Guest Artists

Karen Vanderborght

Karen Vanderborght (alias imagefatale) is a digital dada artist, technologist, and experience designer with 30 years of media innovation. She subverts emerging technologies and AI to question our connected humanity through phygital play and cyberfeminist narratives. Co-founder of studio KrakXR and the RAARAlab collective, her hybrid practice at the intersection of art and research has been recognized with numerous awards and grants. Her work has travelled from Canada to South Korea. She is represented by Argos (Brussels) and the Floating Point Gallery (Toronto).

Emmanuelle Martin

Trained in France, the United States, and Canada, Emmanuelle Martin embodies a mestizo and engaged dance practice rooted in her Reunionese and Indian heritage. Contemporary, urban, ritual, aquatic: her movement is at once fluid, visceral, and deeply inhabited. A sought-after performer, she collaborates with Van Grimde Corps Secrets, Moment Factory, Bouge de là, RD Créations, Caroline Laurin-Beaucage, Sinha Danse, and many others. In parallel, she develops her own choreographic work with her company Nouena Danse, founded in tribute to her younger sister with multiple disabilities.

 

 

Royden Mills

Royden Mills is an artist and contract academic at the Department of Art and Design, University of Alberta. His practice has unfolded through numerous large-scale commissions and installations presented across Canada and internationally — including at Grounds for Sculpture (USA), Terwillegar Park (Edmonton), Odette Sculpture Park (Windsor), and the first International Symposium for Public Art in Bhubaneswar, India. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts since 2017, he develops monumental sculpture centred on physical presence, territory, and the dialogue between natural materials and human-made forms. He has collaborated with Isabelle Van Grimde and Sean Caulfield for many years. At ccdMalvina, he is developing Le Cheval de Malvina, a life-size sculpture created in dialogue with the agricultural memory of the site and artificial intelligence tools.

Sean Caulfield

Sean Caulfield is a visual artist and professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta. His prints, drawings, installations, and artist books have been shown in numerous exhibitions across Canada, the United States, Europe, and Japan. His work is held in several public and private collections, including at Harvard University, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas. Elected to the Arts and Letters division of the Royal Society of Canada, he has collaborated with Van Grimde Corps Secrets and ccdMalvina for several years.

 

 

Isabelle Van Grimde

Isabelle Van Grimde is a choreographer, artist-researcher, curator, founder, and artistic director of Van Grimde Corps Secrets. For over thirty years, she has developed a transdisciplinary practice that brings contemporary dance into dialogue with music, the visual arts, science, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence. Her work interrogates perceptions of the body, its transformations and becoming, notably through works such as Le corps en question(s), Eve 2050, Messis, Transes, and, more recently, Intelligences sauvages.

Thom Gossage

Thom Gossage is a composer, drummer, and percussionist active in improvised and contemporary music. Founder of the ensemble Other Voices, he develops a musical approach grounded in structured improvisation, collaboration, and dialogue between performers. His career has been marked by deep involvement in contemporary dance, particularly with Van Grimde Corps Secrets, with whom he has collaborated for many years as composer, musical director, performer, and artistic advisor. He is currently working on the sound installation for Intelligences sauvages and has composed music for several of the company’s works, including Eve 2050 and Messis.

Guest Researchers and Specialists

Guillaume Lévesque

Guillaume Lévesque is an interactive developer specializing in digital arts. Trained in interactive media and music, he supports artists in the design and realization of technological projects, drawing on tools such as Processing, Max/MSP, and TouchDesigner. His approach combines creativity, technical rigour, and close collaboration with artists. He serves as technology director for Intelligences sauvages and will lead a workshop on artificial intelligence tools in artistic creation at ccdMalvina.

Hela Zahar

Hela Zahar is a professor of digital cultures at the Université de l’Ontario français. She holds a doctorate in urban studies from INRS (Montréal) and a doctorate in cinema from the University of Tunis and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She is a research member of the Francophone AI and Digital Chair and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Sustainable Development. She leads the research pole and the Digital Cultures Medialab at UOF. Her work focuses on digital visual cultures, ecological imaginaries, transformations in media communication, and visibility politics in the age of artificial intelligence.

Marek Blottière

Marek Blottière holds a master’s degree in cultural and digital studies from the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS). During his studies, he conducted research on the Canadian media ecosystem and AI cultural policy as part of the Shaping AI project. Since 2023, he has been a project manager and trainer with the Innovation team at the Société des arts technologiques (SAT), where he is involved in research projects on collective immersion, interactivity, and sound spatialization.

Isabelle Lemelin

Isabelle Lemelin is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University (Ottawa). Her research focuses on symbolic figures, violence, collective memory, and their cultural representations. She is interested in the links between founding narratives, identity, and transmission — a sensibility she brings to her practice as a moderator in interdisciplinary dialogue. At the Festival Malvina, she will moderate the roundtable bringing together artists and researchers around the relationships between art, artificial intelligence, environment, and territory.

Léon Robichaud

Léon Robichaud is a professor in the Department of History at the Université de Sherbrooke, specializing in social and political history, particularly in relation to New France, the history of justice, and institutions. His research integrates digital humanities — geographic information systems, modelling, and historical data visualization — to make history accessible to both researchers and the general public. He led a workshop on the history of the Abenaki in the Eastern Townships at ccdMalvina in 2025. At the Journées de la culture, he will present a lecture on the history of the Eastern Townships in the 19th century.

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