Co-Applicant

Alanna Thain

I am an Associate Professor of world cinemas and cultural studies in the department of English at McGill University. I direct of the Moving Image Research Lab (MIRL), dedicated to the study of the body in moving image media and expanded performance. I am former director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. My 2017 book, Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, explores how cinematic experiences of unusual temporalities can create ethico-aesthetic opening onto what I term “anotherness,” including our own, intimate strangeness to ourselves. I am currently completing a book, Anarchival Outbursts, on dance as a survival strategy in post-digital media, and a new project, Sexo-Somatic Technologies, on desire, distributed embodiment, and feminist technologies. I direct the FRQSC funded research team CORERISC, the Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied Risk, with its current focus on “Unruly Affects: Horror in Media and Performance.”

Research Assistant

Albertine Thunier

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, currently working with Aleksandra Kaminska and Thierry Bardini. I  hold a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from UQÀM, a Master’s degree in Political Analysis and a second Master’s degree in Digital Humanities both from Université Paris 8. My dissertation focuses on memes, on and off the Internet, from the perspective of the playful attitudes that constitute them. My research-creation approach proposes to highlight the logics of which memes, present and past, respond through the creation of a transmediatic memetic game. My main inspirations are tarot cards, Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role play games and contemporary internet memes.

Co-Applicant

Aleksandra Kaminska

I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, working in media studies, media arts, and research-creation. I work primarily at the intersection of media aesthetics, material and visual cultures, and history and philosophy of science and technology. In this project, I’m interested in questions such as how we design for and record sleep, what it means to understand sleep disorders as invisible disabilities, and what we can learn from popular and cultural treatments of sleep/disorders.

Student Researcher

Anabelle Lacroix

I am a French Australian curator and writer. Working with exhibitions, public programming, and radio, I am particularly interested in the expanded fields of curating and writing, involving performance, sound, speech and publishing.
I am a current practice-based PhD candidate at UNSW Art, Design and Architecture (Sydney), focusing on developing curatorial methods for sleepless bodies. I am one of the editors of the upcoming Flaneur Magazine Issue 09 which explores the Boulevard Périphérique (Paris ring road), and a current lecturer at The New Scool Paris campus.

Together with Nicolas Montgermont, I developed Radio Insomnia for the Sociability of Sleep exhibition that will be presented in July 2023.

Core Collaborator

Antonio Zadra

I hold a PhD in clinical psychology from McGill University, am Professor of Psychology at the Université de Montréal and a researcher at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur’s Centre for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. My research interests include lucid dreaming, nightmares, recurrent dreams, somnambulism and dream-related parasomnias. In addition to numerous publications on sleep, dreams, and dream-related disorders, my books include When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep (2021), co-authored with Robert Stickgold, and The Dreamkeepers (2021), a suspense novel blending sleep science with dream mythology. My work has been featured in television documentaries (e.g., PBS Nova, CBC’s The Nature of Things) and written up in various magazines, including the New Yorker, Slate, Washington Post, The Guardian, Bloomberg, le Figaro, Psychology Today, and New Scientist.

Project Coordinator

Charlène Auré

I am currently a Masters student in Communication Sciences at the Université de Montréal. I hold a BA in Sociology & Cultural Studies from the University of Sussex. My research centers around identity politics, popular culture studies, and representation in media. I like to write poetry and fiction, and to explore the processes of turning words and ideas into art and multimedia content.

Research Assistant

Claudia Picard-Deland

I am a Neuroscience PhD student at the Université de Montréal, currently working with Dr Tore Nielsen at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Sleep Medicine at the Montreal Sacred-Heart Hospital. My main research explores the relationships between sleep, dreams, and memory consolidation, using methods of virtual reality, polysomnography, and sound stimulation during sleep to understand how memory reactivations influence dreams and contribute to learning.

Artist-in-Residence, Core Collaborator

Dayna McLeod

I am a middle-ageing queer performance-based artist. My work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions. I am a Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture research-creation postdoctoral fellow. I earned a PhD from the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University. My written work has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, Ciel Variable, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, and NOMOREPOTLUCKS. I have received support from Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Faculty of Education, McGill University, PHI Centre, Centaur Theatre, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Concordia University, and Media@McGill. My video and performance work has been presented at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo Brazil, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris, the Tang Teaching Museum in Saratoga Springs, the PHI Centre and OFFTA in Montreal, and the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto.

Research Assistant

Devon Bate

I am a music producer and sound designer currently writing a Master’s thesis in Media Studies (Concordia University). I have produced Juno and Polaris Prize winning albums across genres, including Jeremy Dutcher’s Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa (2018), and am a four-time Montreal English Theatre Awards nominee for Outstanding Composition and Sound Design. Beginning in a 2015 artist residency with the MUU Artists’ Association in Helsinki, I have been creating work that interrogates how culturally and technologically informed listening practices shape physical space, community, and identity. I am currently researching background noise and ambient audiovisual media on popular streaming platforms.

Core Collaborator

Elizaveta Solomonova

I am a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in the department of Psychiatry. My work is focused on interdisciplinary research of consciousness and experience across wake-sleep states. I am currently working on projects tackling the links between social cognition, sleep and meditation at Ian Gold‘s Neurophilosophy Lab (Culture, Mind and Brain research group).

Research Assistant

Emma Gibb

I am entering my final year of undergraduate study at McGill, majoring in Cultural Studies in the department of English. My previous work in the arts sector includes an internship with Montreal non-profit Artch – art contemporain emergent, where I assisted in programming a two-week long outdoor exhibition featuring over twenty artists in the downtown core. This experience inspired my project Sang Doux, a salon supervised by Alanna Thain, in which I encouraged student artists to come together under the theme of corporeal art for a night of community thinking and conversation. My academic interests include the abject, corporeal arts, transhumanism and cyborgism, body horror and American independent film. In my free time I enjoy experimenting with different creative mediums, making films, going on roadtrips and dancing.

Artist-in-Residence

Henry Tan

I am based in Bangkok and I am a co-founder of Tentacles Art Space and a member of Freaklab, Thailand and metaPhorest, Japan. My work explores the concept of life and simulation through the investigation of technologies such as synthetic biology, mixed reality, brain stimulation and artificial intelligence. Among my previous works is the Young Eel project, in which I combined lab-grown meat, brainwave sound, and light to stimulate sleepers and transfer consciousness and memories into cloned bodies, raising questions about aging society and “environmental” concerns for human and eel populations.

Artist-in-Residence

Ilona Gaynor

I live and work in New York City and start a position in the Department of Art at the University of Buffalo in Fall 2022. I work across photography, narrative texts, schemata, objects and film. My work is drawn from the methods and histories of a wide range of research and disciplines: from design, architecture, literature, theatre and cinema, to the histories of labour, forensic science, risk management and insurance. Using the language and methods from non-visual enterprises such as law and finance, my work seeks to retool the operable systems of these subsequent languages, institutions and power structures as a mode of artistic research and production.

Research Assistant

Iris Pintiuta

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of English at McGill University, currently working with Alanna Thain and Ara Osterweil. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in English and Film Studies, and a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Theory and Culture, both from King’s College London. My current research focuses on scales and spaces of intimacy in queer and trans* experimental cinema. I am particularly interested in pre-Stonewall forms of queerness (both filmic and otherwise). 

Project Coordinator

Josianne Barrette-Moran

I have been a teacher in vocational programs for several years. As a night owl, I was lucky to be able to teach in the afternoon and grade papers at night.

More recently, I have been a bioethics facilitator with medical students. I have commented on the lack of sleep education and training in their programs and have been a guest speaker for Somnambulations (Panel 3: Critiquing Norms in Sleep and Sleep Research).

I will present the outline of my doctoral project on dreams and ethics at the upcoming International Association for the Study of Dreams colloquium.

Core Collaborator

Lakshmi Padmanabhan

I am Assistant Professor in Radio/TV/Film at Northwestern University. I am co-editor of “Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform,” a special issue of Women & Performance. My teaching and research focus on world cinema and experimental film, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. My current book project addresses the ways in which feminist documentary artists from South Asia experiment with cinematic form in order to imagine a radical postcolonial ethics. My academic writing has been published in journals including Camera Obscura, New Review of Film & Television, and Art History, and I have contributed reviews and criticism to venues including Seen, Public Books, and Post45. I have programmed film and video at venues including BRIC Arts, AS220, and Magic Lantern Cinema.

Artist-in-Residence

Manon De Pauw

Le travail de Manon De Pauw a été diffusé entre autres au Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, au Théâtre La Chapelle, au Centro Nacional de las artes à Mexico, au Festival des films sur l’art et à la Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. En 2009, la Galerie de l’UQAM et la commissaire Louise Déry présentaient l’exposition Manon De Pauw – Intrigues, qui a circulé notamment au Musée Régional de Rimouski (2011) et au Centre Culturel Canadien à Paris (2012). En 2010, elle réalisait l’exposition Actes de présence à titre de commissaire invitée au Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal dans le cadre de sa série Point de vue sur la collection. En 2011, elle était la finaliste pour le Québec du Prix Sobey pour les arts et en 2012, lauréate en arts visuels du prix Victor-Martyn-Lynch-Staunton du Conseil des arts du Canada.

En plus de ses projets individuels, elle compte à son actif plusieurs collaborations, notamment avec la chorégraphe Danièle Desnoyers et les musiciens et compositeurs André Pappathomas, Joane Hétu et Philippe B. En 2014, elle présentait à l’Usine C la performance interdisciplinaire La matière ordinaire dans le cadre du Festival Temps d’Images. Au printemps 2017, elle présentait Cocons somatiques à l’Agora de la danse en collaboration avec le danseur et chorégraphe Pierre-Marc Ouellette. La même année, elle participait comme conceptrice et performeuse visuelle à Un si gentil garçon, création du Théâtre Complice à l’Usine C. Manon De Pauw vit et travaille à Montréal. Elle est représentée par la Galerie Division. Elle est professeure à l’École des arts visuels et médiatiques de l’UQÀM.

Exhibition Curator & Coordinator

Marianne Cloutier

I hold a PhD in art history and I am specialized in the question of identity in bioart. My main interests revolve around the use of living materials and biotechnologies in art, speculative biology, representations of the body and motherhood, as well as the epistemology and methodologies of research-creation. I was co-curator of the exhibition Art+ Bioethics (2016), and have been working since 2019 as coordinator and curator of the McConnell-University of Montreal Chair on the Re-appropriation of motherhood. I am also a lecturer in the Department of Art History at UQAM and in the D.E.S.S. in Arts, Creation and Technologies at the University of Montreal, and an external consultant at the CSSDM.

Co-Applicant

Marta Kaminska

I am a pulmonologist and sleep specialist, and a Scientist at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre. My research involves clinical and epidemiological studies in the field of sleep-disordered breathing. My main interests are effects of obstructive sleep apnea on cognitive function and neurodegeneration; diagnosis and treatment of sleep-disordered breathing in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; and respiratory care in neuromuscular disorders.

Core Collaborator

Natalie Doonan

I am an artist, writer and educator. My research focuses on digital creation, embodiment, food, and place. My work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals across Canada and internationally, and my writing has appeared in professional and peer-reviewed art and food culture publications. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at l’Université de Montréal.

Core Collaborator

Navid Navab

I am a multi-award-winning multidisciplinary composer, media alchemist, interaction designer, interdisciplinary artist-researcher, and table-top cosmologist. Interested in the poetics of schizo-phonia, gesture, materiality, and embodiment, my work investigates the transmutation of matter and the enrichment of its inherent computational properties. My works, which take on the form of gestural-sound compositions, responsive architecture, interactive scenographies, and kinetic sculptures, have been presented internationally at venues such as Ars Electronica Austria, device_art triennial Zagreb, NEMO Biennale Paris, Canadian Center for Architecture, Japan Society NY, Shanghai eArts, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

Artist-in-Residence

Nik Forrest

I am an interdisciplinary artist based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. My practice includes sound installation, performance and composition, as well as video, drawing and collage. My recent projects explore the ecological potentials of sound and listening as techniques to heighten attunement to entangled human and non-human materials, bodies and forces, and interconnected affective, social and environmental relations. I am currently working on a PhD at Concordia University in the interdisciplinary humanities program.

Research Assistant

Sandra Huber

I am a writer, scholar, educator, and multidisciplinary artist. I hold a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities and currently teach at Concordia University. In my research, I focus on occulted or hidden knowledges, like magic, witchcraft, and sleep. I wrote Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014), based on a collaboration with biologists, neuroscientists, and sleep technicians in Lausanne, Switzerland. I currently live, work, and sleep in Tio’tia’ke / Montreal.

Core Collaborator

Tore Nielsen

I am a Professor of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and Director of the Dream & Nightmare Laboratory (DNL) within the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. My current research concerns dreaming at sleep onset, the role of dreaming in learning and memory, pathophysiology and dream function in nightmare sufferers, targeted memory reactivation (TMR) effects on sleep and dreaming, and nightmares after early life adversity. I use a variety of sleep research methods including polysomnography, selective REM sleep deprivation, spectral analysis of the EEG and ECG, virtual reality exposure, and internet-based dream collection. The DNL is dedicated to the scientific study of dreaming and its disorders, to the training of graduate students, researchers and health professionals in the techniques and applications of dream science, to the development and deployment of proven methods for treating dream-related health problems, and to public education about the important role dreams and nightmares play in psychological life.

Student Researcher

Yiou Wang

I’m a multimedia visual artist, 3D generalist, and co-founder of Mixanthropy. My work explores nonhuman agency, hybridity, and mind-body relationships including my current focus of the continuous landscape of consciousness across wake and sleep states. Drawing inspiration from mythology, neuroscience, and biology, I work across 3D animation, game, motion capture, BCI, installation and painting, across mind (intrinsic) and morph & motion (extrinsic). Digital nomads don’t know where they’ll sleep tomorrow. 

Artist-in-Residence

Yoojin Lee

I work across and in-between performance, sound, text, installation and video to embody ways of becoming and knowing through care, resistance, and multiple temporalities. My work engages with conditions of (in)activity and (un)productivity; particularly by thinking/feeling through sleep, sloth, and slowness. How can sleep and a sleeping body become a site of quiet resistance? How can slow, symbiotic tenderness disrupt the timescape of linear and constant output? I sleep in London.