​Janet Werner is a Canadian artist, born in Winnipeg, who works and lives in Montreal creating unique female portraits. Werner uses found fashion photographs that she cuts, mixes, and reassembles as source material for her paintings. 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 Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

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.

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.

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.

Shantel Miller is a Jamaican-Canadian visual artist (born in Toronto, ON) who lives and works in Boston, MA. She received an MFA in Painting at Boston University and a BFA in Drawing and Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Miller’s figurative paintings represent lived and imagined experiences that often situate the body in moments of vulnerability and introspection. As part of her creative process, she uses body language symbolically to suggest relationships of tension and intimacy. Working in this way, Miller negotiates notions of a public and private self, and explores ideas relevant to spirituality and existentialism in ordinary depictions of Black life (source).

Ken Lum, a Vancouver-based artist of Asian descent, best known for his photographic work, creates artworks for public spaces. His work focuses on the construction of our identity in society. Guided by an interest in ethnography, Ken Lum creates works that are politically charged and that frequently address the experience of culture clash. Seeking to engage the viewer in dialogue, Lum's installations often immerse his audience in a foreign locale, miming the experience of an immigrant or of an earlier time (source).

Suzy Lake (born in 1947) is an American-Canadian artist and activist. She contributed to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and began her art journey in 1968 when she moved to Montreal from the United States. Suzy was one of the first women artists in Canada to use performance art, photography and film to talk about things like who we are in society, what it means to be a girl or boy, and how our bodies are seen.

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.

Micah Goldstein is an American & Canadian artist living and working in Montreal. She is a wearer of many hats, including cartoonist, designer, illustrator, and animator. Her work centers around storytelling and themes of identity, often auto-biographical. As a self-proclaimed butch, Micah often toys with the idea of gender expectations... and ways to subvert them.

Rosalie Favell (b. 1958) is a Métis (Cree/English) photo-based artist from Winnipeg. She often draws from popular culture, family photo albums, and art history to explore what it means to be an aboriginal woman in today’s society. She uses photography and collage techniques to engage with the complexities of her own identity. Favell has exhibited her work internationally, in Canada, the US, Edinburgh, Scotland, Paris, France, Taipei, Taiwan and Melbourne, Australia. Self-representation through photography is important for Favell as an Indigenous woman, in part because of the painful history associated with the medium. Historically, colonizers have weaponized photography against Indigenous peoples. In Canadian residential schools, staff took photos of Indigenous children to provide proof of order and discipline to government officials, with the goal of forcibly erasing all evidence of these children’s cultural backgrounds. Favell subverts this power imbalance traditionally associated with photography, by turning the camera on herself and using it for her own self-representation.

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.

Kezna Dalz is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. She is known for her bright, colourful, and empowering images of Black women. She aims to uplift the Black community and fight against racial discrimination with both her paintings and digital drawings. Other themes that she engages with in her art include self-care, vulnerability, feminism, and body positivity.

Geneviève Cadieux is a Canadian artist known for her large-scale photographic and media works in urban settings. She lives and works in Montreal. Cadieux's work confronts identity, gender, and the body. She presents the body as a landscape, focusing on small details such as mouths, bruises, and scars in extreme close-ups. Cadieux is also interested in the way that art integrates into the urban environment. Many of her works are installed in public spaces (source).

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.

Shary Boyle is a contemporary Canadian visual artist who works across media and genres, including sculpture, drawing, painting and performance, and is known for her representational and narrative symbolism that is personal and at times disturbing. She lives and works in Toronto. She studied art and music theatre, then went on to post-secondary studies at the Ontario College of Art, graduating in 1994. Her work explores themes of gender, identity, sexuality, power and class, evoking emotional and psychic resonance through craftsmanship. She is particularly known for her explorations of the figure through porcelain sculpture.

Beige Blum is a freelance artist with a passion for illustration, comics, zines and character design. She creates works both digitally and traditionally, with a love for print media. She currently attends OCAD University for Illustration and is based in Toronto, Canada. Beige is also the founder of Dirty Laundry Collective, a collection of Toronto artists/designers, all of whom are women of colour and/or part of the LGBTQ+ community, that often work collaboratively on personal projects such as zines and anthologies. In her spare time, Beige can be found gaming or lusting after high-waisted pants! (source)