Despina Z. Artenie

Despina Z. Artenie, MSc is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Her work focuses on interventions to improve well-being. She previously completed a Master’s degree at McGill University studying the effects of evening light exposure on fatigue and work performance in healthcare.

Amélie Barbier

Amélie Barbier is a PhD student at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. After a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking, she directed Dreams of a blind man. She joined the EHESS in anthropology, and studied the relationships between dreams and perceptions of the environment in a Koryak village in the Russian Far East. Her current research focuses on the “science of dreams” in a French sleep clinic, and also takes the form of an ethnographic film.

Nour Chahine

Nour Chahine is a Lebanese neuroscience PhD student at McGill University. She obtained her undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Nour aims to explore the intriguing mechanisms governing sleep and dreaming. Her artistic practice merges science with art, incorporating experimental algorithms, ambient music, lighting, and projections into immersive experiences. Inspired by her admiration for jellyfish, Nour draws from their ethereal beauty and intriguing sleep-like behavior, despite their simple nervous systems. She believes that art offers a unique perspective to explore the fascinating workings of the sleeping brain.

Mariève Cyr

Mariève Cyr, MD, MSc is a resident doctor in Psychiatry at McGill University. She completed her Master’s degree at McGill on the impacts of evening light on shift workers. Her current work focuses on bridging the gap between laboratory studies and clinical applications to optimise patient care.

Nived Dharmaraj

Nived Dharmaraj is a graduating master’s student in McGill University’s Department of English. His MA thesis, “Estranging History in Contemporary Indian Science Fiction,” focused on the intersection of speculative and historical fiction, placing such literature in conversation with recent political interventions made by the BJP government.

Diletta De Cristofaro

Dr Diletta De Cristofaro is an Assistant Professor at Northumbria University in the UK and the PI on two Wellcome-Trust funded projects exploring sleep in the twenty-first century, the research project Writing the Sleep Crisis (which has also been supported by the European Commission through a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship), and the public engagement project “Reimagining Sleep”. Diletta is a scholar of contemporary anglophone literature and culture, and her research focuses on narratives of crises, intervening in the environmental and medical humanities. She is the author of The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Alexandru Dincovici

Alexandru Dincovici is an anthropologist. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest, doing research on wearables, algorithms and the body. His main research interests are within the range of the anthropology of the body, medical anthropology, sports, embodied cognition and material culture. He is also an associated Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Bucharest and the National School of Political and Administrative Studies in Bucharest.

Emma Dollery

Emma Dollery is pursuing her MA in the Department of English at McGill University. Her research interests span a wide range of topics, including world cinema, global anglophone literature, theories of affect, and radical formalism.

Anabelle Lacroix

Anabelle Lacroix is a curator and PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. Working with exhibitions, public programming, and radio, she is interested in the expanded fields of curating and writing, involving performance, sound, speech and publishing. Her research focuses on developing curatorial methods for sleepless bodies, for rhythming otherwise, as a form of institutional critique. She previously worked at Liquid Architecture, and at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, as a curator for public programs. Anabelle graduated from the International Program in Curating Art at Stockholm University, and has a background in research in Art History and Anthropology (University College London, University Paris 10 – Ouest Nanterre).

Nelly Matorina

Nelly Matorina is a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Toronto, as well as an artist working in video and installation. Both her scientific and artistic research explores the intersections between sleep, dreaming, and memory. Recent shows include Modern Fuel Artist-Run Center and SAW Video.

Leonardo Morales Vega

Leonardo Morales Vega is a Mexican-Canadian artist in Computation Arts at Concordia University, working towards a unified multidisciplinary practice of digital speculative fabulation and sensory research creation. His focus is on multi-cultural representation and sci-art materialization, in the realms of Game and Experience Design. Vega’s trajectory encompasses independent explorations into traditional and digital production techniques – in the context of his hybrid existence across the continent – and a formal education in 3D Animation and Computer-Generated Imagery from Dawson College in Montreal. Lately he has turned his attention to Interaction and Game Design as storytelling tools in his ongoing creative efforts at modern mythologizing.”

Paula Muhr

Paula Muhr is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History of Art and Architecture, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a visual artist. She studied visual arts, art history, theory of literature, and physics before receiving her PhD in Visual Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin (From Photography to fMRI: Epistemic Functions of Images in Medical Research on Hysteria, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2022; open-acess). Her research is at the intersection of visual studies, image theory, media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and history and philosophy of science. She focuses on examining knowledge-producing functions of new imaging and visualisation technologies in natural sciences, ranging from neuroscience over medicine to physics.

Anna Nolda Nagele

Anna Nolda Nagele is a design researcher, educator and editor. She is a PhD candidate in Media and Arts Technology at Queen Mary University of London, senior lecturer in Design History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and founding editor of The Posthumanist magazine. In her current research she analyses the effects and affects of wearable sleep-trackers on user subjectivities, culture and the environment through a critical posthumanist lens.

Matthew-Robin Nye

Matthew-Robin Nye is a visual artist and cultural producer, and has exhibited, lectured and held residencies in Canada and abroad. He is a Joseph-Armand Bombardier PhD candidate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University, in Montreal. In both his art and scholarship, Matthew investigates how aesthetics, artfulness and queerness encounter one another. What is that predisposition to a certain aesthetic sensibility — always at risk of being reterritorialized — that marks the alter-social formation of queerness? In explorations ranging from the relationship between process philosophy, Gertrude Stein and the children’s book Goodnight Moon, to anti-oedipal gay liberationist movements of the 1970s, to the role of gesture in the production of subjectivity in performance and sex, he is moved to think about the worlds-to-come that each engenders.

Ariel Pickett

Ariel Pickett is a second-year Master’s student in the Department of English at McGill University, where she will also begin her PhD in the fall. Her research interests include unsettling cinema, radical formalism, psychedelics, and autofiction.

Aaron Scott Pugh

Aaron Scott Pugh is a third year PhD researcher at the University of Kent, UK.  His thesis explores the ways in which sleep and sleep-related conditions such as fatigue, lethargy, bed rest and restfulness influence the literary aesthetics of Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Sophie Smith

Sophie Smith recently graduated with a degree in Cognitive Science from McGill University. She is currently working in Ian Gold’s Neurophilosophy lab where her research focuses on a variety of social dimensions pertaining to sleep and dreams. More specifically, she is interested in dreaming as a cultural phenomenon and as an aspect of social cognition.

Anastasia Statsenko

Anastasia Statsenko is a Ukrainian-Canadian designer currently based in Tiohtià:ke, so-called Montreal. statsenko’s creative practice is grounded in sustainable production and creative repurposing, working across and inbetween digital media, textile, print, and multimedia installation. statsenko’s work can be read, observed, manipulated, used, worn, repaired, bought, traded, and usually (but not always) composted. It grows in transitional states, between old and new, past and present, ephemeral and material, growth and degrowth, stable and unstable, impossible and possible. The opportunity to speculate and reimagine better modes of being, relating and producing is what motivates this researcher on most (but not all) mornings.

Emre Sünter

Having graduated from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Galatasaray, Emre Sünter pursued a master’s degree in the same field at the University of Paris Nanterre. Subsequently, he earned a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Montreal in 2021, having successfully defended his thesis titled “For An Echology of Microbe-Artworks: Thinking in between Art and Science”. His scholarly contributions have been featured in esteemed journals such as NanoEthics and Theory, Culture & Society. He has dedicated his efforts to translating significant works by prominent philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Gabriel Tarde, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi into Turkish. Furthermore, his translation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s influential work “Mille Plateaux” is currently awaiting publication. His research interests span a wide range of topics, reflecting his engagement with the digitalization of society, new media, aesthetic theory, ethics, ecology, and the philosophy of science and technology.

Eloïse Vo 

After graduating from the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg, Eloïse Vo continues her post-master research at EUR ArTeC (Paris 8/Nanterre). She is now a PhD candidate at EPFL/ALICE in Lausanne and Hes-So HEAD in Geneva, where she is assistant of the Master Space & communication. Developing a practice-based research in the expanded field of graphic design, media art and performance, Eloïse investigates human synthetization in digital layers. She’s exploring the multiple processes of extraction of human cognition and energy at the scale of the interfaces, by focusing on the concept of wetware and lethargy. Her works have recently been exhibited at Le Signe in Chaumont and at the Parallel Festival in Marseille. As a graphic designer, she collaborates with publishing houses and cultural structures, for editorial or visual identity projects.