Michael Herrera is the Chief Financial Officer at George Brown College. He provides senior level leadership and comprehensive financial technical expertise relating to the financial operations of the College. Michael has spent a career in service to the not-for-profit sector, having worked with social services, religious and arts organizations. Most recently, Michael was the Interim Treasurer at the Anglican Church of Canada. He has held similar positions at YMCA of Greater Toronto and National Ballet of Canada.

Previously, Michael was a manager at EY and, as an independent consultant, he supported arts and heritage organizations through the development and delivery of financial and governance training to a variety of organizations throughout the province. Michael’s community involvement includes past governance roles with organizations such as Social Planning Council, Toronto Foundation, and Ontario Museums Association. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for Crow’s Theatre and on the Finance and Property Committee of Sherbourne Health Centre. Michael holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Toronto and has been a member of the Institute of Chartered Professional Accountants in Ontario since 1996. In 2025, Michael was conferred with the distinction of Fellow by the Institute, the highest honour conferred on a member. 

Zahra Ebrahim is the Co-Founder of Monumental. She is a public interest designer and strategist, and her work has focused on community-led approaches to policy, infrastructure, and service design. She is an established bridge builder across grassroots and institutional spaces, using creative and accessible approaches to facilitate bold, collective changemaking. Prior to this role, she built and led Doblin Canada, Deloitte’s Human-Centred Design practice, focusing on engaging diverse sets of stakeholders to use design-led approaches to address complex organizational and industry challenges. In her early career, Zahra led one of Canada’s first social design studios, working with communities to co-design towards better social outcomes, leading some of Canada’s most ambitious participatory infrastructure and policy programs. Zahra has taught at OCADU, MoMA, and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto.She is the Vice-Chair of the Canadian Urban Institute, and the Board Chair for Park People. She was recently named Next City’s Vanguard “40 under 40 Civic Leader”, Ascend Canada’s Mentor of the Year, one of “Tomorrow’s Titans” in Toronto Life, and one of WXN’s Top 100 Women in Canadian Business. She is the 2022 Artist-in-Residence at Lake Superior Provincial Park, and Urbanist-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. 

Roland Gulliver is the Director of the Toronto International Festival of Authors, taking up the position in February 2020. He is one of the leading international figures in the literature sector with over 12 years’ experience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where he created festival programmes of over 600 events across 18 days, representing more than 60 nations. In addition to the August Festival, he led, alongside a fellow programme director, the development of a year-round programme of residencies, mini festivals and standalone events working with a range of communities to offer access and empowerment through the arts. His programming has explored the potential of the live performance from pop-up readings to staged performances, creative writing masterclasses to reading workshops, literary afternoon teas to late night cabaret programmes, alongside commissions for sound installations and WhatsApp digital stories. Alongside creating spaces for authors and audiences to engage in discussion on the contemporary issues affecting society, politics and culture. 

Sally is a passionate, civically minded arts leader who has been working in the sector for over three decades, including involvement in grassroots artist-run groups, mid-size organizations, and larger cultural institutions across several disciplines including visual and media arts, theatre, music, dance, and literature. She is currently the Executive Director of the Canadian Independent Screen Fund for BPOC Creators. She also sits on the Boards of Wavelength Music and the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and is actively involved in the Advisory of the Reel Asian International Film Festival, where she previously served as ED. Other previous leadership experience includes serving as Executive Director of CARFAC Ontario, board membership at the Images Festival and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), and management positions at the Toronto International Film Festival and Soulpepper Theatre Company. 

As an independent consultant, her practice has included strategic planning, project management, program and policy design and planning, organizational development, leadership training, fundraising, and succession planning for several organizations. Sally has been an active member of the independent DIY music community since the early 90s, playing bass in a number of bands, including current outfit Long Branch. 

Sean Lee (he/they) is an artist and curator exploring the assertion of disability art as the last avant-garde. Orienting towards a “crip horizon”, his practice explores the transformative possibilities of access aesthetics as an embodied politic that can desire the ways disability disrupts. 

  

Sean is currently the Director of Programming at Tangled Art + Disability. He holds a B.A. in Arts Management and Studio from UTSC. Sean has been working at the intersection of art and disability for the last decade, adding his insights and perspectives to conversations across Canada, the US, and internationally. He is a regular instructor for NODE Curatorial Studies Online and currently serves on the board of the Toronto Arts Council and CARFAC Ontario, and is Chair of TAC’s Visual and Media Arts Committee. Previously, he was a Board member for the8Fest, Board Chair for Creative Users Project and a member of the Ontario Art Council’s Deaf and Disability Advisory Group. 

Lindsey is an Onkwehon:we (Kanien’kéha)/ Anishinaabe (Ojibwe- Missisakis) artist & community developer originally from Six Nations of the Grand River with ancestral roots to the Mississauga’s of Credit First Nation. She specializes in painting & beading as well as Indigenous arts and culture facilitation, governance, community and program development. Her traditional name is ‘Mushkiiki Nibi’, which translates to ‘Medicine Water’, she is turtle clan. 

Lindsey is a graduate of OCAD University and has sat on a number of community boards and committees in the Toronto area over the last 15 years. Some of her past committee work has been for the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto and the Institute for Research and Development on Inclusion and Society (IRIS). She is currently a member of the Toronto Arts Council and Steps Public Art- Indigenous Advisory Committees. 

In 2017, Lindsey was shortlisted and awarded a public arts project for the Region of Waterloo’s LRT System resulting in a permanent public instillation for the Block Line stop that speaks to the historical stewardship of the land base of Waterloo and the importance of agriculture from a First Nations perspective. Lindsey also received an International Women’s Day- Leadership in the Arts award in 2019 from the City of Toronto. 

She is currently the Community Safety Liaison for the Ontario Native Women’s Association (ONWA), providing advocacy, awareness and capacity building supports for Indigenous women & families, as well as service providers, in the area of human trafficking and gang involvement. She currently practices out of both Toronto and Six Nations of the Grand River. 

Venezuelan-Canadian poly-lingual, cross-disciplinary dance artist, choreographer, activist and settler in Tkoronto with a background in expressive arts therapy. Her vibrant repertoire is rooted in contemporary dance that is informed by traditional Venezuelan genres from the coast of Venezuela, vertical dance and durational-installation performance-art. Mata’s sensibility to inclusion and passion for border stories is due to her eclectic upbringing in three continents. Mata’s career was first sculpted by pedagogic, self-directed training, which proceeded with local and international with internationally renowned choreographers and directors in the Americas and Europe. An active member of Toronto’s progressive arts community and the abolishment of violence against women, Mata’s aspiration is to continue being a catalyst for artistic curiosity.  Her Masters in Contemporary Choreography, propelled dialogues between performance and embodied cultural memory, which awarded her a number of acclaimed recognitions such as being a recipient of Metcalf Foundation and a finalist of Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award 

Dance comes from the people and must be given back to the people 

~ Alvin Ailey 

Tamla Matthews is a lover of fine chocolates and belly laughs. She manages an extensive and layered portfolio of entrepreneurship, art, education, child welfare, youth and children advocacy, community enhancement and public service work.  

Her legacy project Rootz and Branches was born in 2011 as a dance vehicle specializing in Afro-cultural performance, education and professional training for children, youth and their families. 

Tamla manages the CHEERS mentorship program in addition to being a Training and Development Consultant with the City of Toronto Confronting Anti-Black Racism Unit 

Paulina O’Kieffe-Anthony is an award winning artist, curator, arts educator and creative consultant and the current Executive Director of SKETCH Working Arts.  Her high level accomplishments include being featured in When Sisters Speak, co-curating Scarborough: The Backbone as part of Toronto’s Year of Public Art, co-producing the Spoken Soul Festival, and representing Toronto as a 2x national team finalist in the Canadian Festival Of Spoken Word. In 2019 she was a TEDx speaker and in 2020 an excerpt of her play How Jab Jab Saved the Pretty Mas was featured as part of Piece of Mine’s Black Women in Theatre Festival.  

Her work and leadership in the community sector was recognized as she was the recipient of the Toronto Community Foundation Vital People Award and again when she was recognized as one of 150 Black Women Making Herstory (as featured on CBC) for her contribution to building the arts scene in Toronto. 

Devyani Saltzman is a Canadian writer, multidisciplinary curator and cultural programmer. In her institutional practice she is the incoming Director of Arts for the Barbican and was most recently Director of Public Programming at the Art Gallery of Ontario, North America’s fourth largest museum, where she worked with the programming team to shape the museum as a forum for discourse, reflecting all communities and the narratives of Torontonians. She was previously the Director of Literary Arts at the Banff Centre, a leading arts and creativity incubator, as well as a founding Curator at Luminato, Toronto’s international multi-arts festival.