About Us

Mission

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

Mandate 

Pleasure Dome is mandated to:

• foster an appreciation for art expressed in the media of moving images of all formats
• engage, educate, and generate excitement for underrepresented cinema from local, Indigenous, Canadian, and international artists’, for people interested in the arts and 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 installation and other unconventional exhibition formats, like augmented reality (AR)
  

Our screenings are hosted year-round and in a variety of venues, both in person and online. We almost exclusively program short-length works, and prioritize the presentation of works by Black, Indigenous, and POC artists, artists with disabilities, 2SLGBTQIA+ artists, women artists, non-binary and trans artists, self-taught artists, immigrant and refugee artists, first-generation artists, and other artists from marginalized backgrounds. These artists’ perspectives deepen our community’s understanding of what “the experimental” means historically and today. 

Values

Pleasure 

Accessibility 

Engagement 

Innovation 

Diversity

Fairness

Advocacy

Staff:

Lauren Fournier
Executive Director

Contact for the Staff: PleasureDomeManager@gmail.com

Office:

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

The 2023/2024 Board of Directors:

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

Contact for the Board: info@pdome.org

The 2023/2024 Programming Committee:

The PD Board of Directors and:
Justyne Benico
Jon Perez
Zachary Goldkind
Vlad Lunin
Mark Hanson
Sam McGuire
Jacob Crepeault
Kathleen Foran-Spragge

Committee Chairs: Abisola Oni & Jennifer Laiwint

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