Pegah Tabassinejad is an Interdisciplinary artist, educator and wanderer living and working as a stranger -an uninvited guest- on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) people.
Her interest is in creating intermedial performances, interactive performances, cyberformances, digital theatre, multi-channel video installations, and city projects. While focusing on the notion of identity, she has been exploring presence and absence, the real and the virtual, here and there, and the absence inside the two worlds that she inhabits in. While interested in body and body movements, she also questions the borders and boundaries of private and public space. Pegah is interested in the aesthetics of CCTV cameras, cell phone cameras, laptops, monitors, and the Internet.
She holds MFA in Interdisciplinary Art at Simon Fraser University and BA in Stage Directing from the Art University in Tehran. She also studied Visual Art at Azad University of Tehran and Contemporary Dance in Paris at Conservatoire de la Danse. She has taught various studio and seminar courses at the University of Art in Tehran, international Institutes, as well as leading workshops in Paris, Tehran and Vancouver.
Peter Dickinson is Professor and Director of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. He has published extensively on dance, theatre, film, and live art, often through a place-based and urban studies lens. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of fifteen books and special journal issues, including: World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics (2010), Mega-Event Cities: Art/Audiences/Aftermaths (2016), Q2Q: Queer Canadian Theatre and Performance (2018), My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community (2020), Performing Practice-Based Research (2023), and Conversations and Essays on Dance in British Columbia (2025). Also a playwright, Peter’s produced works include The Objecthood of Chairs (2010), Long Division (2016/17), and At the Speed of Light (2022).
Daisy Thompson is a contemporary dance artist, educator, and writer, interested in resistant choreographies that transform the relations between bodies towards affirmative kinesthetic connections. Her practice and choreographic processes work to cultivate a sensitive and alert fleshiness in the body and imagination, to explore and discover a newness in our moving. She has performed for and collaborated with many artists both locally and internationally, published several articles, holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on Dance and Politics, and regularly teaches in a variety of spaces in Vancouver.
Taha Saraei is an interdisciplinary artist with a diverse background in stage direction, photography, installation, performance making, and music. His works utilize the communicative fundamental principles of these disciplines to create individualized experiences. He primarily explores human behavior and instincts by constructing interactive environments for audiences to encounter. Each of his creations is based on its own algorithm/system, shaping the random wholeness of the piece. This simply makes his works a unique and unintentional practice for viewers to experiment with and discover, just as they are for him.
