Karen Kaeja is an award-winning performer, choreographer, mentor, community builder and project instigator whose work interrogates relational feminine perspectives. “The mastermind behind Porch View Dances” Toronto Star, she develops performance platforms provoking collaborative relationships between dancers, everyday people and the body. Co-Artistic Director of Kaeja d’Dance with Allen Kaeja, her awards include the 2019 Dance Ontario Lifetime Achievement Award, the CDA “I Love Dance” Community Award and the Paul D. Fleck Fellowship for Innovation. She has been honoured with an American Choreography Award nomination and 7 Dora Mavor Moore nominations, including 4 for Crave (winning outstanding male). Karen is distinguished in The Canadian Who’s Who, was a finalist for the 2020 TAF Celebration of Cultural Life Award and the 2017 TAF Muriel Sherrin Award for International achievement, the CDA Innovation Award, NOW’s Best Local Choreographer and twice nominated for NOW’s Best Dance Company. Commissioned and presented by performance series around the world, she has created over 70 dance works, continues to mentor, dramaturg and perform for many of Canada’s brilliant emerging and established choreographers and was Stratford Festival’s first movement dramaturg for Wendy and Peter Pan. Karen was the first resident dance artist for both MUN/Dance NL and the Guelph Dance Festival.

Doris Rajan is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the Director of Social Development at the Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion and Society (IRIS) where her focus is on violence against women, access to justice, migrant, Indigenous issues, and disability rights. Her work involves designing community-based social development and applied research projects with international, national and provincial/territorial organizations. As an educator, Doris has taught community development courses at a variety of post secondary institutions. She had written many training resources and advised national and international NGO’s on how to conduct effective community-based research and development strategies. Doris is also an actress, playwright/screenwriter and filmmaker. She is very proud of her work with director Pierre Tetrault on the films This Beggar’s Description, The ‘R’ Word and the comedy Healing Rani. Favourite theatrical work includes: Gandhi High, Doris Does Damage, and most recently, her play A Tender Path.

Shahrzad Mojab, scholar, teacher, and activist, is internationally known for her work on the impact of war, displacement, and violence on women’s learning and education; gender, state, migration, and diaspora; Marxist feminism and anti-racism pedagogy. She is Director of Equity Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Mojab is Professor of Higher and Adult Education in the Department of Leadership at OISE/University of Toronto and the former Director of the Women and Gender Institute. She received the prestigious Royal Society of Canada Award in Gender Studies in 2010. A unique feature of her work is making knowledge accessible to the public through the use of arts such as story-telling, dance, drama, painting and film. Her most recent research projects are Youth in Transition: War, Migration, and ‘Regenerative Possibilities’; The Pedagogy and Policy of Refugee Youth Resettlement; and No Woman’s Land, which is a dance project to capture the experience of refugee women of sexual violence.