Meet the core team spearheading TACLA!
Kelly Lui
Kelly is a community arts facilitator who is constantly interested in the ways digital media can be a site and tool for social change. She is a graduate from the Masters of Environmental Studies program at York University with a focus on community-arts methodology, critical food pedagogy and critical theory. Her favourite food is any form of noodle soup.
Jasmine Gui
Jasmine is a Singaporean-born interdisciplinary artist and arts programmer. She runs San Press at Teh Studio. She holds an MA in English, Diaspora and Transnational Studies (U of Toronto), with a focus on radical imaginations, creative resistance and power. She is widely known as a tea lady.
Nam Hoang
Nam is a designer and cinematographer whose work focuses on a unique blend of strategy, creative direction, and interdisciplinary experimentation. He is the founder of Makeshift Collective, a shared studio space for designers, artists, and fabricators. Nam is also the creator of the Vietnamese Refugee’s Archive, a crowdsourced platform for the Vietnamese Canadian Diaspora to tell their story.
Özge Dilan Arslan
Özge Dilan Arslan is an interdisciplinary Kurdish artist, activist, and researcher. Founder of the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) art collective Diaspora Express, Özge aims to illustrate the complexities of life within the diaspora. She is currently pursuing her MA in Communication and Culture at Ryerson/York University, and working alongside the Studio for Media Activism.
Melina Mehr
Melina Mehr is a multi-disciplinary creator raised in Abu Dhabi and currently based in Toronto. She is an art museum professional, writer, and film photographer, whose work focuses on social justice, transgenerational memory, and storytelling. She received her Master of Museum Studies at the University of Toronto and currently manages freelance curatorial research and community programming while running her DIY project, invisibilities zine.
Grayson F. Lee
Grayson is a Ph.D student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He researches Korean webtoons, the digital culture industry, and transnational culture, utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to ask how people are imagining alternative realities within/without capitalism. Grayson is also a co-founder of giant doma, where he produces podcasts, makes digital collage art, and fulfills various other creative impulses.