Janet Werner is a Canadian artist, born in Winnipeg, who works and lives in Montreal creating unique female portraits. Using found fashion photographs that she cuts, mixes and reassembles as source material, she then uses paint to recreate the composite characters. Her work addresses themes of gender, beauty, transformation, loss and psychological vulnerability. Werner has had countless exhibitions across Canada, including a solo exhibition at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal. In the past, she has taught painting and drawing at University of Saskatchewan, and currently teaches at Concordia University, Montreal.

A graduate from the BFA program of the Ontario College of Art and Design, Canadian artist Winnie Truong, based in Toronto, uses colored pencils and chalk pastels to create large-scale drawings that challenge ideals of beauty through an overarching focus on the female form and its relationship to nature. Her pencil markings most often depict masses of hair that sprout from unexpected places combining portraiture, fauna and flora in order to subvert the idealized female form. Truong’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United-States, Asia and Europe. She is also represented in private and public collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas, and the Bank of Denmark among others.

Lorna Simpson received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. By the time she finished school, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography. Lorna Simpson is known for her large-scale photograph-and-text works that confront and challenge narrow, conventional views of gender, identity, culture, history and memory, as well as her large multi-panel photographs and films. Throughout her body of work, Simpson questions memory and representation. Her works have been exhibited at and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art and many more.

Rojin Shafiei is an Iranian artist living and working in Montreal. In her videos, art is a vehicle for the translation of cultural messages and is used to present diverse feminine subjectivities. She presents these themes both through a literal documentary style and as symbols. She is particularly inspired by the observation of routines, both individual and urban. Rojin received her bachelor of fine arts in Intermedia from Concordia University in 2017 and has screened her work internationally in various festivals.

Montreal-born artist Susan G. Scott is best known for her figurative work that often combines painting with other media, usually text, to create a dialogue between the work and the viewer. Scott is praised for her use of light, space and color in her paintings that draw as much from abstraction as they do classical figuration. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, within Canada as well as internationally, and can be found in public collections around the globe. Susan G. Scott has been teaching in the Department of Studio Arts at Concordia University, Montreal, since 1994.

Painter James Rielly, was born in Wales, and now lives and works in France. His portraits often depict children in a way that accentuates the dysfunction in adults. His work also covers themes of social pressure and tradition. Throughout his career, his work has been shown in multiple solo and group exhibitions across the globe including cities in Europe, Asia, Australia, Central America and the United-States. In 2006, Rielly became professor of painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and still holds this position.

Working collaboratively for over 40 years, Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard are French artists and life partners who live and work in Paris. Their art combines painting (done by Gilles)  and photography (done by Pierre) to create portraits that mix reality and fantasy with a nod to history and pop-culture. Their work has been in exhibitions in Europe and the United-States. Over the course of their career, the pair has taken portraits of celebrities, including Marilyn Manson, Naomi Campbell and Madonna, to name but a few.

Kent Monkman is an interdisciplinary Cree visual artist who uses painting, photography, video and performance art to explore themes of colonization, sexuality, loss and resilience  in the context of indigenous experience. Monkman’s own alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle consistently appears in his art as a gender-fluid being to combat the colonial gaze. Monkman’s work has been featured in exhibitions in Canada, the United-States and Europe, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The National Gallery of Canada, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, among many more.

Andrew Moisey is a photographer and professor of art history at Cornell University. His most recent work, a book called The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual, takes at the secretive, ultra-masculine worlds of fraternities in the US and the stereotypes of men that take part in them. Some of his research investigates how photography became an art that deals with philosophical problems. He has received multiple awards for his photography, as well as a solo exhibition at ASUC Art Gallery in Berkley, California.

Miss Me, or The Artful Vandal, is a Montreal artist who uses wheatpasting, video and photography to confront social issues regarding race, gender and class. Her large-scale street work forces us to confront these issues, even if they are uncomfortable. Miss Me is passionate about community involvement and often participates in conferences, panel discussions and interviews as a vocal advocate for women and their role in society. She has been recognized by the media as one of the faces of new feminist activism.

Canadian portrait painter Kris Knight, was born in Windsor, Ontario. In his work, Knight focuses on character-based portraits of men in which he blurs the line between dream and reality, public and private self. Ambiguity is an integral element of his work. He has participated in artist residencies, solo and group exhibitions across North America and Europe, and his work can be found in collections in Canada, the United-States and Europe.

Alberta artist Tristen Jenni Sanderson creates paintings to memorialize Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Her painting “Not Visible” features the face of an Indigenous woman superimposed on a feather. The face is covered by a red hand print. “I drew her looking up, strong and proud. The hand print is red because they say a spirit can only see that colour. So, when you put that on… it’s like calling the missing Indigenous women back home." - Tristen Jenni Sanderson. Currently, Tristen Jenni works as a tattoo artist, while also creating custom portraits in a variety of mediums.

Kim Dorland is a Canadian artist, born and raised in Alberta, who now lives and works in Vancouver, British-Columbia. His artistic process consists of creating thick layers using oil, acrylic, and spray paint to generate painterly works that are reflective of his own life experiences, inspired by nature, domestic interiors and portraits of his family.  Dorland earned his BFA at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and his MFA from York University. His work can be found in numerous public and corporate collections including the Art Gallery of Alberta, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Montreal Museum of  Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain of Montreal, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Sander Collection in Berlin, and many private collections.