Can Artists Really Save the World?

Vanessa Kwan is a Canadian artist and curator with a focus on collaborative, site-specific and community-engaged practices. She is currently Program Director at grunt gallery in Vancouver and is also curator/ producer at Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, an organization that curates and produces artworks for the public realm. She is a founding member of the arts collective Norma who were honoured with a City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for public art in 2012. She regularly writes and publishes on art and culture, and is currently working on curated projects at venues across the Pacific Rim (Vancouver, Seoul and Sydney) exploring artist-led creative exchange.

Lynda Jessup is Associate Dean (Graduate Studies and Global Engagement) in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Queen’s University and Director of the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI). Her research focuses on the representation and circulation of Canadian and Indigenous visual and material culture in exhibitions and in museum collections, an interest that has taken shape most recently in research on the use of exhibitions in cultural diplomacy. She is co-editor, with Sarah Smith, of “Curating Cultural Diplomacy”, a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies and is co-author of Cultural Diplomacy and Trade: Making Connections.

Owais Lightwala is a theatre producer, and currently the Managing Director of Why Not Theatre. He advises many arts organizations (including theatre and dance companies, music presenters, film festivals and more) as a strategic consultant, particularly on finding better ways of doing things, changing who’s on stage and in the audience, and anything to do with numbers. He also dabbles in theatre making as an artist, and is a prolific web and graphic designer. A lifelong learner, he was selected for the Impact Program for Arts Leaders (Stanford Graduate School of Business), has completed the CORe program (Harvard Business School), was a 2018 DiverseCity Fellow (CivicAction), a fellow in the 2018 Leaders Lab (Toronto Arts Council/Banff Centre), and a graduate of York University’s Theatre program.

Kelly has more than 20 years of experience in cultural policy and diplomacy, international exchange, partner and stakeholder engagement and event management. Her career has mostly focused on public arts funding, where she has led various programs and initiatives aimed at supporting more opportunities for artists and arts professionals.