About Us

Mission

Pleasure Dome is an artist-run presentation organization and publisher dedicated to fostering an empowering and connective culture for artists’ experimental media, including film, video, and other forms of moving image.

Pleasure (OED): a state or feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment, or something that produces this feeling; a quality of consciousness intimately connected to contentment or happiness; an experience that feels good

Mandate 

Pleasure Dome (Artist Film Exhibition Group of Ontario) is mandated to:

• foster an appreciation for and literacy with art expressed in the media of moving images of all formats
• engage, educate, and generate excitement for underrepresented cinemas from local, Indigenous, Canadian, and international artists’, for people interested in the arts as well as for the general public who may or may not have had much exposure to the arts
  
• present a variety of different genres, styles, and approaches  from historical to contemporary strategies of cinematic spectacle, disruption and other attempts to re-imagine the experimental media tradition
• screen innovative works in engaging and “expanded” presentations, including multi-channel installation and other new media formats, like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)
  

Our screenings are hosted year-round in a variety of venues, both in person and online. We almost exclusively program short-length works, and prioritize the presentation of works by BIPOC artists, 2SLGBTQIA+ artists, artists living with disabilities, neurodiverse artists, newcomer immigrant and refugee artists, first-generation artists, women artists, and other artists who are under-served. These artists’ perspectives challenge and deepen our understanding of what “the experimental” means in media arts historically and today.

We support the work of artists who are based in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in programs like our annual screening New Toronto Works, while also programming work by artists based in Ontario, Canada, and internationally. We take pride in bringing artists from a range of backgrounds together for thoughtful dialogue and meaningful exchange, and believe this to be integral to the health of media arts and film.

Values

Radical Welcome

Connection

Pleasure

Support

Challenge

Respect

Experimentation

Staff:

Lauren Gabrielle Fournier (she/her)
Executive Director

Contact for the ED: pleasuredomemanager@gmail.com

Office:

Pleasure Dome (at Critical Distance)
Suite 122
401 Richmond Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5V 3A8

The 2024/2025 Board of Directors:

Abisola Oni, Co-Chair
Sadaf Khajeh, Co-Chair
Julie Hall, Secretary
Erika Yuen, Treasurer
Jennifer Laiwint
Gladys Lou
Nicole Cartier Barrera

Contact for the Board: pleasuredomeboard@gmail.com

Pleasure Dome is on land that has been inhabited by Indigenous peoples from the beginning. We wish to acknowledge the Ancestral Traditional Territories of the Ojibway, the Anishinaabe and the Mississaugas of the New Credit whose territory we reside in. As settlers, this recognition of the contributions of Indigenous peoples must be connected to our collective commitment to Truth and Reconciliation and to bring justice for murdered and missing Indigenous people across the country.

Pleasure Dome (Artist Film Exhibition Group of Ontario) partners with media art organizations and artist-run centers in Toronto, regionally, nationally, and abroad on co-presentations, collaborations, and sponsorships that bring forward culturally diverse and experimental media art and film projects. We are continually looking for ways to enhance the audience experience and welcome new ideas or suggestions for future programming and member interactions.

Pleasure Dome (Artist Film Exhibition Group of Ontario) is generously supported by the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts, and by our members, sponsors, and community partners. We want to thank our funders for making our annual programming and outreach possible.

“We were just bored that’s how I think it started, bored with watching the same new avant pictures hitting the screen by fathers we never wanted, mothers we’d spent our lives saying no to. We thought fringe cinema wasn’t the church but serious fun, strange new emulsions for strange new lives, and wanted to lend a stage to all those queer, trans, post-pop underthings that had been waiting all along for a place to shine.

We loved super-8 and when our friends were dying we gave them cameras and then the punks came and made zinekinos and there were performances by people who were fucking with emulsion not because they could but because they had to, because it was the only way to face the next day…the miles of tape and emulsion keep running past eyes still open for something akin to our capacity for wonder. Welcome to the Pleasure Dome.”

— Mike Hoolboom, co-founder of Pleasure Dome