Dan Vena
Dan Vena is currently completing his PhD in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. He locates his academic interests within the spheres of visual and popular cultures, merging together trans, queer, and feminist approaches to an array of topics including horror cinema, Classical Hollywood, comic book superheroes, and cult monsters. He has given numerous university and college lectures on the above topics, and has spoken at a number of activist- and community-oriented panels and conferences about trans identities, and feminist activism.
In companion with his academic work, Dan also dabbles in acting, appearing at Domino Theatre as the charming sociopath Rafe (One Night Stand) and as the awkward, would-be adult film star Byron (Skin Flick). Additionally, he teaches summer film courses at the Seniors Association Kingston and volunteers at Royale Place Retirement Residence screening Sunday-night classics for the residents.”
Robin McDonald
Robin Alex McDonald is a writer, independent curator and PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Queen’s University. Their academic and artistic interests span queer, feminist, and trans theories; visual culture studies; museum studies and alternative curatorial methodologies; theories of collectivity, relationality, love, and “the social;” and activist art/art-as-activism. Their dissertation project investigates queer and trans artist collectives active in New York City and Toronto from 1970 to the present as sites at which the social has been (and continues to be) reimagined against the affective and social structures of neoliberalism. Robin is a co-founder of Turbines Curatorial Collective and has worked with the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Artery Gallery, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, Queen’s Positive Space Program for Sexual and Gender Diversity, and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Their writing has recently been published, or will soon appear, in nomorepotlucks, Guts Canadian Feminist Magazine, Spiffy Moves, n.paradoxa, TheatreForum, and GJSS.