Karen Kaeja is an Ashkenazi, Tkaronto born, award-winning choreographer, project instigator, performer and mentor. The heart of her research, creation, pedagogy and writing concentrates on the agency and challenges of Touch. She develops platforms for collaborative relationships between dancers and everyday people, and holds mentorship, dramaturgy and artistic advisory relationships, a priority. Karen is in The Canadian Who’s Who with awards including the George Luscombe Mentorship Award, Dance Ontario’s Lifetime Achievement Award, CDA “I Love Dance” Community Award and Paul D. Fleck Fellowship. A Finalist for the TAF Celebration of Cultural Life Award, TAF Muriel Sherrin Award, NOW’s Best Local Choreographer and twice for Best Dance Company, Karen has 7 Dora Mavor Moore nominations. Screened in over 400 festivals worldwide, her dance films and feature roles have appeared in TV documentaries including Gemini nominated Old Country and Bravo! Freedom documentary series. Uniting 8 professional dancers with 30 everyday folk on stage, her upcoming TouchX as PART OF TORQUE International Contemporary Dance Festival at Harbourfront, aims to reveal the fragile implications of touch when humanity experiences its presence and absence. Co-Artistic Director of Kaeja d’Dance with Allen Kaeja, she is commissioned and presented by performance series around the world, and collaborates with many of Canada’s brilliant choreographers.

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.