Pleasure Dome is welcoming six new members to our Board of Directors. Each brings with them a dynamic range of perspectives, skills, and experience to experimental film and artist-run culture! They will begin their posts in January 2023.
Pleasure Dome is pleased to introduce to our community our six new Board members, Sadaf Khajeh, Erika Yuen, abisola oni, Gladys Lou, Julie Hall, and Nicole Cartier Barrera. They will be joining our existing Board members Kourtney Jackson, Jennifer Laiwint, Sylvia Nowak, Zoltan Huber, and Andrea Creamer to start planning for 2023.
Sadaf Khajeh (she/her) is a Toronto-based artist with a background in visual design, photography, and film. She holds a master’s degree in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University, for which she was awarded the Graduate Toronto Metropolitan Gold Medal. Sadaf’s creative narrative is informed by her own experience of immigrating from Iran to Canada in her teens, as she often tries to form a bridge between the two cultures she belongs to by further exploring their sociocultural similarities and differences. Her short film titled “Distance” has been officially selected and screened at Art Gallery of Hamilton’s Photophobia Contemporary Moving Image Festival, Trinity Square Video & Vtape’s Video Fever 2021, and Pleasure Dome’s Domestic Documents: Spaces of Care & Crisis.
Erika Yuen (she/her) is a 4th year Rotman Commerce Management student at the University of Toronto deeply excited about the arts, creative industries, and entrepreneurship. With a passion to support local creatives, she co-founded Influencers Business United (IBU), a Toronto-based digital marketing start-up, and is also currently the Marketing Lead for Free Artists, a web3 platform that supports emerging artists. In her free time, she can be found exploring new local restaurants in the city. Coming from a visual arts background, she is inspired to by art as a medium to generate discourse, community, and novel innovation, and she’s looking forward to being a part of the Pleasure Dome community!
abisola oni (she/her) is a Canadian-Nigerian video and performance artist and curator based in the Greater Toronto Area. She completed a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Culture and Studio Art at the University of Waterloo. Her visual discourse centers around spiritual and philosophical inquiries that range from the most mundane to the highly supernatural aspects of life. abisola’s autotheoretical reflections manifest through image-making processes often using performance for the camera. As a member of the Board of Directors at Pleasure Dome, abisola is proud to support the spirit of collectivity and experimentation in the media arts community.
Gladys Lou (she/her) is a Hong Kong-Canadian artist and writer with a BA in Art & Art History and Psychology in the joint University of Toronto and Sheridan College program. She works with experimental media including video and sound to challenge the boundaries between visual art and performance. She is a member of the Power Plant’s RBC Emerging Artist Network 2022-2023, and she has interned at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC with the Time-Based Media working group. She currently works at the Blackwood Gallery as a student curatorial research assistant. Gladys was awarded a Fulbright scholarship with a placement at the University of Washington, where she had studied Digital Art and Experimental Media.
Julie Hall (she/they) is an artist and writer concerned with perception and language. They work collaboratively with their partner, Jacob Irish (he/they), developing their nine-year co-creative practice towards sculpture, video, and audio. Their current work is focused on the materials of domestic construction, speaking on their experiences of housing precarity and settler-Canadian subjectivity, and reacquainting themselves through reenactments of situated memories. Julie grew up outside of Halifax and, before attending art school, was a research scientist; however, their interest in objectivity ran its course. Their MFA thesis exhibition, borrowers and bullies, was exhibited at UWAG in May 2022.
Please join me in welcoming Pleasure Dome’s incoming Board of Directors for 2023:
abisola oni (she/her)
Erika Yuen (she/her)
Sadaf Khajeh (she/her)
Gladys Lou (she/her)
Julie Hall (she/they)
Nicole Cartier Barrera (she/her)
Kourtney Jackson (she/her)
Jennifer Laiwint (she/her)
Sylvia Nowak (she/her)
Zoltan Huber (he/him)
Andrea Creamer (she/her)
