The Toronto Performance Art Collective (TPAC)

Bojana Videkanic was born in Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia where she studied fine art, continuing at Concordia University (Montréal) after immigrating to Canada as a refugee. Bojana is a practicing artist, theorist, and educator. She has participated in Nuit Blanche, The Leona Drive Project, and FADO’s Emerging Artist Series. She teaches art history and studio art.

Francisco-Fernando Granados is a Toronto-based artist. His multidisciplinary critical practice spans drawing, performance, installation, cultural theory, digital media, public art, and community-based projects. He has presented work in galleries, museums, theatres, artist-run centres and non-traditional sites since 2005. These venues include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mercer Union, Art Gallery of York University, Gallery TPW, Trinity Square Video, Images Festival, NuitBlanche, Bunker 2 (Toronto), Vancouver Art Gallery, MAI – Montreal, arts interculturels, Darling Foundry (Montreal), the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie), Queens University (Kingston), Neutral Ground (Regina), Third Space (St. John) Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts at Ramapo College (NJ), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago), Voices Breaking Boundaries (Houston) Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), and Theatre Academy at the University of the Arts (Helsinki)

Golboo Amani is a multi-disciplinary artist working in performance and social practice . Amani utilizes familiar social engagements as a point of entry into her practice.

Johanna Householder is one of the co-founders of the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art, held biannually in non-pandemic years, in Toronto. Her interest in how ideas shape and move through bodies and has led her often collaborative practice in performance art, video, dance and other media. As a member of the feminist performance ensemble, The Clichettes (with Louise Garfield and Janice Hladki), throughout the 1980s she helped establish lip sync as a viable medium for political critique. She has performed across Canada and at international venues for  40 years. She is also writes about performance and with Tanya Mars, she co-edited two books: Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004), and More Caught in the Act (2016). She is professor emeritus at OCADU, where she has taught performance art since 1988. 

Paul Couillard has been working as a queer artist, curator, and performance art scholar since 1985. He has created well over 300 performance works in 26 countries, often with his husband and collaborator, Ed Johnson. Paul was the Performance Art Curator for FADO from 1993 until 2007, and is a founding co-curator of 7a*11d. His main areas of interest include site-responsiveness, building community, and addressing trauma through explorations of our bodies as shared vessels of sensation, experience, knowledge and spirit. He is the editor of the monograph series Canadian Performance Art Legends, and has been a lecturer at McMaster University and the University of Toronto Scarborough. He recently completed a doctorate through the York Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. His dissertation Rethinking Presence with a Thinking Body: Intra-active Relationality and Animate Form offers a meditation on presence from the perspective of a thinking body, integrating insights from continental philosophy, popular neuroscience, and interactive performance art practices.

Shannon Cochrane is a Toronto-based performance artist. Her work has been presented in museums, galleries and festivals across Canada and in twenty countries around the world. Shannon’s practice is mainly concerned with performing the tension between process and strategy, and context and perception. Kinks include problematizing authorship and just about anything that leans on repetition. She’s also a form Queen who is deeply committed to humour. Over the last 25 years, Shannon has contributed to the development of a national performance art ecology through curating, programming, producing, fundraising, advocating and supporting performance artists and their work for a variety of artist-run organizations and independent platforms. She has been the Artistic Director of FADO Performance Art Centre since 2007. Shannon is a co-founder of 7a*11d.

Tanya Mars is a feminist performance artist who has been actively involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973 and she has done many different things. She has lived and worked in Quebec, Ontario and Nova Scotia. She recently retired from teaching at the University of Toronto Scarborough after 25 years and currently divides her time between Toronto and Shelburne, N.S. where she lives off the grid. She has one daughter and 3 teenage grandsons. She is looking forward to whatever comes next, post-retirement, post-covid-19.