Sir David Adjaye OBE is recognized as a leading architect of his generation. Based in London, U.K., Adjaye was born in Tanzania to Ghanaian parents and his influences range from contemporary art, music and science to African art forms and the civic life of cities. Since forming Adjaye Associates in 2000, he has won several prestigious commissions, including the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo (2005), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver (2007), and the forthcoming new home for the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2009 a team led by Adjaye was selected to design the new $360 million Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington DC., which opened in September 2016 to universal praise. Adjaye frequently collaborates with contemporary artists on art and installation projects, including Chris Ofili and Olafur Eliasson. In 2015 a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work to date was held at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Christi Belcourt is a Michif (Métis) visual artist and author whose ancestry originates from the Métis historic community of Manitou Sakhigan (Lac Ste. Anne) Alberta, Canada. Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Art Gallery of Ontario, where in 2015 her painting The Wisdom of the Universe was voted by gallery visitors as “People’s Choice”, their favourite work in the collection. She is the co-founder of Walking with our Sisters, a touring memorial project that honours the lives of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada and the United States. In 2015, her work gained international recognition when she a collaborated with the fashion house Valentino to create a collection that featured prints based on her work Water Song. In 2016, she received a Governor General’s Innovation Award for her work to raise awareness about Indigenous issues in Canada.

Junot Díaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has centred the American immigrant experience in his work. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, he is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the recipient of the Ella Baker Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, recognizing writers for work that advances social justice.

Paul Gross is one of Canada’s most popular actors on stage and screen, internationally known for his role as Constable Benton Fraser on the award-winning drama series Due South. Gross wrote, directed and starred in the films Hyena Road, Passchendaele and Men with Brooms, which was the highest-grossing English-language Canadian film of the previous 20 years. Passchendaele was the highest grossing Canadian film of 2008 and won five Genie Awards, including Best Picture. He has won multiple Gemini awards for his performances, including two for the critically acclaimed series Slings & Arrows. A recipient of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and the Earle Grey Award, a lifetime achievement honour from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, Gross was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2013.

Matt Galloway is the host of Metro Morning on CBC Radio One, 99.1 FM, and the co-host of Podcast Playlist on CBC Radio One. He anchored CBC Radio's coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics live from Beijing, and the 2010 and 2014 Winter Olympics. In 2012, he was given the Excellence In Community Service Award for addressing issues confronting diverse communities by the Intercultural Dialogue Institute, and in 2013 received the Award for Diversity and Social Inclusion by the Tagore Anniversary Celebrations Committee of Toronto. Toronto Life Magazine named him one of the city’s most influential people in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and he also received the African Canadian Achievement Award for excellence in Media.

Whitehorse is the Toronto-born, JUNO-winning folk-rock duo of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland. Their debut full-length album, The Fate of the World Depends on This Kiss, was shortlisted for the 2013 Polaris Music Prize. Their follow up, Leave No Bridge Unburned, won the 2016 JUNO for Alternative Album of the Year. Their newest release, The Northern South Vol. 1, finds the duo expanding their musical range further into psychedelic-tinged blues rock. They’ve toured across Canada and internationally and are renowned for their live show, which shows off Doucet’s incredible guitar skills and McClelland’s powerhouse voice.

Salman Rushdie is the award-winning author of thirteen novels— including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and The Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and his newest novel, The Golden House. He has also published a book of stories, East, West, and four works of nonfiction—Joseph Anton, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and co-edited two anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories 2008. His books have been translated into over forty languages. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN America, Rushdie holds the rank of Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres – France’s highest artistic honour, and was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

Andrea Fraser is one of the most provocative and influential artists of her generation. Fraser’s work spans performance, video, and a range of other mediums and appears both as a social critique and an ethical investigation. Fraser famously posed the question of whether art is, metaphorically, prostitution by having sex with a collector on camera in Untitled (2003). Her site-specific project Down the River for the Whitney Museum of American Art, used audio recorded at Sing Sing prison to bridge the social, cultural, and geographic divide separating museums from correctional facilities.
Surveys of her work have been presented at museums around the world, and her books include the forthcoming 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics; Andrea Fraser: Works 1984-2003; Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser; Texts, Scripts, Transcripts; and Andrea Fraser. Fraser is Department Chair and Professor, Interdisciplinary Studio in the Department of Art at UCLA.

Charles Officer’s filmmaking career began with a slate of award-winning short films that premiered at international film festivals around the world. He is an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre Director Residency where his debut fiction feature Nurse.Fighter.Boy was produced. The film premiered at TIFF ’08 and earned 10 Genie Nominations. Charles followed with his first feature documentary Mighty Jerome that won 4 Leo Awards in 2011 and a 2012 Emmy Award for Best Historical Documentary.

Officer directed Stone Thrower: The Chuck Ealey Story for the documentary series Engraved On A Nation (2014 CSA for best documentary series). CBC Firsthand commissioned The Skin We’re In, featuring journalist and activist Desmond Cole in 2017. His latest feature documentary, Unarmed Verses premiered in 2017 and won Best Canadian Feature Awards at Hot Docs, VIFF (Vancouver International Film Festival) and the People’s Choice Award at 2018 TIFF Top Ten Canadian Film Festival.

Charles recently completed directing multiple episodes of the dramatic series 21 Thunder, premiering internationally on Netflix in 2018. He is currently in post-production with Invisible Essence: Le Petit Prince, a feature documentary based on the international bestselling novella. Projects in development are the feature crime drama Akilla’s Escape, and a limited-series adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel Son of a Smaller Hero.

Iskwé bridging of cross-cultural aesthetics while exploring her own struggle to both fit into and breakaway from modern Western archetypes has been an important part of her artistic vision since the release of her WCMA nominated self-titled debut album in late 2013. Her debut single “Nobody Knows,” produced by Juno Award nominees The Darcys and featured in the Netflix series Between, captivated audiences by turning a stark spotlight on the more than 1200 missing and murdered Indigenous women here in Canada.

Unafraid to challenge the convictions of her detractors by honouring her heritage, standing steadfast in her viewpoints, Iskwé’s artistry knows no bounds. Blending soulful, breathlessly delivered lyrics coloured by the many shades of human nature with a sonic palette that takes its cue from the shadowy atmospherics of the 1990s Bristol sound, Iskwé’s music revels in her strength of self and that is her true rallying cry.

Iskwé recently garnered a win at the 2017 West Coast Music Awards (WCMA) for Electronic/Dance Artist of the Year and was announced as a judge for CBC Music’s 2017 Canadian Music Class Challenge, in association with Musicounts.

Anna Maria Tremonti has been the host of CBC Radio One’s The Current since it first burst onto the airwaves in November of 2002. The Current marked her return to radio after 19 years with CBC Television, including two years as a host of the flagship investigative program the fifth estate and nine years as a foreign correspondent for The National. Tremonti has won two Gemini awards, and a life Achievement Award from Women in Film and Television Toronto. During her time at The Current, she and the program have won numerous awards at the New York Festivals, including: Gold for Best News Documentary of Special (2013) and Gold for Best Talk Special: Interview (2009). With Tremonti at the helm, The Current in 2012 also won the Canadian Journalism Foundation's Excellence in Journalism Award (Large Media Category), and was a finalist for that top honour in 2013.