mia susan amir
Director
mia, (she/they) is a queer, Crip+Mad Jew of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardi ascent. mia works at the intersection of creative and community practice as an educator, cultural organizer, curator, producer, and transdisciplinary performance maker. mia’s artistic practice spans writing, sound design, dramaturgy, direction, performance, and political intervention. mia is interested in the ways in which live performance offers a prefigurative space to investigate the conditions shaping our world, to challenge and expand perception, to unearth relationship, and to engage in democratic narrative production, starting from the site of physical sensation. mia has taught and presented their research, as well as their solo and collaborative performance works, nationally and internationally. mia is also the founding Co-Producer of Unsettling Dramaturgy. Most importantly, mia is a single mama to her kiddo, amadh solas.
Contact mia at mia@openaccessfoundation.org
Image Description
A very close-up photo of the left side of mia’s face. mia’s skin is freckled and light olive-toned. Whisps of brown and white hair curl around mia’s face. mia has a beauty mark on their upper cheek. They are smiling with their mouth and with their visible eye, punctuated by crows feet. mia is wearing a black sweater with gray dots. A silver hamsa is visible around their neck. Blurry in the background is a yellow wall, a white lamp with blue, grey and white lanterns strung around it, and a white basket with indecipherable art materials.
Photo credit: amadh solas aigéan amir (mia’s kiddo), 2022
Sama Nemat Allah
Communications Manager
Sama Nemat Allah (سما نعمت الله ) (she/her) is a disabled and mad Muslim Egyptian settler living on the stolen and unceded territory of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, Haudenosaunee, and the Mississaugas of the Credit River. She is a writer, storyteller, poet, artist, student of abolition, and lover of peoples. Her creative practice and research explore the anti-colonial canon of disability arts and access in Turtle Island and the ways crip teachings and aesthetics give life to a disabled cosmology: a futurity enmeshed in joy and interdependent networks of care for our broken-beautiful body-minds. As a journalism student, Sama is interested in a cripped and non-extractivist imagining of news work that unsettles journalism’s proclivity for constructing stories of marginalization that are rooted in (dis)ableism, anti-Indigeneity, anti-Blackness, anti-fatness, anti-disfiguredness, queer antagonism, and a white supremacist cisheteropatriarchary. She hopes to always translate her work to her communities in dialects of love, collectivity, dreaming, and world-building.
Contact Sama at sama@openaccessfoundation.org
Image Description
A waist-up photograph of Sama, standing in front of a large tree with green leaves, holding on to one of its branches. She is looking off to her left to something not visible in the photograph. Sama has pale skin and pink cheeks with a short head of black curls. She is wearing rounded gold-framed glasses, a white sheer top with puffed sleeves, and a black skirt with orange and white flowers on it. She is wearing beaded earrings with a green, blue, and yellow design.
Jane Shi
Access Director
Jane Shi (she/her) lives on the stolen, occupied, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She is the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). She organizes Masks4EastVan, a grassroots mutual aid organization that distributes high-quality masks to neighbours in East Vancouver and beyond. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.
Contact Jane at jane@openaccessfoundation.org
Image Description
A double exposure photograph of Jane sitting at her desk on a black office chair, where two images of her are faded onto one another. Jane has pale tan skin and short black hair that slightly flares at the end with rounded, bowl-like bangs, with eyes closed and wearing brown-black glasses. In one exposure, Jane’s face is larger and closer to the camera; lights are directly behind her. In the other, she sits on a black office chair holding a sliced open pomegranate. Behind her is a round, moon-like lamp. The desk-shelf behind her is orange-brown with books ordered in red, black, white, and the remaining rainbow on top. Near the left end of the desk-shelf is a small brown monkey plushie. There’s a black and white ink illustration above the orange to blue books on top of the desk where there’s an open space below the top shelf.
Photo credit: Divya Kaur (Instagram: @soft.kaur)