Faculty

Patrik Andersson specializes in art history and curatorial studies with a strong focus on contemporary art and ideas. He has extensive experience curating exhibitions at institutions and under the independent moniker of Trapp Projects. He holds a PhD in Art History from the University of British Columbia with a dissertation on the post-war reception of Marcel Duchamp’s work.

Julie is an artist and educator based in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Coast Salish people. Their research explores more-than-human ethnographies and multispecies creativity, experimenting with land-based methods combined with video, sound and performance technologies. At ECU, they co-developed the New Media + Sound Arts major, the Ecological Practices in Art minor, and the course Animal Ethics + Creativity. Julie has a PhD from Simon Fraser University.

Randy Lee Cutler is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator. She has a PhD in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art and an MA in the History of Art from the University of Toronto. Her work has shown nationally and internationally including Gallery 881 in Vancouver, Spring Art Show on Salt Spring Island, Into Nature Biennale in the Netherlands, Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver and the Sydney Biennale NIRIN 2020.

Jamie Hilder’s practice stretches across writing, video, performance, installation, curation and sculpture, often addressing intersections of text and image. Jamie is currently focused on how economic conditions function aesthetically in an era of global finance capital. He seeks to foster collaborative relations with colleagues, students and materials where possible, and gratefully resides on the unceded, ancestral and traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples.

Harry Killas is a Canadian director, writer and producer who has worked in the United States, Canada and Europe. His dramatic films have been screened at major international festivals and his documentary films have been broadcast worldwide. His credits include three feature-length documentaries and a short film for the City of Vancouver. He programmed seven seasons of The Image Before Us: A History of Film in British Columbia for The Cinémathèque and is curator of the Vancouver Greek Film Festival.

Miriam Libicki is an Eisner-nominated and Inkpot-awarded cartoonist with a BFA in Visual Art from ECU and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her graphic nonfiction is published by Fantagraphics, the Journal of Jewish Identities, and Abrams Books. Her work received the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature, and she was the 2017 Writer in Residence at the Vancouver Public Library. Miriam exhibits and lectures internationally at galleries, comicons and academic symposia.

Maryam is interested in light and shadows, from their intangible concepts to their corporeal representations in real-world contexts. She received her PhD in Architecture from the University of Tehran. Her dissertation, which examined the qualitative presence of light in Iranian architecture, was published in Iran and received the Dr. Mozayeni Award . She conducted further research at Simon Fraser University between 2012 and 2014, published in Colour and Light in Ancient and Medieval Art.

Jonathan Middleton is an artist and curator working between Toronto and Vancouver. His work has been exhibited, screened, and performed at VIVO, Plaza Projects, Contemporary Art Gallery, Tracey Lawrence Gallery, Vancouver International Film Festival, InsideOut, and Chicago International Film Festival, No Soul For Sale Festival (at Tate Modern), and Slakthusateljéerna (Stockholm). Jonathan has worked extensively in curatorial and directorial positions since 1999 at organizations including Western Front, Fillip, Or Gallery, Art Metropole, C Magazine, and Vancouver Art Book Fair.

Before joining ECU, Dr. Fawn Daphne Plessner was Senior Lecturer and Course Director in Book Arts & Design at the University of the Arts, London. She holds a PhD in Art & Politics and a BA Philosophy from the University of London. She studied painting at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Germany. She has exhibited in the UK and Europe. Her recent focus has been public art interventions and audio-based artworks that experiment with journalistic methods like interviews, newspapers and podcasts.

Jeffrey Swartz is a critic and curator in contemporary art and design and a professor of the history and theory of art and design at ESDi Higher School of Design, EINA University School of Design and Art as well as at ECU. He has published peer-reviewed work and critical writing in journals, magazines and as book chapters. He is a publisher, editor and professional translator and curator of exhibitions in Spain, France and Canada.

Dr. Amanda White’s current creative practice, interdisciplinary collaborations and research projects include studio-based work, curatorial projects, books and publications with a focus on plants, food justice and environmentally engaged arts. Amanda was previously a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University, she received her PhD from Queen’s University, and holds an MFA and BFA.

Living on the unceded lands of the Tsleil Waututh, Musqueam and Squamish peoples, Rita Wong is guided by questions of respect for water, collective health and just relationship. She has written several books of poetry exploring the intersections of life, language, water and land, and co-edited the anthology Downstream: Reimagining Water (2017) with Dorothy Christian. Rita has received the Latner Griffin Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writer Award. Her book forage was selected for Canada Reads Poetry in 2011. Her work calls in readers to recognize their responsibilities to the land, the planet, and their communities. She is committed to collective action to address the climate crisis and systemic inequities through an economy of care and solidarity.