Our incredible Winter 2019 guest speakers are announced on our workshop page. Bios are coming shortly!
The Spring 2017 cohort worked with these creative and artistic leaders.
Nicole Wong
A dabbler and flâneuse, Nicole is a visual storyteller with a passion for all things music, contemporary art, design and film. When she isn't crafting visual content for a Canadian diamond brand, she can be found hitting up concerts and art openings, trying new restaurants, and scrolling through Instagram. As a digital influencer, Nicole has worked with brands like La Garçonne and Native Union, and was most recently a national finalist in the Hong Kong Tourism Board and Chinese Restaurant Awards' #TasteHKG contest.
Anita Cheung
Anita Cheung is the co-founder and Brand Director of MOMENT Meditation—Canada’s first modern meditation studio. She is interested in making meditation interesting, and relevant. After dutifully getting a university degree, she threw caution (and her degree) to the wind and dove deep into entrepreneurship waters. She is a solar powered, stationery aficionado with a hot passion for journalling, good design, and naps.
Kristin Ramsey
Kristin is a lover of all things publishing and runs the editorial department at Quietly, a Gastown-based content marketing company. Prior to joining Quietly, she was the Associate Digital Editor of NUVO and MONTECRISTO magazines. She has worked with SAD Mag for four years as its copyeditor and proofreader, and is joining the board of directors as co-chair. Kristin also recently co-founded an annual art publication and exhibition called Within Pages because, clearly, she doesn't edit enough as it is. Kristin is a graduate of Simon Fraser University's Master of Publishing program.
Michelle Cyca
Michelle makes magazines and writes various things (tweets, stories, reports) for passion and profit in Vancouver, BC. She likes puzzling out the clearest and most interesting ways to share information and spark action. The majority of her professional and educational experiences have been in public health, and so she likes talking to friends and strangers alike about their contraceptive choices. You're most likely to run into her at the Vancouver Public Library, especially the Firehall branch.
Vanessa Richards
Vanessa Richards is an artist and community engagement facilitator. Her work focuses on creativity and participatory culture as central to social sustainability. She loves collaborating with groups and supporting individuals to create inventive, meaningful and beautiful projects. She earned an MPhil from Cardiff University and her poetry and critical works have been anthologized in the UK, Holland, United States and Canada. She is the founder and song leader for the Woodward’s Community Singers and director of Creative Together, a song based facilitation process. This April she became the Director of Community Engagement at 312 Main, Vancouver’s Centre for Social & Economic Development.
Jane Koo
Jane is a graphic designer and illustrator, whose work reflects her love for storytelling, witty puns and pleasing colour combinations. She currently works as a graphic designer with ivivva’s Brand & Community team and runs a one-woman design fort, Studio Coup. Jane’s work has appeared both IRL and in the interwebs, such as Vancouver Farmers Market, Translink, Buzzfeed and Refinery 29.
Jen Sungshine
Jen Sungshine speaks for a living, but lives for breathing life into unspoken situations in unusual places. As a queer Taiwanese artist-activist based in Vancouver, BC, she is grateful to live, breathe, dance and work on the unceded, occupied and ancestral lands of the Coast Salish people. A facilitator by trade, she works with creative technology and social justice media to evolutionize and revolutionize QTBIPOC visibility and community-based work through Love Intersections, Our City of Colours, Out in Schools and the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Jen’s artistic practice involves learning through unlearning; and instead of calling you out, she wants to call you in, to make artful social change with her. In the audience, she looks for art in your interruption.
Katie Stewart
What do you do?
I'm the Director of Social Impact at HiVE and the Publisher and Creative Director of SAD Mag.
What's your favourite part of your job?
Facilitating unique (and sometimes surprising) creative collaborations that result in new art, new ideas, and new ways of doing things.
What’s one piece of advice you have to give to anyone who wants a job like yours?
You don't have to be an expert to be a risk-taking maniac. You just need to be brave.
Jackie Wong
Jackie is the kind of double-Pisces who loves nothing more than a good heart-to-heart. As a journalist and workshop facilitator, she’s even made a living out of it, almost! She’s recently written two multi-part series about grief, loss, and responses to B.C.’s overdose crisis for The Tyee; a personal essay about ancestral identity and food for VICE Munchies; a forthcoming magazine feature on undocumented people in the city for Vancouver Magazine; and a forthcoming best practices guide to engaging the community for museum collections planning for the Museum of Vancouver. Jackie chairs the board of the Hua Foundation, a non-profit connecting Asian youth with social and environmental justice work while building pride in shared heritage and cultural identity. When she was your age, she spent most nights at concerts, wrote embarrassingly about some of them, and hoped one day the free press passes might turn into paid work. She had no idea what was next. She can’t wait to meet you.
Wanyee Li
Wanyee Li is a reporter at Metro News. She graduated from UBC’s School of Journalism in 2015 and worked at CBC Vancouver as a digital reporter as well as an associate producer for TV and radio before taking a job at Metro one year ago.
Her work has also appeared in The Globe and Mail, CBC’s The Current, and Vancouver Courier.
She is passionate about local news, especially if it involves shining a light on Vancouver’s diversity.
Born in Montreal and raised in Vancouver, she feels lucky to have the opportunity to report in the city she has called home almost all her life.
Melanie Matining
Melanie Matining is an activist and community organizer on the traditional and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Her work focuses on the importance of social spaces in movement building and the necessary intersections of community-determined access, placemaking, and solidarity building. She convenes communities to create platforms for celebration, healing, and just dancing it all out. Melanie makes up one half of the duo that brings us Denim Vest and a broader team to create Open Relationship, queer events that does exactly such. In the recent past, she also worked as the Community Development Manager at Heartwood, a social space that was centred on community and movement building. On the day to day, Melanie walks everyday in love and liberation alongside communities working towards queer rights, Indigenous solidarity, and migrant justice.