Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium 2025 Presenter & Performer Bios
Presenter Bios
Rebecca Barnstaple
Rebecca Barnstaple, Assistant Professor in Theatre/Creative Arts, Health and Wellness, is an artist-researcher who engages with biological dimensions of culture. With a PhD in Dance Studies complemented by graduate training in neuroscience (York University), her research investigates impacts and mechanisms of participation in the arts, with a focus on dance.
Vanessa Blais-Tremblay
Vanessa Blais-Tremblay (IREF-UQAM, CRILCQ, OICRM) is Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music at Université du Québec à Montréal. She heads the DIG! network (Différences et inégalités de genre dans la musique au Québec) and co-directs the research team La vie musicale au Québec.
Amy Bowring
Amy Bowring is the Executive and Curatorial Director at Dance Collection Danse and a Lecturer at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is one of Canada’s foremost advocates for the study and preservation of Canada’s dance heritage. Her book Navigating Home: Artists of the Newfoundland and Labrador Dance Project was published in 2019.
Classic Roots
The heartbeat of the boreal north, Classic Roots is a Toronto-based artist with roots in Thunder Bay, Ontario—Ojibwe and Blackfoot from Long Lake 58 First Nation. Fusing traditional pow wow sounds with contagious basslines, Classic Roots creates a distinctive sound that serves as a vibrant celebration of cultural freedom and Indigenous resilience. An award-winning producer and DJ who is impacting the music community with his fresh sound and meaningful collaborations with diverse artists across Turtle island, the Downie Wenjack Foundation ambassador has been a favorite DJ at venues like the ROM, The Drake Underground, TIFF 2023, The Rivoli, and Luminato Festival.
Heather Cornell
Heather Cornell is literally and metaphorically a mover and shaker in the world of dance. She is an ensemble founder and a sought-after solo artist. She is a choreographer, director, and producer. She has learned from and performed with giants of the tap dance genre. In a career that has spanned over four decades, Cornell has left an indelible mark on dance and music stages all over the world. She is an oral history fellow at the New York City Library Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center and was on full-time faculty at Hope College. She is now pursuing her PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.
She worked with and was mentored by tap greats Buster Brown, Cookie Cook, Chuck Green, Eddie Brown, Steve Condos, and Harriet “Quicksand” Brown. She was the only tap dancer mentored by iconic jazz bassist Ray Brown. She toured internationally with Jazz Tap Ensemble and worked in NYC with Gail Conrad, Anita Feldman, Andrea Levine, and as clown partner to Noel Parenti. She eventually co-founded Manhattan Tap, a leading American tap and music ensemble which would go on to garner international acclaim. For close to twenty years, Cornell served as the group’s choreographer, director, and soloist, collaborating on a huge body of work with her main collaborator Keith Saunders. In 2004, she launched a successful solo career, creating a number of projects internationally. She also founded The Heather Cornell Legacy Project—an initiative to pass to the next generations her archives and concepts through an active shift in understanding the artform in pedagogy and practice.
She has held her Tap Labs for 35 years, in which she has trained free-thinking improvisational music/dance artists focused on the magic of community. With Thanos Daskalopolous and Max Pollak, of Tap Motif in Lefkada, Greece, she co-created an eight-year music/dance summit focused on creating balanced multi-disciplinary pedagogy through the freedom of improvisation. She is presently on faculty for the ImproJazzWorkshop in Vamvakou, Greece, where five tap dancers are accepted each year as part of the music ensembles.
Cornell calls herself a physical percussionist—someone whose rhythmic, precise foot movement adds to or creates the musicality of a piece—and she dances using different textures of sound, including wood, leather, and sand. She dances only to live music, never music that is “canned.” For more info, check out her website.
Yesenia Fuentes
Yesenia Fuentes, contemporary dancer, choreographer, and Butoh practitioner, born in Bogotá and now rooted in Montreal, draws from dreams, the inner architecture of being, and the somatic memory of the body. With slowness, gentleness, and a daring risk, she examines the intricate connections between movement and social change. Her work is a journey of introspection, of embodiment as a healing process, and an opening to forms of knowledge that dwell within the sensory experience.
Emilie Jabouin
Emilie “Zila” Jabouin is a dance artist and researcher, doctor of communication studies, based in Tkaronto, Turtle Island (Toronto, Canada). She merges performance and historical research to public education and collective healing, Since 2020, Emilie reconnects to Haitian folk culture as the foundation of her art practice (drumming, dancing, and singing) under the guidance of master dancer and drummer Peniel Guerrier (NYC) and his professional KASE DANS training program. Emilie offers a series of Haitian dance workshops to heal the body, mind, and spirit through movement, chanting, and rhythm exploration—an approach she describes during a CTV interview with The Social in 2023. She is also working on a full-length piece, The Release, about Afro-Caribbean experiences with [interrupted] pregnancies and bodily autonomy, sections of which she has performed in Ayiti (Haiti), Canada, and the United States between 2022 and 2024. Emilie is the author of “Black Women Dancers, Jazz Culture and ‘Show Biz’,” which received an honourable mention for the Canadian Historical Association Jean-Fecteau prize in 2022, in which she discusses Meilan Lam’s documentary film about Black women jazz performers of the 20th-century, Show Girls. Emilie’s academic and artistic research interests include celebrating Black women in the Americas, documenting intellectual and performance histories, exploring the body, archives and newspapers, and promoting wellness and discussing Black liberation movements.
As an artist and researcher, Emilie also works as a Dance Historian for Dance Collection Danse, Canada’s national dance archives and as the Financial Advancement Officer at dance Immersion, Canada’s only year-round presenter of Black dance. In 2020, Emilie founded her own multi-faceted research, performance, creative consulting, and production company, Do Gwe dance and research that merges dance and socio-historical research into artistic productions for social transformation, healing, and collective liberation, www.emiliejabouin.ca.
Val Jeanty
Val Jeanty also known as Val-Inc, is a Haitian Afrofuturist, drummer, turntablist, and Professor at Berklee College of Music. Jeanty is a pioneer of the electronic music subgenre called Afro-Electronica (also called “Vodou-Electro”) incorporating Haitian folkloric rhythms with digital instrumentations by synergistically combining acoustics with electronics and the archaic with the postmodern.
Val Jeanty is also performing as part of this year’s Guelph Jazz Festival. Find out more here.
Infinite “Ivvy” Johnson
Infinite “Ivvy” Johnson, a Brooklyn native, is a self-taught dancer. She has studied Hip Hop, and street dance styles like Bruk up and Flexn. She has collaborated with Sean Paul and Tanisha Scott and has performed in ‘Monochromatic Light’ at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC, Life at Larocks, Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick RoadTour, and at the Guggenheim Museum.
Ivvy is also performing as part of this year’s Guelph Jazz Festival. Find out more here.
Liberté-Anne Lymberiou
Liberté-Anne, composer, performer, and conductor, anchors her practice in profound listening and unspoken spontaneity, drawing inspiration from sonic traditions, the physical environment, and movement. Through projects like Liberté Big Band and FROTAE, she weaves collaborative musical forms rooted in social sensitivity and sensory imagination. Her soundscapes become realms for radical exploration, where each note carries memory, tension, and the potential for transformation.
Liberté-Anne is also performing as part of this year’s Guelph Jazz Festival. Find out more here.
Ravish Momin
Ravish Momin, who produces electronic music under Sunken Cages, is an Indian-born drummer and electronic music producer residing in New York City. His unique approach quickly led him to work with a diverse cast of musicians ranging from legendary avant-saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre (of the AACM) to pop-star Shakira.
Ravish Momin is also performing as part of this year’s Gueph Jazz Festival. Find out more here.
Patricia Nicholson
Dancer, poet and organizer of movement, music, and causes, Patricia Nicholson Parker has developed her work within the aesthetic of the free jazz improvised arts with an attention to spiritual and social responsibility.
There is a choreography to Nicholson’s approach to programming. She curates evenings with a deliberate arc, emphasizing dynamic flow and messaging. Her goal is to design nights that create a complete experience, and engage audiences in active and creative witnessing.
All her work is done with the intention of illuminating, whether it is movement/dance based, poetry, or organizing.
Nicholson has had a wide-reaching influence in her capacity as an artistic and community organizer. In 1981, Nicholson choreographed, performed, and organized A Thousand Cranes Peace Opera, with 1,000 children performing in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for the opening of the Special Sessions on Disarmament; in 1983 and 1985, she responded to a lack of visibility for free jazz by helping to organize the Sound Unity Festivals. In 1994, Nicholson brought together fifty artists to form The Improvisors Collective. Following that success, in 1996, Nicholson founded Arts for Art and the Vision Festival to promote and advocate for free jazz with a focus on equity and diversity, raising awareness through the highly visible platform of the Vision Festival. AFA has grown to be a movement that supports hundreds of artists annually, all working within the free jazz aesthetic. In addition to the Vision Festival, there are year-round events which are free or include a pay-what-you-can option. There is also a free or pay-what-you-can option for her music education program. In every way, Patricia Nicholson Parker has dedicated herself to maintaining diversity in creative improvised music and arts, as well as fair pay for artists, and accessibility. All of this is driven by a deep sense of social responsibility.
In January of 2017, she initiated and led Artist for a Free World, a marching band that participated in 47 demonstrations. Patricia Nicholson Parker has reactivated this group to respond to present threats to our shared humanity.
Patricia Nicholson is also performing as part of this year’s Guelph Jazz Festival. Find out more here.
Julie Richard
Julie Richard, musician, composer, and cultural worker, is a tuba player by training, blending improvised music, collective memory, and the pursuit of social justice. Her approach delves into the evocative power of breath and the archive, as seen in Les Angles Mortes, where she revives the fragments of works by forgotten Black women composers. In her hands, music becomes a reparative gesture, a space of resonance that invites a transformative listening, where the past converses with the present.
Julie Richard is also performing as part of this year’s Guelph Jazz Festival. Find out more here.
Aimée Dawn Robinson
Aimée Dawn Robinson brings wild spaces, the conceptual, and the feminine to embodied performance practices. Aimée is a dancer and improviser, actor for movies and theatre, writer, video/filmmaker, director, performer, visual artist, researcher, musician, theatre-maker, teacher, producer, facilitator, and curator. She has over thirty years of performance and teaching experience in and across Turtle Island (North America), and in Japan, Malaysia, America, Scotland, London UK, and online.
Aimée’s doctoral project, Dissolution of Hierarchies Part Two – The Permission to Dance is comprised of over 200 sixty-to-ninety-second improvised screendance videos…and counting. Find them on Instagram @tracedancepractice.
Aimée is grateful to live and work on the lands of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation and Ta’an Kwäch’än Council in the so-called Yukon Territory. She also spends time in London and Guelph, Ontario.
Multi-media band with IMPR cohort four: Almost Alchemy
Désirée Rochat
Désirée Rochat is a community educator, memory worker, and historian. Her work aims to preserve and transmit histories of Black community and cultural activism in Quebec. She is currently a FRQSC Postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University.
Raphael Roter
Raphael Roter is a playful sound adventurer and a reveler in human connection whose work spans free improvisation and music for contemporary dance. Since 2019 he has organized Toronto’s long standing music-dance improvisation series coexisDance. In all his endeavors, Raphael places curiosity and wonder at the heart.
Georgia Simms
Georgia is an artist who dances, writes, performs, and facilitates. She is a PhD student with IICSI. Her studies connect arts practices with inquiry into worldmaking, aesthetics, agency, ensemble, assemblage, reciprocity, leadership, decision-making, belonging, and conflict. With passion for paradox, she hosts classes in contemporary modern dance technique, improvisation, and collaborative composition, and continues to practice “ecstatic survival” within the intergenerational community of artists, Dancetheatre David Earle.
Andrew Staniland
Described as a “new music visionary”(National Arts Centre), composer Andrew Staniland has established himself as one of Canada’s most important and innovative musical voices. His music is performed and broadcast internationally and has been described by Alex Ross in the New Yorker Magazine as “alternately beautiful and terrifying”. Important accolades include 3 Juno nominations, ECMA awards, the 2016 Terra Nova Young Innovators Award , the National Grand Prize winner of EVOLUTION (presented in 2009 by CBC Radio 2/Espace Musique and The Banff Centre), and was the recipient of the Karen Keiser Prize in Canadian Music in 2004. As a leading composer of his generation, Andrew was recognized by election to the Inaugural Cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists Royal Society of Canada.
Andrew served as Affiliate Composer to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (2006-09) and the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2002–04), and has also been in residence at the Centre du Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (Paris, 2005). Recent commissioners and collaborators include Germany’s Flex Ensemble, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, American poet and activist Jessica Care Moore, cellist Frances-Marie Uih, and Les Percussions de Strasbourg. Andrew also performs as a guitarist and with new media (computers and electronics).
Andrew is currently Professor at Memorial University in St John’s Newfoundland, where he founded MEARL (Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research Lab). At MEARL, Andrew leads a cross-disciplinary research team that has produced the innovative JADE and Mune digital instruments.
Robert VanderBerg
Robert VanderBerg is the Senior Information Manager, Archivist, and Curator of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The NAC Archives collects, preserves, and makes available the historical records and artifacts of the organization. Its vast collection encompasses all disciplines of the performing arts in both English and French since the opening of the Centre in 1969, and since 2019 contemporary Indigenous practice. Robert joined the NAC in 2015.
Bageshree Vaze
Bageshree Vaze is an Indo-Canadian dance artist, musician and writer. Bageshree initially trained in Bharatha Natyam while growing up in St. John’s, NL, and studied vocal music with her father, Damodar Vaze. She later trained in Kathak dance with Jai Kishan Maharaj in New Delhi, and studied vocal music with the renowned Veena Sahasrabuddhe. As a vocalist, Bageshree has five CDs to her credit, including Tarana, an album of music for Indian dance, which was released in India by Times Music under the name Khanak. In 2004 Bageshree was named an MTV India “rising star” and in 2010 she was awarded the K.M. Hunter Award in Dance. Bageshree has a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Carleton University and a Master’s degree in Dance from York University. In 2022, Bageshree was named Dance Collection Danse’s inaugural Artist Researcher-in-Residence and was the co-recipient of the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding Original Sound Composition in the Dance Division. Bageshree is Artistic Director of Pratibha Arts in Toronto. She is currently recording a new album, Songs From the Temple, and is producing a new dance work titled “Paratopias,” which will be presented at the Guelph Dance Festival in June 2026.
