Momus Emerging Critics Residency 2020

Rahel Aima is a writer based in Dubai. She was an associate editor of Momus and remains a contributor and her writing has appeared in or at 4 Columns, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, ArtReview, The Atlantic, Bidoun, Bookforum, e-flux architecture, frieze, Garage, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Mousse, New Republic, Real Life, Rest of World, Tank, Vogue Arabia, and World Policy Journal, among many others. Aima regularly contribute exhibition texts, catalogue essays, and book chapters.

Osei Bonsu is a British-Ghanaian curator, writer, and art historian based in London. He currently serves as the Jorge M. Pérez Senior Curator of International Art, Africa and Diaspora, at Tate Modern.

Daisy Desrosiers is an interdisciplinary art historian and the current director and chief curator of The Gund at Kenyon College.

Tammer El-Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Art History at York University in Toronto. He has written feature articles and reviews for Parachute, C Magazine, ETC Magazine, Canadian Art, and BlackFlash, and essays for a number of exhibition catalogues both in Canada and abroad. His academic writing has appeared in the journals ARTMargins and Arab Studies Journal, and his first edited volume, titled “Hybrid Bodies: An Anthology of Writings on Art, Identity, and Intercorporeality,” was released in the spring of 2020.

Sky Goodden is the founding publisher of Momus, an online platform for art writing and criticism; and co-host of Momus: The Podcast. Goodden has published in numerous catalogues, art books, and publications including Momus, Frieze, Art in America, C Magazine, and Art21, among others. She is based in Montreal.

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, editor, and educator. She is internationally recognized for her essays and short books, marked by a hybrid, genre-defiant prose style. Formally, this work attempts to both theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and outline the future of creative production in a technocratic age.

Mark Mann is a writer and editor who specializes in longform narrative journalism. He has written feature stories for Toronto Life, The Walrus, Report on Business, Reader’s Digest, The Dance Current, Torontoist, Broadview and Maisonneuve, as well as essays about art and culture for Momus, The Toronto Star, and others. His writing about science and tech has appeared extensively on Motherboard. He has been shortlisted twice for the National Magazine Award. Mann is Associate Editor in Chief at Beside.

Tausif Noor is a critic and art writer currently working on his PhD in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the former Spiegel-Wilks Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and a graduate of Dartmouth College, where he studied art history; and Goldsmiths, University of London, where he received his MA in Art and Politics. From 2014-15, he was a Fulbright Scholar in India, and has held internships at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the not-for-profit agency Culture+Conflict, based in the UK. His writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues for the India Habitat Center and Karma Gallery in New York and in venues such as Artforum, frieze, and ArtAsiaPacific, among others.

James Oscar is a writer, art critic, curator of art and performance, based in Montreal.

Aliya Pabani is an artist and audio producer. She was host/producer of Canadaland’s arts and culture podcast, The Imposter, and her audio work has appeared on In the Dark Radio, NTS Radio, and BBC’s Short Cuts. She co-created POC in Audio, an online directory of 700+ people of colour in audio from around the world. Her predominantly installation- and performance-based art has been shown at Toronto venues including Images Festival, SummerWorks Performance Festival, Art Metropole, and The Theatre Centre.

Andy Patton is a painter who lives in Toronto with his wife, the artist Janice Gurney. He represented Canada in the Fifth Biennale of Sydney. In 2014, his text paintings were included in “The Transformation of Canadian Landscape Art” exhibition in Xi’an, which later traveled to Beijing. His recent book, “Little Testament,” was published in 2017 by Blue Medium Press. With the poets, Roo Borson and Kim Maltman, Patton was part of the poetry collaboration, Pain Not Bread; together they wrote Introduction to the Introduction to
“Wang Wei” which was published by Brick Books in 2000. Patton is represented by Birch Contemporary.

Saelan Twerdy is a writer, editor, and cultural worker living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He is currently the Managing Editor of RACAR, the official journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), and is pursuing an MLIS degree at McGill University.

Lauren Wetmore is a Canadian writer, editor, and curator based in Brussels. She is Director of Programs for Momus, co-host/producer of Momus: The Podcast, and is a member of the Board of Directors of rekto:verso magazine. She is co-editor of The Employee, with Joshua Schwebel (Art Metropole, 2025) and has contributed to publications from Lenz Press, Mousse Publishing, and Sternberg Press. As a critic she has been published by frieze, MadaMasr, Spike Arts Quarterly, and C Magazine, among others. Wetmore has held curatorial positions at MUDAM (Luxembourg), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), Frieze Projects (London), Mophradat (Beirut/Brussels/Cairo), the Barbican Art Gallery (London), The Banff Centre, and she has curated independant projects for the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels) and Fundació AAVC Hangar (Barcelona). Wetmore has received grants and awards from Creative Europe, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Goethe-Institut, and the Flanders Arts Institute.

Marilyn Adlington is an emerging art critic and curator based in Toronto currently completing my MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University. As an emerging independent critic and curator, she believes the intersecting worlds of art criticism have a responsibility to support and sustain the communities upholding it. Her current research explores collage as a practice and a politic that offers a regenerative critical space for historical narratives, present realities, and desired futures to intersect in innovative and unexpected ways.

Madeline Bogoch is a writer and MA student at Concordia University whose work is focused primarily on experimental moving image practices. Her writing has been published in C Magazine, Galleries West, Peripheral Review and others. She is a member of the programming committee for the Winnipeg Underground Film Festival (WUFF), and a Project Coordinator at Video Pool Media Arts Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Christie Carriere is a visual artist and student at OCAD University (Drawing and Painting). She is also a Co-Creative Director at Tea Base, a grassroots community arts space and collective located in Chinatown Centre. Her work is meant to be an exploration of her own mixed Chinese Canadian identity, the many nuances of community and culture, and what it means to be in relation to this complex ecosystem. 

Ryan Diaz is a queer Filipino designer, writer, dancer, activist, and Celine Dion fanatic from Seattle, Washington. He studied creative writing while earning his BFA in visual communications design from the University of Washington. With his background in queer artist collectives, publishing, survivor-focused anti-violence training, and art direction in the fashion industry, his work as an MFA candidate at RISD explores space-making as opportunity for emotional transformation through a personal cosmology of the profane, the sacred, and the wild party in between. He hopes to continue examining performance through vulgarity, schmaltz, humor, despair, and joy.

Dallas Fellini is a writer, curator, and artist living as a guest in Tkaronto. Their practice is invested in interdisciplinarity and the dissolution of boundaries between different art forms and arts communities. Dallas works as a programming coordinator at the Riverdale Hub and is the cofounder of Silverfish, a new arts publication devoted to interdisciplinary collaboration, skill-sharing, and cultivating ongoing dialogues between emerging Toronto artists and writers.

Amarie Gipson is a Houston born writer, art critic, and cultural worker based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA in Liberal Studies & Sociology from St. Edward’s University in 2018. Gipson is the former Editorial Director of MUD Magazine, the cultural compass of the South. Her writing has appeared in ARTNews, ARTS.BLACK, Conflict of Interest, and THE SEEN among several other journals and magazines. She has worked as an arts administrator in several American institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Renaissance Society, The Contemporary Austin, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Gipson currently works as the Curatorial Assistant, Permanent Collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Her research and writing interests range from Black feminist theory and experimental cinema to the rich history and culture of the American South. She is currently working on a project on visual artist Tomashi Jackson for Artforum.

Gracie Hadland is a writer living in Los Angeles. She has written for the LA Review of Books, Spike Art Quarterly, and others.

JAX is a transgender non-binary artist and writer, currently based in Toronto, Canada. Their work focuses on disrupting and dismantling the binaried norms that define the non-binary experience. Recently, they published, “Navigating Transgender Representation in Contemporary Lens-based Art”, with co-writer Samuel Gratton. The essay provides a deconstructive approach to conceptualizing how transgender bodies appear in contemporary photography. Jax holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from OCAD University.

Karina Roman Justo is an emerging writer and researcher residing in Toronto. She recently completed her BA in Visual and Critical Studies at OCAD University, where she has been recipient of the VCS Graduating Award by the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and School of Interdisciplinary Studies there she also leads the Journal of Visual and Critical Studies. She has published reviews in diverse publications like the Senses and Society journal. Her research focuses on decolonial theory as well as collaborative relationships between human and non-human beings within art practices.

Teri Henderson is a curator, co-director of WDLY, and writer. Henderson holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Texas Christian University. She formerly held a curatorial internship at Ghost Gallery in Seattle, Washington. During that time she also helped launch the social media campaign for the non-profit access to justice platform PopUpJustice!. She also previously served as the Art Law Clinic Director for Maryland Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts. Her work as co-director of WDLY addresses shrinking the gap between the spaces that contemporary artists of color inhabit and the resources of the power structures of the art world through the curation and artistic production of events. She currently holds roles as a staff writer for BmoreArt, the gallery director for Connect+Collect, and the curator of private acquisitions for the Doug+Laurie Kanyer Art Collection.

Raised in Florida, Steph Wong Ken is a racialized settler and writer currently based in Tkaronto. Her work has appeared in The Walrus, Canadian Art, Maisonneuve, and Public Parking, among others.

Gunreet Kaur Gill is an independent curator, writer, and artist based in Toronto. She graduated with a B.F.A. from OCAD University’s Criticism and Curatorial Practice program in 2020, and is currently working independently on her portfolio to apply for an M.A. in art therapy.

Elliott Larson-Gillmore is a sound and media artist, writer, and composer of electroacoustic music. He completed a BFA in Integrated Media at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and received the Fourth Year Medal in that program. He received the OCAD U Career Launcher, Long Winter: Digital Video Art Commission for his video For Bike Bells with XC98. A twelve channel audio installation, The Intertwining Voice of Contact, will also be installed at Ignite Gallery that same year. He is currently working on a study project in phenomenology of listening and touch, a treatise on modes of sensory entanglement. He has self-published written works of concrete poetry, instructions, and auto-theory. He is a member of the Merleau-Ponty Circle and maintains a research practice in movement, perception, the body, ecology, and non-dualism.

Michael Laundry is an artist, curator and critic based in Bergen, Norway. Laundry is well known for their playful approach to choreography with solo projects and the interventionist performance duo The Avalanche Boys. Laundry holds a MA in Comparative Literature, as well as, a MA in English and Education from the University of Bergen, Norway. Current research interests include: curatorial ethics and biennial culture, and political aesthetics in publicly funded galleries. Laundry’s writing has appeared in ARTMargins, Hymen Magazine, and Kunstkritikk. He is curator at Mikey Laundry Art Garden (Bergen) and Creative Director of Portmanteau Books.

Tiffany Le is based in Montreal. She holds a BFA and MA in Art History from Concordia University, where she pursued her masters thesis, “MoMA and Nazi-Era Art Restitution: Contexts and Thoughts for the Future,” exploring the larger debate of stolen cultural property and the persistent concern over ownership of material culture held in trust by major institutions. Over the past few years, she has honed her skills in writing, editing, creative problem-solving, and exhibition management, developing a focus on arts administration. She currently works as a studio manager overseeing everything from grant applications, publishing projects, and writing artist statements to coordinating exhibition projects for a mid-career artist.

Helen Lee is a writer based in Toronto, and a participant in the 2020 Momus Emerging Critics Residency. Her work explores memory, time-based media, and archival theory. She is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Film Preservation at Ryerson University.

Lorenza Mezzapelle is a freelance writer and an Art History and Journalism double major at Concordia University. She has worked alongside publications such as The Fine Print Magazine, Maisonneuve, and Flanelle, and institutions such as Centre Phi. In addition, she works as a copywriter for SSENSE. Her research interests include critical theory, psychoanalytic theory, material culture, and sustainability. 

Cecilia McKinnon is an intermedia artist from California and New Mexico, currently based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. Her research is concerned with entropy, ecology, and landscape representation. She is pursuing an MFA in Fibres and Material Practices at Concordia University, and holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico.

Rado Minchev is a TV news producer, occasionally editor and video journalist currently based in Washington, DC. His professional life has been mostly European public service media, and everything from hard news to viral videos on social media. His primary interests gravitate around politics and art, and he is increasingly drawn towards other forms of journalism such as writing for the web and podcasting. 

Maandeeq Mohamed is a Toronto-based writer and researcher. Engaging Black Studies and related cultural production, her writing is featured in Real Life, C Magazine, and Canadian Art. She is also a member of the REFRESH collective, where she co-organized the Refiguring the Future conference in collaboration with Eyebeam and Hunter College Art Galleries. She is deeply indebted to the generations of work around Black liberatory politics, poetics, and aesthetics.

Enrique Morales is an artist, curator, and researcher/writer (art media and cultural policy). His research interests include public space and art within contemporary art discourse as well as hybrid medium approaches to contemporary art. He is also a social impact entrepreneur within the cultural sector, having co-founded an arts non-profit organization in Chicago, now in its ninth year of operation. He is a passionate advocate for labor reform and rights for creative professionals. During his free time, he is a professional tennis enthusiast. 

Zahra Nasser is a fourth-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago studying Art History and Philosophy.

Nicky Ni graduated with an M.A. degree in Art History and Arts Administration from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Additionally, she holds a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering and French from Northwestern University. She has a general research interest in new media and moving-image art forms, with a particular focus on computer-based art that involves real-time simulation. Her secondary interest is in the reception of contemporary Chinese art in a global context. Ni is co-founder of LITHIUM, a Chicago-based gallery dedicated to time-based art, and is currently working with an all-female team to rebrand LITHIUM into TNL (aka. The Neu Lithium), a completely online platform that reports on and supports new media art. Ni has worked as Curatorial Assistant at Conversations at the Edge and as Graduate Distribution Assistant at Video Data Bank. Nicky Ni is originally from Beijing, China.

Sarah Ratzlaff is a writer and student based in Toronto. Having recently completed her MA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto, with a focus on the philosophy of art, Sarah is interested in the methods and histories of art criticism, the sociopolitical discourses surrounding public art and public space, and the connections between theatre and community creation. She is the public art columnist for Spacing Magazine, where she covers public works of art and artist interventions.

Delilah Rosier is an artist and writer working and living in Tkaronto. Her practice consists of generating criticism and theory pertaining to popular culture, performance and visual culture through a lens of queer theory, race politics, and intersectional feminism. She holds a BA from OCAD University’s Criticism and Curatorial Practice program, an MA from York University’s Theatre and Performance Studies program, has been profiled in C Magazine, Formally Known As Magazine, is one half of Masking Collective, and was the 2016 Recipient of the Won Lee Fine Art Award for her written thesis project entitled “Sissy Those Subversions: Disidentifications and Institutionalized Performativity.” She is currently back at OCAD University, pursuing a second MA in Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories.

Daisy Silver is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at University College London. She holds an MA in History of Art from UCL and an MA (Hons) Fine Art from the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research is focused on contemporary art that addresses the integration of pre-Columbian and European modernist design within the urban landscapes of Mexico and California. This analysis intends to contribute both a more global narrative of modernism that is contingent on local circumstances and reveal the influence of design histories in the cultural construction of place. Her thesis is supervised by Professor Briony Fer and funded by the UCL History of Art Department Bursary.

Tash Nikol Smith is a creative, writer, organizer, and herbalist based in Muscogee Creek (ATL). Her work attends to our present day interactions with past technologies, language and storytelling to decode standard systems of knowledge in design, art and technology. She is currently studying print making and how to liberate emergent technological environments. She recently worked as a curator running programs and exhibits for Murmur Media (atlanta zine fest 2016/17). Personal interests: reading science fiction (delany), Baldwin, plant/herbalism/farming, Atlanta everything, and playing piano while listening to southern rap.

Dana Snow is a freelance curator, writer and critic based in Toronto. Her practice centres around frameworks of post-modern identity politics, including approaches of queer, material, phenomenological and feminist theory. Focusing on healing through affect, Dana believes in the power of seeing our stories reflected in art. Dana earned her BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University in 2019 and has since curated shows at Xpace Cultural Centre, Ada Slaight Gallery, and Artscape Youngplace; Toronto. Her most recent work was featured online in the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.

Andrew Stock is a composer/artist/[new+developing] curator working in concert and installative formats. His research interests center on abstraction and modernism(s), conceptual art, performance, and time-based media thought in the contexts of Atlantic modernity, colonialism, capital circulation, and enslavement.

Mohammad Tabesh is an engineer turned artist residing and working in Toronto. His practice is focused on the human condition, the art of resistance, and art and social change. His current project, The Book of Fading Memories, is a body of work inspired by the artist’s personal experience of war, violence, and censorship. Through writing, printmaking, multimedia, and sculpture, Tabesh explores modes of storytelling in which narrative is embedded in the artwork. By sharing his memories from a child’s point of view, Tabesh conveys these stories in a deeply human and universal language, avoiding the cliché of shock and horrors of war on one hand, and the abstract notion of war far away on the other hand. Mohammad is the 2020 recipient of the OCAD University’s Sculpture and Installation medal.

Alyse Tunnell is an accessibility advocate and writer currently working as a freelance content creator and accessibility consultant. As a (dis)abled, neurodiverse, queer /genderqueer, anti-racist, anti-colonial, settler creator, Alyse strives to build intersectional frameworks of compassion for marginalized folks of all sorts. Together with her creative partner Cherie Pyne, Alyse is building Criptopia, a media organization based around expanding accessibility politics. Alyse graduated from the Art History program at Concordia University in Spring 2020 and continues to reside in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Quebec.

Geneviève Wallen is a Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal-based independent curator and writer. Wallen’s practice is informed by diasporic narratives, intersectional feminism, intergenerational dialogues, BIPOC alternative futurities and healing platforms. Her ongoing research focuses on the notion of longevity as a methodology for resistance and care work in the arts. Her most recent curated exhibition, Made of Honey, Gold, and Marigold (2020), is on view at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. Wallen contributed essays for C Magazine and the anthology Other Places; Reflections on Media Arts in Canada, edited by Deanna Bowen. She is an Exhibition Coordinator at FOFA Gallery, a member of  YTB (Younger than Beyoncé) collective, and is the co-initiator (with Marsya Maharani) of Souped Up a thematic dinner series conceived to carve spaces for care and support building among BIPOC curators and cultural workers.

Amelia Wong-Mersereau is the Coordinator of Print Projects and Digital Content at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal. She received her MA in Art History from Concordia University. In 2021, she was awarded the Winter Editorial Mentorship at Canadian Art. She has been a member of the editorial board at Esse arts + opinions since 2018.

Diane Hau Yu Wong is an emerging curator and art historian based in unceded Coast Salish Territories & Tiohtiá:ke territory. She graduated with a BFA in Art History from Concordia University in 2018. Her practice and research are largely based on her experience as an immigrant from British colonial Hong Kong and the intersection between community and diasporic identity. She is particularly interested in exploring digital futurism as a method to re-imagine a better world and solidarity among BIPOC communities through technoculture and science fiction. She most recently curated Centre A’s graduate exhibition titled (dis)location (dis)connect (dis)appearance, examining the loss of language, tradition, and culture in the diasporic community and as a result the disconnect between generations.

Kate Whiteway is an independent curator based in Toronto. Her exhibitions include In & Out of Saskatchewan (Art Museum, 2019), Whispers That Got Away (SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, co-curated with Hera Chan and Thy Anne Chu Quang, 2018), and A Glass House Should Hold No Terrors (Montreal, co-curated with Yen-Chao Lin, 2016). She recently completed the Master of Visual Studies in Curatorial Studies at the University of Toronto. She has worked as Gallery Manager of SUGAR Contemporary and as Publications Coordinator for the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2018 Reesa Greenberg Curatorial Studies Award and the 2020 C Magazine New Critics Award. Her curatorial practice is interested in correspondence, mobility, and networks of communication. Current research looks at non-Western histories of abstraction, as well as the intersection of contemporary art with activist practices on housing and homelessness.

Lucy Wowk is interested in moments of encounter between ethics and aesthetics. With a background in graphic design and academic research, their work and skills are founded in intersections of visual representations and interpretations. Lucy is currently completing an MA in Communication in Culture at Ryerson University and York University, and is the recipient of the Ryerson Graduate Development Award and the Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC). Research interests include ephemeral longing, translation, poetics, embodiment, and technologies of representation.

Danielle Wright is a Chicago-based visual artist engaged in serious play. She is interested in language, the language(s) of materials, and the politics and poetics of what it means to be a witness. She delights in blurring distinctions between artist and viewer and is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Chicago.

Saaret E. Yoseph is a writer and multidisciplinary artist, from Washington, DC. Her creative inquiries explore themes of identity, culture, migration and memory across the African diaspora. Saaret’s writing has been featured by HuffPost, Medium, The Rumpus, The Root, CNN and The Ethiopian Reporter, where she penned the column “Chronicles of a Diaspora Kid.” She has a BA in English and Africana Studies from the University of Maryland – Baltimore Co. and a master’s in Communication, Culture & Technology from Georgetown University. Her 2014 documentary RED LINE DC explored gentrification and graffiti in the District and Saaret is currently working on various writing and media projects, including her first feature script and a reimagining of Toni Morrison’s THE BLACK BOOK.

Mattia Zylak is a coordinator and writer living in Montreal, QC. She recently completed an MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice at OCAD University where she researched how contemporary art theory can inform alternative methods of display within the context of exhibitions of dress. In 2019, Mattia co-founded the Institute of Institutional Critique with Florence C.G. Yee in order to question the possibilities and impossibilities of critical curating while asking how and for whom institutional critique is performed.