Elif Uras (b. Ankara) attended Brown University and Columbia Law School before receiving a BFA from School of Visual Arts and and MFA from Columbia School of the Arts. Her practice spans ceramics, drawing, and painting. She frequently employs labor intensive intricate patterns on her surfaces inspired by diverse art historic sources including Prehistoric art, antiquity, Islamic geometry, Iznik tiles and Western modernism. Her work also engages with questions of tradition, ornament, and labor, especially feminized labor. Often working on location in Iznik (Nicaea), where the most renowned tiles and ceramics of the Ottoman Empire were produced centuries ago, Uras produces works in ceramic that incorporate the non-figurative visual vocabulary of Iznik with the female body.

Kaashif Ghanie (he/him) is a first-generation Guyanese Canadian Muslim ceramic and visual artist based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax. He works at Wonder’neath Art Society and KG Ceramics Studio, which he co-runs with his partner, Kate Grey. Ghanie’s practice integrates historical Islamic vessel forms with motifs drawn from family prayer rugs, creating a contemporary visual language rooted in cultural memory and identity. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics with a minor in Art History from NSCAD University (2016).

Leila Fatemi (b. 1991, Milan) is a contemporary visual artist currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Through a combination of material and textual research, her practice unfolds across a variety of mediums including photography, collage, archival materials, textile, pattern and printmaking. Bridging themes of postcolonialism, gender, and spirituality, Fatemi’s work challenges viewers to consider their role in relation to the representational accuracy and cultural consequences of Orientalized subjects. Her work offers alternative perspectives surrounding the colonial gaze, ethnic representation, and collective numinous experiences by employing methods of subversion and reclamation as tools to resist imperialist legacies.

Regatu Asefa (she/her) is a curator and art historian based in Toronto and Oxford, where she is completing her MPhil in Islamic Art and Architecture. Her practice prioritizes non-visual sensory experiences and body engagement in the formations of place and identity, with a special focus on arts of the Islamic world. Recent projects include Behind the Curtain and My Body is Wherever it Has Something to Do as the inaugural Curator-in-Residence position at Namara Projects; Inviting the Conflict (Ottawa Art Gallery); 83 ‘Til Infinity: 40 Years of Hip-Hop in the Ottawa/Gatineau Region (Ottawa Art Gallery); and Where We Stand (Carleton University Art Gallery). She holds both an MA in Art and Architectural History and a Graduate Diploma in Curatorial Studies.