OUR MEMBERS
We are a growing group of artists and community organizers who are committed to challenging exploitative labour practices, building new organizing models, and supporting workers in the arts and cultural sector.
VALU’s COMMITMENT TO ANTI-RACIST, IBPoC LEADERSHIP
From the outset, we knew we wanted VALU CO-OP to be an anti-racist, anti-oppressive, anti-capitalist organization. But when, in our early days, one of VALU’s members drew attention to our predominately white founding team, we realized we needed to more explicitly map out our anti-racist trajectory at an institutional level.
And so we implemented a mandate to maintain a minimum 50% representation of Indigenous, Black, and People of Colour (IBPoC) within our membership base and Board of Directors. To realize this mandate, we invited an additional nine members, bringing VALU’s total founding team to 17. We are sharing this information because we believe this should be the bare minimum for any organization claiming to stand in solidarity with IBPoC people, and hope we can lead by example.
But the work does not stop here. White supremacy is the dominant, default social structure that we must continually take action against in our organization, communities, and personal lives. By centering IBPoC voices and leadership at the core of our decision-making processes, we hope to contribute to the long journey of dismantling this oppressive system; knowing that this work is forever ongoing. This is a permanent internal policy within VALU CO-OP.
Get to know some of the members in our democratic workers co-operative!
Nura Ali
Nura Ali is a visual artist, community organizer and social activist, living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. Her multidisciplinary practice engages issues of memory, place building, displacement and power.
Nura has been involved in grassroots organizing in the non-profit sector for many years. Firstly at the Al Madad Foundation, an NGO that provides art and educational initiatives to displaced children living in refugee camps. Followed then by a move to the British Somali Community where she worked for a number of years on community education programs aimed at eradicating Female Genital Mutilation.
Nura is committed to community oriented organizing and for this reason became one of the founding members the Vancouver Artists Labour Union, a unionized workers cooperative with a mission to transform labour practices within the arts and cultural sector.
Shira Anisman
Shira Anisman is a Vancouver based illustrator, working primarily in watercolour, ink, and digital mediums. She is currently pursuing a BFA in Illustration at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and plans to graduate in fall 2020. Her work focuses specifically on storytelling and self portraiture. Through whimsical illustrations, she deals with heavier topics of abject bodies, fear, and feelings.
Aileen Bahmanipour
Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian born Vancouver-based artist. She has received her BFA in Painting from the Art University of Tehran and MFA in Visual arts at the University of British Columbia. Bahmanipour has exhibited her work in a body of solo and group exhibitions in Iran as well as in Canada, including her solo and group exhibitions at Vancouver’s grunt gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gallery 1515, Hatch Art Gallery, and Two Rivers Gallery. She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in 2017, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Artist in 2019, and Early Career Development grant from BC Arts Council in 2019.
Bahmanipour’s practice is currently centred on exploring contemporary forms of Iconoclasm. She defines Iconoclasm not to reject or negate the image but to redefine it. To do that, she challenges the figure/ground relations. The ground of the image, through the history of image-making, has been always suppressed and hidden by the covering image. By vandalizing the image, the iconoclast gives an opportunity to the ground of the image to find a language, to become visible, and be part of the image.
Annie Canto
Annie Canto works mostly with people, food, and humour. She came to the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh people about two years ago to continue her community-based art education. As a graduate student at Emily Carr, she spent most of her time supporting students and faculty of colour in the constant battle against institutional racism. In general in her art practice, she works with performance, text, comics and food to acknowledge the complexities of the other and question the overarching systems that govern our relationships. You might see Annie screaming down the sidewalk in her pineapple-coloured roller skates or sitting on her porch reading comic books. She watches a lot of horror movies with her partner and cat and loves making empanadas.
Jonny Sopotiuk
Jonny Sopotiuk is a visual artist, curator and community organizer living and working on the Unceded Indigenous territories belonging to the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh-ulh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and Tsleil-Watututh peoples in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.His interdisciplinary studio practice explores compulsion and control through the lenses of production, labour, and work.
Jonny is the Vice-President of CARFAC BC, the collective voice and association for professional artists. Over the last decade Jonny has worked in the labour movement as a union organizer and in campaigns and communications roles. He is currently the Coordinator for the Organizing and Member Engagement Department for a 20,000 member union in British Columbia where he is a proud HSASU union member.
Jonny is the President of the Arts and Cultural Workers Union (ACWU), IATSE Local B778 and Vice-President of CARFAC BC. He currently works as a labour union organizer with IATSE.
Laura Gaaysiigad Cuthbert
Laura grew up with walking with her feet wet from Brunette Creek in New Westminster, a gathering place of many nations and the territory of the Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Kwikwetlem, Sto:lo, Katzie, and Musqueam. With her hands swinging from willow trees. And her face dirty.
She got her love of learning and temper from her Dad and used those traits to fight hard. When that didn’t work, she learned that organizers need to be soft too. She shares that in her facilitation and Directorship of both Organize BC and Populous Map.
Laura believes in community above all else and uses data visualization, art, and anthropology to share the history of “BC” you might not learn otherwise. She does this by building real reciprocal relationships with Knowledge Keepers, Elders, and volunteers across the province. In the summer, you’ll find her somewhere rural shuffling through dusty records, gutting fish, and sipping on lemonade. In the winter she’ll respond to your emails in a timely manner.
Zandi Dandizette
Zandi Dandizette is an interdisciplinary new media installation artist with a BMA in animation from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2014). Their work focuses on discussion and subversion of the binary found within society as a nonbinary queer individual. Their works have been showcased internationally and spans a diverse set of mediums.
Originating from Portland, OR, Zandi has run and founded a PAARC recognized artist-run-centre called The James Black Gallery in Vancouver, BC since 2014. As a previous CARFAC BC coordinator, Zandi now works for CARFAC National as the AGM project coordinator and also is the Executive Secretary on VIVO Media Arts Centre’s board of directors. Zandi feels as an artist it’s important to be involved in the advocacy and support of other artists in order to build community and thrive as a collective.
Catherine de Montreuil
Catherine de Montreuil is an artist and arts-worker situated on unceded Coast Salish territories. Her practice includes text-based sculpture, writing, publishing, organizing, gardening, and project management.
de Montreuil holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2017), and has studied at Universität der Künste in Berlin, and The Banff Centre for Arts. She has been published by Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, and ISSUE Magazine; and has spearheaded several independent publishing projects. de Montreuil is the former Projects Coordinator at Access Gallery (2017-19), overseeing publications and public programs.
She is proud to be the Vice-President of the Arts and Cultural Workers Union (ACWU), Board President of VALU CO-OP, as well as VALU’s current Project Coordinator. But most of all, she’d like to be out in the garden.
Matthew Freeman
Matthew Freeman is a writer, musician, climate activist, and general obsessive, working to harness his hyperactivity toward community and care.
Emily Neufeld
Emily Neufeld was born in Alberta, on Treaty 6 and 7 land, and now lives and works on the unceded territory of the Squamish, T’seil Waututh and Musqueum in North Vancouver. Her practice investigates place and how humans change and are changed by the surrounding environment, and the layers of memory and psychic history that accumulate in our material world.
In addition to collaborative projects, recent solo exhibitions include Before Demolition (2017: Burrard Arts Foundation), and Picture Window (2016: Vancouver Heritage Foundation), a large-scale billboard on the CBC Wall in downtown Vancouver. Neufeld has created and participates in community sharing gardens, and sees land as fundamental to her research process. She is a proud member of CUPE Local 389 through her work at The Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art. She received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2013.
David Ng
David is the Co-Artistic Director of Love Intersections, which is a media arts organization made up of queer artists of colour. His current artistic practices grapple with queer, racialized, and diasporic identity, and how intersectional identities can be expressed through artistic practice.
His work has also recently included collaborations with Primary Colours / Couleurs primaires, which is a national initiative to decolonize the Canadian art system by putting Indigenous arts practices at the centre, through the leadership of Indigenous artists, supported by artists of colour. He is currently a PhD student at the Social Justice Institute at UBC, through which he is a member of CUPE 2778!
Jen Sungshine
Jen Sungshine speaks for a living, but lives for breathing art into spaces, places, cases. She is a queer Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist/activist, facilitator, and community mentor based in Vancouver, BC, and the Co-Creative Director and founder of Love Intersections, a media arts collective dedicated to collaborative filmmaking and relational storytelling. Jen's artistic practice is informed by an ethic of tenderness; instead of calling you out, she wants to call you in, to make (he)artful social change with her. In the audience, she looks for weirdos, queerdos and anti-heroes. In private, she looks after more than 70 houseplants and prefers talking to plants than to people.
Grant Calder
Grant Calder is a community activist, organizer, and urban planner situated on the unceded territory of the Squamish, T’seil Waututh and Musqueum in North Vancouver. His practice investigates the ways in which art can act as an intervention in public space, where building hyper-local identities through collaborative community mural-making works as a medium to cross social divides.
Calder holds a Masters in environmental studies and urban planning. He studied for six consecutive years moving from undergraduate to graduate student in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. He is passionate about socially engaged art and cultural arts practices that seek to affect environmental and social change through direct action approaches. He is also an advocate with the homeless and under-housed population(s), having previously worked in Toronto as a mental health and justice case manager.
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