Cahiers de recherche sociologique (2021), by Les presses du réel (2024), and in Muséologies (2026). Her research-creation work received the Prix citoyen de la culture Andrée-Daigle (2025), while her master’s final essay received the Prix Roland-Arpin (2015). She serves on various committees and is actively involved in her professional community. Larocque is head of the Art and Communities sector at MAC LAU – Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, the region where she lives and works.

Source: Gabrielle Larocque

Lani Maestro came to Canada from the Philippines in the early 1980s for an extended art residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta. Her encounters with artists such as John Cage, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Martha Rosler, and Robert Irwin had a profound impact on her, and she decided to stay to pursue graduate studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) in Halifax. Maestro’s work has been exhibited widely, including at the National Gallery of Canada, Museo de arte contemporáneo de Vigo, Art Gallery of Ontario, Centre d’art contemporain de Basse-Normandie, Shanghai Art Museum, Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Casa de América (Madrid), Singapore Art Museum, Cultural Center of the Philippines (Manila), Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore; and Centro Wifredo Lam and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana). In 2017, Maestro co-represented the Philippines at the 57th Venice Biennale. Maestro was the co-founder, editor, and designer of Harbour Magazine of Art and Everyday Life, an art journal of works and writing by artists and theorists. For ten years, she was a lecturer in the MFA program at Concordia University in Montréal. She subsequently taught in the art departments of NSCAD and the University of Lethbridge (Alberta). In 2018, she received an honorary doctorate from NSCAD. The National Gallery Singapore will present a comprehensive exhibition of Maestro’s work spanning five decades in 2028.

Source: Lani Maestro

Diana Nemiroff holds an MA in Canadian art history from Concordia University in Montréal. Her career as a curator began in 1980 with the exhibition Yesterday and After at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where she worked as a special assistant to Normand Thériault. Subsequently, she was the regional editor in Quebec of Vanguard Magazine for two years, before accepting the post of assistant curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada. There, she earned a national reputation as the curator of several ambitious exhibitions of national and international scope, including Songs of Experience (1986, with Jessica Bradley), Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (1992, with Robert Houle and Charlotte Townsend-Gault), and Crossings (1998). She is the author of Women at the Helm: How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada (2021) and is currently working on a monograph on Jana Sterbak for the Art Canada Institute.

Source: Diana Nemiroff

A teacher for thirty-seven years at Collège d’Alma as well as an exhibition curator, author, cultural worker, and collector, Alayn Ouellet holds an MA in arts administration from Columbia University (NY, USA), a certificate in art history from UQAC, an MA in popular arts and traditions from Université Laval, and a BA in arts education from UQAM. He also attended college at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal. In 1979, Ouellet established Langage Plus, one of the first artist-run centres in Quebec and presided over its board of directors for many years. He is also a founding member of RCAAQ (Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec) and was the director of the International House Gallery in New York (1984–86). His involvement in the local, national, and international art scenes have led him to give many talks and participate in various juries. When he taught at Collège d’Alma, he set up the gallery and developed the programming for Espacepointca, now called the Galerie du Collège d’Alma.

Source: Alayn Ouellet

Chantal Pontbriand is a curator, art critic, museologist, and art consultant in strategic planning. Since 1970, she has focused on the internationalization of contemporary art from Montréal. Expanding our shared horizons, she was the founder and director of PARACHUTE (1975–2008), created and directed the public programs at the MMFA (1976–78), then founded and directed FIND (1982–2004), contributing to adding Montréal to transnational networks of art, performance, new dance, and new music. She was the curator of Pluralities 1980 at the NGC (1980) and of the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (Geneviève Cadieux, 1990). Based in Europe from 2004 to 2015, she maintained this momentum, developing projects and networks across all continents. She became the head of research and development at Tate Modern, then an associate professor at Paris/Sorbonne. The author of over 250 essays published in various countries, she is currently developing SPHERE(S) Art Contemporain International. She has received a Governor’s General Award and an honorary doctorate from Concordia University and been appointed an Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.

Source: Chantal Pontbriand

Kitty Scott is a leading Canadian curator, writer, and senior arts administrator whose work spans major art institutions and international exhibitions. She is director of Fogo Island Arts/Shorefast and director of The Shen Foundation. As chief curator of the 15th Shanghai Biennale, she recently presented Does the flower hear the bee? at the Power Station of Art. She is known for shaping contemporary art discourse through ambitious programming and sustained collaborations with artists. Scott has held key curatorial posts, including deputy director and chief curator at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). She served as the Carol and Morton Rapp Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto). Previously, she was chief curator at Serpentine Gallery (London) and director of visual arts at The Banff Centre, where she oversaw residencies, exhibitions, and the Banff International Curatorial Institute. Scott was a core agent for dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012. With Sally Tallant, she co-curated the 2018 Liverpool Biennial, Beautiful world, where are you? In 2017, she curated Geoffrey Farmer’s exhibition for the Canada Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale. In all these roles, she has championed a wide range of contemporary artists while publishing extensively in catalogues, books, and journals.

Source: Kitty Scott

Sherry Simon is a distinguished university research professor emerita in the Department of French Studies at Concordia University. She has published widely in the areas of literary, intercultural, and translation studies, in particular exploring the cultural history of linguistically divided cities and the multilingual cities of the former Habsburg empire. Her publications include Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (2006, published in French as Traverser Montréal), Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012, translated as Villes en traduction), and Translation Sites: A Field Guide (2019, published in French as À l’écoute des lieux). Her books have been translated into several languages, particularly French, Polish, and Turkish. Simon is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Académie des lettres du Québec.

Source: Sherry Simon

Johanne Sloan is an art historian, curator, and professor emerita in the Department of Art History at Concordia University (Montréal). Her research has often focused on the art, photography, and visual culture of Montréal. She co-edited Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir (2009) and Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City (2021) and has published numerous articles and catalogue essays on Montréal artists, including Jana Sterbak, Melvin Charney, Bill Vazan, Anne Ramsden, Kathleen Vaughan, and Cynthia Girard. She is currently writing a book that situates the international postcard craze of the 1900–14 period in Montréal.

Source: Johanne Sloan

An archivist and student in the Humanities PhD Program at Concordia University, Kessie Theliar-Charles is interested in issues of self-determination and forms of dissemination of individual and collective Caribbean memories. Her practice takes shape through research-creation, merging oral history and contemporary and archival research to preserve and make accessible the diverse narratives of Black diasporas. Her current research is dedicated to documenting Haitian visual artists who left Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship from 1957 to 1986 and re-established themselves in Montréal, New York, and Paris. She has published her work in AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Apertura, Global Media Journal, and Esse Arts + Opinions. More broadly, she focuses on the recovery, preservation, and dissemination of Afro-descendant visual artists who have been and continue to be active in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal.

Source: Kessie Theliar-Charles

Michèle Thériault is a curator, author, and editor. She was director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University from 2003 to 2023 and Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario in the 1990s. Over the past thirty years, she has curated numerous exhibitions of Quebec, Canadian, and international contemporary art and has written and edited essays and books. She has also taught the history of art of the 1970s and 1980s, museology, and exhibition-making. Since 2021, she has been director of PERICULUM, Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Source: Michèle Thériault

Normand Thériault was an art critic at La Presse from 1968 to 1971. He subsequently founded the Groupe de recherches en administration de l’art at UQAM, where he produced the journal Médiart, Québec 71 où en sommes-nous ?, Québec Underground (3 volumes), and Les Moins de 35. In 1973, he founded the Institut d’art contemporain, which was behind such projects as Québec 75 / Arts, Cinéma, Vidéo and 03.23.03. From 1978 to 1981, he was curator of Canadian and international contemporary art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, where he presented several exhibitions, including Dix mètres cube, George Trakas: Montréal, Hier & après, and Le Musée d’hiver. At the Centre international d’art contemporain, he developed what would become Aurora Borealis in 1985. He has also written for numerous journals and served on several committees and advisory commissions.

Source: Normand Thériault