IF 2025 falls during the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence” (November 25th-December 10th). We encourage you to support Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis during this time.
Ben Finley is a bassist/composer. He performs in various creative ensembles and composes music that often engages co-creation, improvisation, the human voice, and environmental connections. He is the creative director of Westben’s Performer-Composer Residency and is completing a PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph.
Chantelle Mostacho (she/her) is a Filipino-Canadian dance artist, choreographer, and educator trained in classical and street styles, with a heavy focus on Punking/Whacking/Waacking. Her versatility has led to collaborations across theatre, film, and commercial spaces, where she pushes creative boundaries and tells compelling stories through movement.
Claire Whitehead is a multi-instrumentalist based in Guelph, who primarily plays violin and guitar. She has been performing across Canada and abroad for over fifteen years. As an improviser, she mostly uses violin and effects pedals, performing regularly in free improv ensembles at Audiopollination and Temporary Ensembles events in Guelph.
Colby Richardson is a Toronto-based media artist working within experimental film, sound art, performance, and installation. Richardson utilizes unconventional materials to create his auditory and visual works: compact fluorescent light bulbs, microsoft powerpoint, discarded children’s toys, etc. His work aims to embrace chaos in a playful, structural, and exploratory manner.
Colin Cudmore (he/him) is a Toronto-based percussionist and improviser. His fascination with the objects around him has led to some precarious musical moments, re-experiencing the discovery of tossing things around and reveling in their sonic capabilities. He is a local representative for the Ministry of Phonic Services.
Connor Kurtz primarily operates under the alias Important Hair to perform voice-based harsh noise and contemporary organ music. Instruments of choice include organs, turntables, tape players, distortion electronics, feedback systems, microphones, field recordings, cables, electricity, metal bowls, electric fans, tape, metal wire, chopsticks, tables, tinfoil, strings, and mallets.
Dan Loughrin plays and teaches music, mostly on the guitar. He also works as a freelance audio engineer. He spends his free time playing with two small bunny rabbits and cooking enormous amounts of food for himself and whoever else is around.
David Mott has a multifaceted and award-winning career as a baritone saxophonist, composer, and improviser in both new classical music, jazz, and improvised music. The recordings of his compositions Regarding Starlight and Eclipse were taken on Space Shuttle missions, requested and listened to by Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean while in orbit. Mott has improvised for Pope John Paul II, for the Dalai Lama’s Long Life Empowerment Ceremony in Toronto, and has performed with a wide variety of musicians, from Stevie Wonder to I Musici de Montreal. With over 36 recordings and 40 commissions, Mott remains active in a career spanning 65 years. He has taught at two four-letter universities whose name begins with Y: Yale and York Universities. He retired from academia as a full professor, senior scholar emeritus in 2013.
Dimitri Georgaras is an Ottawa-born composer, sound artist, and instrument builder. His compositional voice is informed by deconstructing the fundamentals, limitations, and chaotic behaviours of analog electronics, creatively exposing their musical potential through composition and performance. His no-input feedback practice with self-built electronics has appeared at Electric Eclectics, Debaser’s Pique, Congrego’s Palingenesis, and Club SAW.
Em Wright is an improvising musician, poet, and arts organizer who is somehow keeping it together. She hosts events including Audiopollination Guelph and makes eggs in a basement daily. In 2025, Wright released 100% Total Life Makeover with the Doomsday Glitter Posse, and published her inaugural collection of poetry Speak Birth 1997 through PS Guelph. More is probably coming, and she’s working on quitting cigarettes.
Erica Pomerance has over 30 years experience as a writer, director, and producer in documentary film. In 1968, she released an album of original songs You Used to Think, on ESP-Disk’, re-released on CD in Europe in 1993. In 1970, she had a lead role in the Montreal production of the musical Hair. In 1973, she moved to the Iles-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, where she worked as a teacher, journalist, and radio broadcaster. She has directed films on social issues—women’s rights, maternal health, cultural diversity, and the environment—shot in Canadian Indigenous communities and West Africa. She runs Initiative Taling Dialo, a non-profit offering audiovisual training to youth in Africa and Quebec. In 2020, the indie label Tour de Bras relased an album of a concert she gave in 1972 in Quebec. Erica recently returned to performing locally. Her music is folk- and blues-style compositions, and French adaptations of songs learned in her youth. Influences include Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Billie Holiday, country blues, and traditional West African music.
Germaine Liu is inspired by kindness and unconditional love. She enjoys making, through mediums like sound and touch. In this ensemble with Erica, Joe, and Dan, she hopes to contribute by bringing her pleasure, along with kindness and unconditional love.
Heather Saumer is a trombonist, multi-instrumentalist, singer, composer, mover, thinker, wonderer, noticer, collaborator, and therapist. A versatile performer, she is as comfortable singing country songs as she is improvising, playing jazz/contemporary classical ensembles, or dancing with tall grasses. She enjoys experimenting with sound in physical space, and bringing people together through experience and across artistic disciplines.
Jesse Stewart is an award-winning percussionist, composer, artist, educator, and community arts worker dedicated to reimagining the spaces between artistic and academic disciplines, and to fostering healthy communities through the arts. In 2012, he was honoured with the “Instrumental Album of the Year” Juno award for his work with genre-defying trio Stretch Orchestra.
Joe Sorbara is a Canadian drummer and percussionist who has spent decades developing a reputation as a dedicated and imaginative performer, composer, improviser, collaborator, organiser, listener, writer, and educator. A consummate sonic adventurer, Sorbara’s music draws on a vast array of influences, most notably the African American Creative Music tradition. Joe is a student of master drummer Jim Blackley. They hold an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music from York University, a Master’s degree in English from the University of Guelph, and are currently studying toward a PhD in Critical Improvisation Studies. Joe has worked extensively as a workshop facilitator and guest lecturer, and has taught through the School of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Guelph for many years. As an organiser, they have contributed substantially to Toronto’s creative music scene, co-founding the Leftover Daylight Series and the Association for Improvising Musicians, Toronto (AIMToronto). Joe now resides with their family in Guelph, serving as board chair for local art space Silence, and as Artistic Director of the Guelph Jazz Festival.
Joel LeBlanc turned to free, improvised music after fifteen years as a touring roots musician. He also works as a trail specialist with a focus on advocacy and inclusion. Joel leads workshops, community ensembles, studied with guitarist Joe Morris, and collaborates with Nicole Rampersaud.
Karl Lemieux is a filmmaker, whose work is inspired by the dialogue that occurs between film, music, and sound art. His films, installations, and performances have screened internationally in museums, galleries, music venues, and film festivals including: the Montreal Contemporary Arts Museum, the MOMA-Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, and the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. He is known for is collaboration with Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GY!BE), a Montreal music collective for which he does live 16mm film projections since 2010. He is also the co-founder with Daïchi Saïto of Double Négatif, a Montreal-based collective, dedicated to the production and dissemination of experimental films. His first feature film, Maudite Poutine (Shambles), premiered in the Orizzonti competition of the 73rd Venice International Film Festival organised by the Venice Biennale.
Kristina Guison is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws from philosophy, psychology, biology, and culture. Her sound art practice involves the creation of sound sculptures which often incorporates modified time-keeping devices, tools, and other objects. Thematically, her work explores ideas that shape our experience and perception of temporal realities through materiality and sound.
Matt Rogalsky works in live electronic music composition, performance, sound installation, and study/re-performance of late-20th-century compositions by David Tudor and other composers. He has been active in installation art, composition, and improvisational performance since the mid-1980s. He is based in Kingston, where he leads the Sonic Arts Studio at Queen’s University.
Nico is a transgressive interdisciplinary artist with roots in the midwest. As a violinist, they integrate their love of bluegrass and blues into improvisational music. Outside of music, he runs creative workshops on zine making and collaging. Nico is disappointed by the amount of roadkill they see every day and hope to one day have a car.
Nicole Marchesseau is a co-founder and curator for sound braid. Along with Em Wright and Gabz Gillespie, she launched Broken Film Festival (BFF) in the spring of 2025. Her background includes a PhD in music. She is also currently a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at York University.
Nicole Rampersaud is a boundary-pushing trumpet player, composer, and improviser whose work spans jazz, experimental, and site-specific composition. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, her fearless sonic explorations have captivated audiences at FIMAV and the Guelph Jazz Festival. Pathways, her ongoing project, unites diverse musicians through collective improvisation and community connection.
Richard Benedict has a degree in classical guitar performance from Wilfrid Laurier University and has taught the instrument at university level. He is also a pianist and creator of interesting electronic noises who currently performs with Nicole Marchesseau in their performance art/music improv outfit Special Gues*.
Roger Tellier-Craig is a composer fascinated by the interstices between the “real” and its simulations. He is a founding member of Fly Pan Am, Et Sans (with Alexandre St-Onge), Set Fire to Flames, and Le Révélateur (with Sabrina Ratté). These projects have taken him on extensive tours across Canada, Europe, the United States, and Japan, with releases on Constellation, Locust, Alien8, FatCat, Root Strata, Gneiss Things, NNA Tapes, Where To Now?, Dekorder, and Second Editions. He has composed music for film, theater, and dance, collaborating with Denis Côté, Brigitte Haentjens, Karl Lemieux, Albéric Aurtenèche, Zaynê Akyol, Projet EVA, United Visual Artists, and Lynda Gaudreau, while also scoring most of Sabrina Ratté’s video works. Over the past fifteen years, he has worked closely with choreographer Dana Gingras. He holds a certificate in electroacoustic composition from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. His compositions “Duelle” and “Nulle part à trouver” were awarded 3rd and 2nd prizes, respectively, in the Jeu de Temps / Times Play competition, organized by the Canadian Electroacoustic Community.
Sarah Pagé is a Montreal-based harpist. To encapsulate her career, one would have to draw long, constellation-like shapes across genres, borders, and histories. While perhaps best known as a founding and longtime member of roots rockers The Barr Brothers, a brief consideration of her resume reveals the fact that she’s equally at home within traditions as without them. From her solo work to collaborations with Lhasa DeSela, Nadah El Shazly, Esmerine, and Land of Kush, the mere range of sounds Pagé is able to pull out of the harp while remaining tethered to its essence is astounding.
Susanne Chui is a mother of two, a dance artist, and co-artistic director of Mocean Dance, based in Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki, (Halifax), the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. Susanne collaborates across disciplines, teaches at the Creative Music Workshop, and is part of Becoming Old Growth collective. Energized by the world’s aliveness, her practice is grounded in sensing and responsiveness.
Vee J. Sparvier-Wells is an Alberta-based Cree multi-disciplinary artist. She is a member of Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan. She interweaves land, Indigenous identity, history, and language throughout her dance and music creation/performance practice. A classically trained flutist, she holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Calgary and an MFA in Contemporary Arts from Simon Fraser University. Her work fuses together traditional language and dance with her own contemporary experiences as an Indigenous woman and Two-Spirit person.
Wounded Dog creates experimental music based on improvisation and spontaneity. Her recorded works and performances both let the story the music wants to tell happen in the moment. She is a multi-instrumentalist playing in a wide variety of styles, from dark and horrifying harsh noise to soft and gentle ambient ballads.
Audiopollination has been a beacon of connection and sound-making in the Toronto free improv scene for over 10 years. In 2022, the Guelph branch emerged, and has been inviting musicians, artists, and freaks to meet and experiment together ever since. Anyone can sign up to play in Audiopollination, regardless of experience with improvisational music, and all are welcome to attend and witness! The next official Audiopollination Guelph showcase is scheduled for early December. “A Taste of Audiopollination Guelph” will feature two sets by local regulars of the community-curated improvisational music series, in a duo and a trio never before seen or heard.
coexisDance is a grassroots bimonthly performance series, going into its 20th season, that explores and celebrates the dance <–> music relationship by presenting free improvisation duets between movement and sound artists. Our performances, held in an intimate theatre-in-the-round studio, bring together dancers and musicians from a wide array of stylistic backgrounds and traditions to create deep dialogues that cross disciplinary boundaries and speak to the questions, struggles, tensions, and joys of our time. We are proud to be a rare meeting place for the dance, music, and experimental arts scenes to come together and create an attentive, supportive, and artistically hungry community.
Wet Sounds is a performance and conversation series hosted by the Musagetes Foundation in Guelph that centers artistic practice from within a queer and/or feminist framework. The series invites artists to share how they see their work in the context of the interconnected, cascading crises unfolding around us —climate chaos, genocide, fascism, an erosion of democracy, and multiple sites of oppression and resistance—and the crises of meaning that underpin these rapid shifts.