Ecologies: Spaces of Visibility 

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm | Panel

With speakers Laura Levin, Diana Sánchez, Tamara Toledo, and Luz Sierra.

Moderated by Dot Tuer.

What spaces do Latin American voices occupy within the Canadian art scene? How and where do their practices, discourses, and histories circulate? This panel invites four guests to discuss the ecosystem of Latin American media art in Canada, informed by their experiences working for, as well as directing academic, commercial, and artistic institutions: Laura Levine, director of the research-creation group Hemispheric Encounters and Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology; Diana Sanchez, former programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF); Tamara Toledo, director and curator of Sur Gallery, and Luz Sierra, researcher and archivist on the digital archive project Archivo at Sur Gallery. The guests will share their experiences promoting the visibility of Latin American artists in Canada through different formats, as screenings, exhibitions, digital archives, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and transnational projects.  

The conversation will run for approximately 70 minutes, followed by 20 mins for Q&A.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register in advance.

About the speakers

Diana Sanchez has over 25 years of experience in the International and Canadian film industry. She previously served as TIFF's Senior Director of Film, where she oversaw the organization's Festival and Cinematheque programming strategy, after collaborating at TIFF as a programmer for over 17 years. In 2011, Diana was the founding artistic director of IFF Panama (the International Panama Film Festival) where she created a launching pad for films from Central America and the Caribbean She has also held programming and industry roles at several film festivals and organizations, including LALIFF, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Miami Film Festival as well as director of programming for Houston Latin Wave. She has participated in several film festivals and national film fund juries both in Canada and abroad. Diana is currently consulting for several state and private film agencies while teaching at the University of Toronto where she holds a Master’s Degree in Cinema Studies. Her latest film series, (co-curated with Jennifer Baichwel) entitled Visions at Work screened at the Fondazion MAST in Bologna from March through April 2023. 

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre & Performance and Director of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design. She is author of Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Ann Saddlemyer Prize) and Co-Editor of Performance Studies in Canada, with Marlis Schweitzer (Patrick O’Neill Award). She is also former Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Theatre Review and Editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto and Conversations Across Borders, a collection of dialogues on performance and border culture with performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña Laura has led and collaborated on several research-creation projects that explore political performance, site-specificity, archives, and digital technologies. Most recently she has served as dramaturg on Jess Dobkin’s Wetrospective (2021) and SpiderWebShow’s VR production, You Should Have Stayed Home (2022). Laura is Director of Hemispheric Encounters, a SSHRC-funded partnership project that brings together artists, activists, and scholars across Canada, the US, and Latin America to study “hemispheric performance” as a research-creation methodology, a pedagogical strategy, and a tool for social change.

Luz Sierra is a Puerto Rican-born art professional based in Toronto. She specializes in photography collections and Circum-Caribbean photographic history. Her focus is on creating accessible tools to enhance community history and engagement through photographs and archival material. She holds a BA in Photography with a minor in Western Art History from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. In 2022 she finished an MA in Photography Preservation and Collection Management from the Toronto Metropolitan University. Luz’s master thesis project was to intellectually organize a finding aid for the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The thesis outcome was to expand the collection searchability and accessibility by translating the tool into the Spanish language. In October 2022, Luz began to work as a researcher and archivist on the digital archive project Archivo with the director and curator Tamara Toledo at Sur Gallery in Toronto. 

Tamara Toledo is a Chilean-born Toronto-based curator and is currently a PhD candidate at York University in Art History & Visual Culture. Toledo is co-founder of the Allende Arts Festival and of Latin American Canadian Art Projects. She has developed various art projects and has curated numerous exhibitions for over twenty years offering spaces and opportunities to artists of the Latin American diaspora. Projects include the Latin American Speakers Series, Sur Gallery, Art of the Americas Series, Mentorship Program for Emerging Latinx Artists and Curators, Archivo, among others. Toledo has presented her work at various conferences in Montreal, New York, Vancouver, Chicago, Mexico City, and Toronto. Her writing has appeared in ARM Journal, C Magazine, Fuse, Canadian Art, and the Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Journal of the University of California. She is presently the Director/Curator of Sur Gallery, the only space dedicated to contemporary Latin American and Latinx art in Canada.

About the moderator

Dot Tuer is a writer, curator, and artist, whose work explores the intersections of cultural memory, decolonial histories, and visual storytelling in a hemispheric context, with a focus on performance, photography, and new media art. She is the author of Mining the Media Archive (2005) and Frida and Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting (2012) and of numerous museum catalogues, book anthologies, and journal essays. Since the 2000s, Tuer has divided her time between Corrientes, Argentina, and Toronto, Canada, where she is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at OCAD University.  A selection of her writings can be found at https://ocad.academia.edu/DotTuer. 

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of our funders, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

LAMAS has been generously supported by the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration Program (CERC Migration) and the WhereWeStand Project at Toronto Metropolitan University; the George Brown School of Media and Performing Arts; The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University; the Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University; Hemispheric Encounters; Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology, School of the Arts, Media, Performance, and Design at York University; Performance Studies (Canada); OCAD University; Onsite Gallery; the University of Toronto Centre for Culture and Technology; the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Toronto; the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University; and Lokaal.