Whether it’s vocal jazz, acting, children’s literature, or teaching, the multi-talented Ranee Lee has spent the better part of life in the Canadian arts scene.  Born in Brooklyn in 1942, Lee moved to Montreal after high school, where her first break came in the Emerson Bar & Grill stage production of Lady Day, a musical portrait of Billie Holiday.  Since then she has had many acting highlights that spotlight her singing abilities, including the stage production of Dark Divas, the film Giant Steps, and the television program The Performers. She has won the prestigious Dora Mavis Moore Award for her acting, and in 2007 she was honored with the ACTRA Award for Lifetime Achievement. In the fall of 2009, Lee starred in the Black Theatre Workshop presentation of Swan Song For Maria.  A significant contributor to McGill’s jazz program, Lee has also recorded eleven jazz albums for the Justin Time label; her most recent release, 2010’s Ranee Lee Lives Upstairs, won the Juno Award for Vocal Jazz Album of the Year. In 2006, Lee was awarded the Order of Canada for her contribution to the arts. (DN)

Born at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and raised variously in NDG and St. Lambert, lifelong Montrealer Cat Lemieux is a French-Canadian who has made her fluent bilingualism a virtue and a cornerstone of her acting career.  A graduate of Dawson College’s Theatre Performance program, Canadians may recognize Lemieux from her supporting role in 1992’s Quebecois film classic, Léolo, directed by Jean-Claude Lauzon.  Though she’s contributed to other French films since then, such as Oscar et la Dame Rose, the bulk of this actor’s English performances have been on the theatrical stage.  With two MECCA Award nominations to her credit, Lemieux has appeared in Repercussion Theatre’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth, as well as Centaur Theatre productions such as Murder on her Upper East Side and Leaf in the Mailbox. (DN)

Rick Leong is a painter who brings a contemporary approach to traditional Chinese imagery. A third generation Chinese- Canadian, he paints delicate large-scale canvasses that often incorporate snakes, dragons, and landscapes – images used by ancient Chinese artists. Leong gives life and animation to these quiet scenes, with trees, fungi, mosses, and rocks morphing into skeletons of animals or graffiti-like script. His Dancing Serpent in Dawn’s Quiet was purchased by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Represented by Parisian Laundry, his work has been shown across Canada in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Leong was born in Burnaby, BC, obtained a BFA at the University of Victoria, and came to Montreal to experience life in a large city and study at Concordia University, where he obtained his MFA in 2007. (PF)

Hush, 2010, oil on canvas

Jo Leslie has been a powerhouse in theatre and dance, having contributed to over 120 productions across the country. In theatre, she has worked out of Canada’s premiere houses, such as Stratford, Shaw, and the National Arts Centre. Her collaborations with director Micheline Chevrier include the award-winning Vaudevilles of Chekhov at the NAC, where she was also movement director on Marty Maraden’s creative team for Hamlet, Love Labour’s Lost, and A Winter’s Tale. She has collaborated with other top names in theatre, including Peter Hinton, Jackie Maxwell, and Peter Wylde. Leslie was principal teacher and coach at the National Theatre School of Canada from 1991 to 2001, where she developed a three-year pedagogy for actor movement training. Prior to her life in the theatre, Leslie toured her solo, contemporary dances to critical acclaim. She is also co-founder of Studio 303, a Montreal dance hothouse, and a long-time writer on dance. (PF)

Photographer and multimedia performance artist Paul Litherland incorporates themes of masquerade, vulnerability, and machismo into his visual art projects, which involve creating self-portraits and assuming characters. As The Globe and Mail’s Leah Sandals writes about the video Force of Attraction: “Seeing the artist's skin and cartilage turn to mere putty in the atmosphere's hands is by turns amusing and anxiety-provoking - Cindy Sherman-esque self-portraiture meets extreme-sports risk." His work, Fall Out, was welcomed at the University of Toronto’s Blackwood Gallery in 2009, while Wood vs. Wood played Berlin’s Studio 54 in 2008 and Faking Death at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2006. Litherland was born in Vancouver and received his MFA from Concordia University. His work can be found in private and public collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank and the Musée du Québec, and has been reviewed in numerous publications, including The Globe and Mail, ARTnews, and The New Yorker. (PF)

Naomi London has given her audiences big plush letters that lean over each other and spell out the word “hope,” knitted sweaters that wrap around heads and trees or sport enormously long arms and adorned walls with polka dots. The Montreal visual artist, according to critic Anna Maria Carlevaris, “engages the viewer’s imagination in play, wonder and sensual delight.” She has exhibited in Canada, the US, Europe, and Japan and has been involved in numerous group shows. Her work can be found in public and private collections, including Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts and Musée d’art contemporain. She graduated with a MFA from UCLA and a BFA from Concordia University, and now teaches in the Fine Arts Department at Dawson College. She was lured back to Montreal by several things, including family, the opportunity to live in two languages and in what she sees as a liberal Quebec culture. (PF)

Colin Low’s innovations in documentary filmmaking have made a lasting impact on the genre and his films have garnered over 100 awards. Born in 1926 in Alberta, he moved to Montreal in 1945 to join the National Film Board, where he directed The Romance of Transportation in Canada, a witty animated film that viewed Canadian history through the impact of technological developments. He moved to documentaries and directed the award-winning short, Corral. Filmed in Alberta on the ranch where Low spent his childhood, Corral eschewed the usual commentary and employed only a solo guitar piece to accompany the lyrical images of a cowboy rounding up horses. In 1952, he and Wolf Koenig directed the film, City of Gold, which documented the Dawson City gold rush told mainly by means of still photographs. Low also helped develop the NFB’s Challenge for Change program, which, from 1967–80, put film and video equipment into the hands of people from diverse communities. (PF)

Folk music may be one of Canada’s oldest songwriting traditions, but in the able voice and fingers of Rob Lutes, the long-standing genre is infused with more than a touch of the blues. Known for his deft fingerstyle guitar work and impassioned live performances, Lutes now has four critically acclaimed albums to his name, the most recent being Truth & Fiction (2009). The album spent three months near the top of the Euro-Americana charts and earned him a Songwriter of the Year nomination at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. It came on the heels of his breakthrough third album, the internationally acclaimed Ride the Shadows (2007), which broke his musical talents wide open at home, in the US, and on the European charts.  Several of his songs have been recorded by other artists, such as Bob Walsh, Nanette Workman and Dawn Tyler Watson. (DN)

Photo Credit: Tony Lazarecki

Actress Danette Mackay is the creator of Kiss My Cabaret, a notorious evening of alternative entertainment that ran at the Sala Rossa from 2001 to 2008. She introduced audiences to clowns, comics, contortionists, musicians, magicians, drag kings and queens, and along with actress Danielle Desormeaux created the wildly popular characters, Madame et Matante. Kiss My Cabaret raised tens of thousands of dollars for small local charities. As an actress, she most recently worked with director Peter Hinton in The Comedy of Errors, which was presented at the Centaur Theatre and the National Arts Centre in 2010. She originated the role of Ricotta in Bryden Macdonald’s With Bated Breath, which premiered at the Centaur, and she performed in the English language premiere of Jean-Marc Dalpe’s August, at the 2008 Playrites Festival in Calgary. She and Montreal playwright and actor Harry Standjofski are longtime musical collaborators. Born in Toronto, Mackay studied theatre at Concordia University and has been living in Montreal since. (PF)

Photo Credit: Andreas Apergis

As well as a respected musician, G. Scott MacLeod has been a successful painter for more than 20 years; for the last five filmmaking has become part of his palette. He has exhibited in Mexico, Germany, Ireland, Czech Republic, the US, and across Canada. Several museums own his paintings, including the National Gallery of Canada and the Museo Nacional de la Estampa, numerous corporate offices hang his works, and celebrities, such as Jane Goodall and Rick Mercer, collect his canvases. In film, his most recent project was a 22-minute documentary-animation, After the war with Hannelore – A Berliner war child’s testimony 1945–1989, which was featured at Arsenal, Berlin’s Institute for Film and Video Art. McLeod says he tries to make his art accessible while reflecting social, political, and historical themes. He has been awarded numerous arts grants and residencies, including two with the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico, and a four-year stint at Montreal’s Centre St-Ambroise. (PF)