Brian McKenna makes provocative, prize-winning films on Canada’s history. A native Montrealer, he directed The Valour and the Horror, arguably Canada’s most controversial documentary; The Killing Ground, a documentary on the First World War; and Memoirs of Pierre Trudeau, a five-part series broadcast on CBC’s French and English networks. Other historic films include War at Sea, Web of War, War of 1812, and Fire and Ice: The Rocket Richard Riot. In 1987, he wrote and produced a feature-length drama on the Montreal underworld, And Then You Die, directed by Francis Mankiewicz. During his 12 years at the CBC’s Fifth Estate, he wrote and directed some 60 films, winning a host of awards. Amnesty International used his feature documentary on torturers, The Hooded Men, in their campaign against torture. He has been honoured with two lifetime achievement awards: a Pierre Berton Award for bringing history alive and a Gemini Award. (PF)

Dayna McLeod is a writer, video and performance artist whose work is exhibited worldwide. She created and manages 52 Pick-Up, a video website where participants create a video each week for an entire year. She has been invited to queer events in Poland, Turkey, and Toronto, and her theatrical series, Hot Hot Gossip, played in Montreal at Studio 303’s Edgy Women Festival. She incorporates several genres into her work, including cabaret and animation. In 2010, her film Ultimate SUB Ultimate DOM was both the audience winner and best short film at the Reelout Queer Film Festival in Kingston, Ontario, and in 2000, PlanetOut Queer Short Movie Awards deemed her film, How to Fake an Orgasm, the best comedy and audience choice. Born in Alberta, she came to Montreal in 1995 to complete an MFA at Concordia University. She says she loved the city so much that she never left. (PF)

A bold and expressive newcomer to the world of contemporary dance, Dana Michel brings a high standard of athleticism to her creative movement. Prior to shifting her life into dance at the age of twenty-five, she was a track-and-field competitor. A graduate of the Concordia dance program, she has distinguished herself as mesmerizing soloist who brings a warped and frenetic body language to the stage. In 2005, Michel stirred the Montreal scene by winning the Studio 303 Best Dance Production prize at the Montreal Fringe Festival. The following year, The Globe and Mail named her “Best Emerging Choreographer.” Since then, her career has taken off internationally, and her film The Greater the Weight won the jury prize for Best Performance at the International Festival of Video Dance and Performance in Lisbon. The year 2009 was her busiest yet, with engagements at Montreal’s Place des Arts and New York’s Performance Mix Festival. (DN)

Photo Credit: John Londono

Joel Miller started playing saxophone at the age of 10 and at 18 he left his hometown of Sackville, New Brunswick to move to Montreal to pursue his dream of being a jazz musician. Since completing his degree at McGill University, he has recorded many original compositions featuring deceptively simple melodies combined with complex harmonic structures, developing a style that critics have compared to the smoky soulfulness of Stan Getz.  Miller has been the recipient of an array of accolades over the years including the Grand Jazz Award at the Montreal International Jazz Festival and an Opus Award for the concert of the year from Le Conseil Québécois de la Musique.  He has toured, recorded and collaborated with such jazz musicians as Kurt Rosenwinkel, Ben Monder, Ingrid Jensen, Steve Amirault, and Gary Versace.   His recording career spans 12 years, including his latest album, Tantramar (2008). (DN)

Tantramar, 2007

Misstress Barbara is quite simply the queen of the night.  A veteran DJ who routinely holds court across the globe’s many dance floors, Barbara Bonfiglio (as she’s known to her parents) got her start spinning house and techno records during the late-nineties heyday of Montreal’s big after-hours clubs. In 1999, she began releasing a slew of 12-inch singles that helped raise her profile among the club cognoscenti. Since then, she has become one of the more in-demand DJ’s on the global scene, regularly touring the world to perform in the main rooms of some of the world’s biggest clubs. In 2009, she released, I’m No Human, her debut artist album that brought her vocals and love of synth-pop to the forefront and featured collaborations with fellow Montreal rock star, Sam Roberts. (DN)

Operating at the crossroads between folk music and indie-rock, Katie Moore has built a distinctive sound from blending old and new. Moore got her start at Montreal’s longstanding bluegrass open-mic night at the Barfly, where she first gained recognition in the local music community. Whether performing solo or collaborating with other Montreal artists like Plants and Animals, Socalled, and Patrick Watson, Moore brings a keen appreciation of old-time country, bluegrass, and alt-country to both her songwriting and her radio show, CKUT’s Country Classics Hour. In 2007, Moore released her stripped-down debut album, Only Thing Worse, which featured the accompaniment of Plants and Animals member, Warren Spicer. Since then, she has co-written the Socalled song, “You Are Never Alone,” which became a hit single in France, while “The Storm” – her duet with Patrick Watson – appeared on his 2007 Polaris Prize-winning album Close to Paradise. When not performing solo, Moore also plays in the Montreal bluegrass band Yonder Hill. (DN)

www.katiemoore.ca

Relatively few Canadian writers ever win the significant international awards, but Montreal’s Jeffrey Moore managed just that back in 2000 with his first novel, Prisoner in a Red-Rose Chain.  A searing satire of academia first published by a Saskatchewan small press, Moore’s debut won both the regional and then international Commonwealth Prize and launched his literary career.  In 2004, he published his second novel, The Memory Artists, a novel that went on to win the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Fiction. Both books have been optioned for film and published in some 20 countries. His third novel, The Extinction Club, was released in Canada and the U.K. in April 2010. Moore was long steeped in academia; when not writing novels, he taught translation at all four Montreal universities. Alongside his academic work, he is also an esteemed translator for numerous cultural organizations both in Quebec and abroad. (DN)

Erín Moure is the author of 13 collections of poetry and has won the Governor General’s and Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, the Quebec Writers’ Federation Klein Prize, and has been a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is one of Canada’s most eminent poets, as well a translator from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. One of Moure’s most acclaimed books was Little Theatres (2005), an avant-garde work that brought Galician and the poetic musings of her heteronym (a fictitious character based on herself) Elisa Sampedrín together in a plea for little theatres in the face of the big theatres of war. She admits her work operates on the edge of difficulty and acceptability. Among her many translations of poetry is the 2008 book she translated with Robert Majzels, Nicole Brossard’s Notebook of Roses and Civilization. Her latest book is O Resplandor (2010). (PF)

Erin Moure and her book O Resplandor

Krista Muir is a composer and musician who performed under her alter ego Lederhosen Lucil for six years until she fell in love with the ukulele in 2006. As Lucil, she played vintage keyboard electro pop and released several independent singles and two full-length albums, Hosemusik (2002) and Tales From The Pantry (2003). She toured North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe with DJ, Kid Koala. Once she became a ukulele convert, Muir composed a collection of whimsical tunes recorded with Toronto’s Fembots and Montreal producer Shane Watt for the CD Leave Alight (2007) and the concept album Accidental Railway (2008) about an imaginary city, which The Hour called “ a multilingual pop gem.” A classically trained musician, she has composed music for several films. She is the founder of the Montreal Ukulele Bizarro Festival, teaches private lessons, and programs a monthly ukulele play-in at a Montreal cafe. (PF)

Accidental Railway, 2008

Nadia Myre brings her Algonquin ancestry to her multidisciplinary art. From 2000–02, a group she led beaded over The Indian Act, a 55-page document. In 2005, she started The Scar Project, an ongoing “open lab,” where viewers sew their scars – real or symbolic – onto stretched canvases and write their “scar stories” on paper. She has had solo exhibits and has participated in numerous group shows such as Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World, which travelled to Arizona, New York, and Toronto, and Shapeshifters, Time Travellers and Storytellers at the Royal Ontario Museum. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec and the National Gallery of Canada all hold her work in their collections, and she been profiled in several publications, including The New York Times and ARTnews. Born in Montreal, she obtained her MFA from Concordia University, and, in 2009, won the Prix à la creation artistique du CALQ. (PF)