Meet the cluster members below.
People
Principal Investigator
Metzer is a historian of twentieth and twenty-first century music. His work covers a variety of genres, including popular music, classical, and jazz. He nimbly jumps from Barry Manilow’s power ballads to songs by Aaron Copland. His research explores cultural issues of race, sexuality, gender, and emotional expression. A new project looks at how musicians have confronted the toll of incarceration in American society and how musical works have shaped understandings of incarceration.
Leadership Team
Alison Ariss
Curatorial Assistant
Alison is a PhD student in AHVA at UBC. She earned her art history MA at UBC, and holds a BA Honours in anthropology from Waterloo. As a settler-scholar, Ariss finds her research is an (un)learning experience that centers Salish weaving practices, and is guided by Indigenous feminist approaches and critiques of institutions. Prior to her return to graduate studies in 2015, Alison worked in research development, including pre-award administration and management roles at the University of Winnipeg and McMaster, to consultative roles for research partnerships with Western and UBC.
Lorna Brown
Associate Director/Curator
Actively engaged as a visual artist, writer, educator and editor, Brown has been exhibiting her work internationally since 1984. She was the Director/Curator of Artspeak Gallery from 1999 to 2004 and is a founding member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a collective of artists, architects and curators presenting projects that consider the varying conditions of public places and public life. She has taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Simon Fraser University.
Carrabré has been active as a composer, administrator, educator, radio host and conductor. For well over a decade, he worked closely with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, including six seasons as composer-in-residence and co-curator of the orchestra’s New Music Festival. Also active in the media, Carrabré served two seasons as the weekend host of CBC Radio 2’s contemporary music show The Signal.
Barbara Cole
Curator of Outdoor Art
Barbara is the founder and principal of Cole Projects. She is an artist, curator, educator and curatorial consultant in public art. In recent years, she has specialized in developing frameworks to support changing programs of public art that require the cooperation of multiple partners. She is the founder and a producing member of Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a non-profit society that collaborates and shares resources to present artworks that consider the aesthetic, economic and regulatory conditions of public places and public life.
Candice Hopkins
Independent Curator
Hopkins is a curator and writer of Tlingit descent originally from Whitehorse, Yukon. She is Senior Curator of the Toronto Biennial of Art and co-curator of the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada. She was a part of the curatorial team for documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany and a co-curator of the major exhibitions Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, and the 2014 SITElines biennial, Unsettled Landscapes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Jay Pahre
Cluster Project Coordinator
Pahre is a queer and trans settler artist, writer, and cultural worker currently based on the unceded territories of the of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. Weaving between drawing, sculpture and writing, his work queries trans and queer nonhuman ecologies at points of intersection with the human. He received his BFA in Painting and BA in East Asian Studies from the University of Illinois in 2014, and went on to complete his MA in East Asian Studies in 2017, and MFA in Visual Art at UBC in 2020. His work has been exhibited across the US and Canada.
Dylan Robinson
Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts
Robinson is a xwélméxw artist and writer of Stó:lō descent. His current work focuses on the return of Indigenous songs to communities who were prohibited by law to sing them as part of the Indian Act from 1882‒1951. Robinson’s previous publications include the edited volumes Music and Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples of North America (2018); Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2016) and Opera Indigene (2011). His monograph, Hungry Listening, is forthcoming in early 2020 with Minnesota University Press.
Shelly Rosenblum
Curator of Academic Programs
Rosenblum’s role at the Belkin is to develop programs that increase civic and academic engagement in the University community and beyond. She received her PhD at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her awards include Fellowships from the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University and a multi-year Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Department of English, UBC. She was selected for the Summer Leadership Institute of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University (2014).
Naomi Sawada
Manager of Public Programs
Naomi Sawada is Manager of Public Programs at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She received a BA (Anthropology 1995) and Diploma (Art History 1996) from UBC. She has worked in exhibitions research and programs at Science World in Vancouver (1986-1991) and at the UBC Museum of Anthropology (1991-1995). As co-curator of exhibitions and curator of programs, she helped to develop the mandate and operating policies at the Nikkei National Museum in Burnaby (1995-2000).
Cluster Members
Erica is an undergraduate student at UBC pursuing a degree in trumpet performance and a Masters of Management. She is proud to have been a part of multiple Soundings projects, including Raven Chacon's American Ledger no. 1 and Athena Lordedo's Strata Tempora.
Olivia Hall is a soon-to-be graduate of the UBC BA Honours program in Music. Born and raised in Vancouver, she started playing music in guitar classes at the Sarah McLachlan School of Music. At UBC, she has studied both art music and popular music, producing a research project on punk music as her honours essay. She is interested in how the music we carry with us interacts with the events and issues of our world.
Germaine Koh is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver, unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Her work often adapts familiar situations, everyday actions and common spaces to encourage connections between people, technology and natural systems. Her ongoing projects include Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing, and League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice.
Catherine Laub is a PhD student in musicology at UBC, living and working on the traditional and unceded territories of the kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) peoples. She is also a singer, composer, producer, teacher, and mushroom forager. Her practices of creation and consumption reflect a collection of positionalities, including: queer, feminist, antiracist, transnational, and settler.
Matheus Moraes is a trumpet player and a Doctoral Fellow currently enrolled in the Doctor of Musical Arts program at the University of British Columbia. He received his B.Mus. in Trumpet from Rio de Janeiro Federal University under the tutelage of David Alves, and his M.Mus. degree in Orchestral Instrument from the University of British Columbia under Larry Knopp.
Peter Morin is a Tahltan Nation artist and curator. Throughout his artistic practice, Morin investigates the impact zones that occur when Indigenous practices collide with Western-settler colonialism. Morin’s artworks are shaped, and reshaped, by Tahltan epistemological production and often takes the form of performance interventions. In addition to his exhibition history, Morin has curated exhibition for the Museum of Anthropology, Western Front, Bill Reid Gallery and Burnaby Art Gallery.
Candice Newberry is a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia where she studies orchestral trumpet performance. She is an active brass teacher and performer in the lower mainland. Prior to returning to studies at UBC, Candice held the second trumpet position with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra. She currently studies with Larry Knopp of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and will be graduating in 2024.
Heidi Aklaseaq Senungetuk is the granddaughter of Helen Aklaseok and Willie Senungetuk, and the daughter of Ron and Turid Senungetuk. She is an Inupiaq scholar of ethnomusicology and a musician, who has focused her research in Indigenous people practicing and performing music and dance in urban areas throughout the Arctic. Currently, she serves the University of Alaska Anchorage as the first postdoctoral fellow in Alaska Native Studies.
Joseph Stacy is an American pianist currently based on the unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Squamish, and Tsleil-watuth First Nations. He graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University in 2019 with a BMus in Piano Performance/Pedagogy and is now entering the final semester of his MMus studies at the University of British Columbia. In his endeavors as both a performer and orator, Joseph prioritizes social justice engagement, understanding the impact of musical performance, collaboration, and teaching.
Tania Willard (Secwépemc Nation) works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production. Often working with bodies of knowledge and skills that are conceptually linked to her interest in intersections between Aboriginal and other cultures. Willard has worked as a curator in residence with grunt gallery and Kamloops Art Gallery.
Walker Williams is an eclectic composer from rural West Virginia, whose compositional style runs the gamut from conservative tonality to avant-garde performance art (admittedly with an overall tendency towards writing ‘pretty music’). Walker is currently pursuing doctoral studies in composition at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and he holds a MMus in composition from UBC, and a BA in music composition from Shepherd University in West Virginia.
Caroni is currently studying at UBC in the Masters of Choral Conducting degree program. She grew up on Salt Spring Island, where she began her career as a choral director. She is currently the artistic Director of both Viva Chorale and the Makana Youth Choir both located on Salt Spring. Caroni is also a music teacher with a Bachelor of Education from UBC and a Bachelor of Jazz Studies from Capilano University. As a performer and educator she loves to share her enthusiasm for music with anyone she meets.
Trainees
Sasha is a Malaysian composer currently based on the unceded, territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil- Waututh peoples. She obtained a BMus in Composition from the University of Oregon, and is now in the 2nd year of her graduate degree in Composition at the University of British Columbia. Her music has been performed at the Concerts at First series, Oregon Bach Festival, Oregon Composers Forum, and the Music Today Festival. Her most recent work was premiered at the West Coast Student Composers' Symposium by UBC's Contemporary Players.
Marcus Prasad
Academic Programs Assistant
Marcus is an art historian and writer currently residing on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He has earned his MA (2020) and BA Honours (2018) in Art History and Theory from the University of British Columbia, with a research focus on spatial theory, temporality, and queer theory as they relate to American contemporary horror film and postwar art.