Montreal documentary filmmaker Magnus Isacsson follows his subjects for as long as their compelling stories require. In his 1996 award-winning film, Power, he chronicled the five years it took the Cree to defeat Hydro-Québec’s Great Whale project. In The Choir Boys, another award-winning film, he shot footage of Montreal’s choir of homeless men for two years. He not only captured the choir’s enthusiastic receptions but also its internal conflicts. In two separate films, Union Trouble – A Cautionary Tale, and Maxime, McDuff and McDo, Isacsson documented attempts in Quebec to unionize McDonald’s restaurants. He explored protest politics in two further films, first in Pressure Point – Inside the Montreal Blockade, and then in View from the Summit, a feature-length documentary that involved directing seven film crews during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Isacsson studied political science, history, and cinema in Montreal and began his career as a broadcast journalist working for “The Fifth Estate,” “Le Point,” and “Contrechamp.” (PF)

Dubbed “one of Canada’s most compelling composers” by The Globe and Mail, jazz composer and saxophonist Christine Jensen has been an active member of the Montreal music scene for nearly two decades.  A British Columbia native, Jensen moved to Montreal in 1990 to pursue a degree in jazz performance at McGill’s School of Music.  In 1995, a year after graduating, she collaborated on her sister Ingrid's Juno Award winning jazz album for composing the title track “Vernal Fields”, and this early success spurred her to keep writing her own music. As a bandleader, she has released five recordings, including her latest Treelines (2010). In 2006, she received the Opus Award for Jazz Concert of the year for her work with the 18-member Christine Jensen Jazz Orchestra. (DN)

Photo Credit: Mathieu Rivard

A recipient of both the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal and the Order of Canada, it’s with great surprise that English folk singer/songwriter Connie Kaldor has, by her own admission, a relatively low profile within the Quebec arts communities. Although she has lived here for nearly twenty years, Kaldor was born in Regina and spent her early artistic years in Toronto, where she divided her time between music and theatre. Ultimately, music proved to be a more compelling draw and by 1981, she had founded her own independent record label, Coyote Entertainment Group, and released her first album, One of These Days. From that point, recognition of her considerable talent has spread across North America, supported by 15 albums of folk and children’s music. In 1991, following the birth of her first child, Kaldor joined her husband in Montreal, where she now manages a vibrant career outside the province from her home on the South Shore. In addition to consistent critical praise for her songwriting talents, Kaldor has also won three Juno Awards. (DN)

Inspired in large part by her family’s immigration from Hungary when she was still a child, Elaine Kalman Naves’ broad body of work plumbs the multicultural complexities of Montreal, the city that she has embraced as home. A writer, journalist, and broadcaster whose endeavours reach back two decades, Naves has authored several books that explore the Hungarian-Jewish experience, beginning with Journey to Vaja: Reconstructing the World of a Hungarian-Jewish Family (1996), which won the Elie Wiesel Prize. A notable documenter of Montreal immigrant writing, her 1998 book, Putting Down Roots: Montreal’s Immigrant Writers, garnered the Quebec Writers’ Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction and expanded on the work she began with The Writers of Montreal (1993) and continued in Storied Streets: Montreal in the Literary Imagination, co-written with Bryan Demchinsky (2000).  Naves is a frequent contributor to the CBC Radio program Ideas. (DN)

Shoshanna's Story, 2003

Exploding onto the international scene in 1996, turntablist Kid Koala (aka Montrealer Eric San) became the first North American to sign with legendary British label Ninja Tune. He brought with him an unabashedly original DJing style, in which he used elements from hip hop scratch and musique concrete to weave an aural landscape that was immensely detailed and surreal. What’s more, San could replicate the complexity of his turntable skills live, in real time, and this allowed him to garner a wide audience outside the genre. An unerringly meticulous composer, it took four years for Kid Koala to release his debut album, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (2000), which came with a 32-page comic book hand-drawn by San himself. Comics have long been part of his artistic persona. In 2003, he published the 350-page comic, Nufonia Must Fall. Later that year, Kid Koala released his second album, Some of My Best Friends Are DJs, and his third album, Your Mom’s Favourite DJ, followed in 2006. (DN)

Photo Credit: Corinne Merrell

Catherine Kidd is a writer and performer whose multimedia collaborations and solo works have toured extensively to festivals throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Her solo show, Sea Peach, described as “an adult blend of Dr. Seuss and Aesop’s Fables,” toured internationally for six years. It also won a 2003 Montreal English Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Text. Her short story Green-Eyed Beans was nominated for the 2005 Journey Prize. Her performed poetry has played to audiences from Whitehorse to Oslo, and in small clubs in New York to amphitheatres in Cape Town. In 2007, her novel, Missing the Ark was published. Kidd, who graduated from Concordia’s creative writing master’s program, is based in Montreal but spent most of 2009 in a cabin on the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia working on her next collection of story-poems, Hyena Subpoena. (PF)

Lion Queen, spoken word. Photo Credit: James Tworow

In just a few years, dancer and choreographer Lara Kramer has built an impressive career, working with several Montreal artists, as well as creating a successful full-length work of her own. For her creation of Fragments, Kramer was inspired by her mother's stories of her time at two Manitoba Indian residential schools. In order to physically understand the environment, her research involved a residency at the Indian Residential School Museum of Canada in Portage la Prairie. Fragments premiered at the Gesù in Montreal in 2009, in partnership with The First Peoples Festival, and has since been presented at the MAI and the Festival Vue Sur la Relève. Kramer has been granted a mentorship project with Catherine Tardif for 2010/11 and a creation residency with Usine C and the Gesù for 2011, and she has been invited to debut a new creation at Tangente the following season. A Montreal resident, Kramer was honoured with the James Saya Memorial Bursary for Excellence in 2006 from Concordia University, where she graduated in 2008 with a BFA in Contemporary Dance. (PF)

Photo Credit: Caroline Charbonneau 2010

Most artists are fortunate enough to have one go at success, but folk-singer Penny Lang was fortunate enough to have two chances.  Born in East-end Montreal, in the 1960’s Lang’s folk music caught on at clubs and festivals in New York and Montreal, building a strong following.  At her sixties peak, she was even invited to record a version of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” for her US major-label debut.  But the stars were not on her side, and soon after, Lang’s album, career and personal life began to fall apart. By 1970, she left performing altogether. Moving to rural Quebec, she lived in artistic exile until 1988, at which point she decided that she was ready to give music a second chance.  Since then, Lang has been accepted back into Canadian music as a folk pioneer, and she has toured internationally numerous times. Her debut album finally came out in 1991, and seven more records have followed suit. (DN)

Photo Credit: Libby King

A long-time professor of contemporary dance at Concordia University, since 1979 Elizabeth Langley has become synonymous with the fabric of the many aspiring, young dancers who pass through her studio every year. Born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1933, she got her start as many dancers do, juggling a mixture of company performances with work as an interpreter, choreographer, and teacher. In 1960, she moved to New York, where she trained in the Martha Graham technique. The New York experience in hand, she then moved to Canada five years later, where she resumed her career as a dancer and teacher. In later years, Langley has developed as a teacher and a technician of dance, continuously refining her talents at international residencies, and bringing back her experiences to her students in Montreal. She retired from Concordia in 1997 and in 1998, she was awarded the Canada Council’s prestigious Jacqueline Lemieux Award. (DN)

alcides lanza is a prodigious avant-garde musician and composer. Born in Argentina in 1929, he studied composition and electronic music and moved to New York in 1965 on a Guggenheim fellowship. While there, he worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and studied with several great musicians, including Aaron Copeland. In 1971, he was hired as a McGill University professor and, since 1974, has been the director of the Digital Composition Studios (formerly the Electronic Music Studio). lanza is particularly interested in the music of the three Americas and his compositions make use of both traditional instruments and electronica. He has made several recordings as a pianist and has been a frequent performer on radio and television. He was the subject of a 2007 biography by Pamela Jones called alcides lanza: portrait of a composer, and won the 2003 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council, which recognized his career as a composer. (PF)

Photo Credit: Drawing of alcides lanza by Otto Gal