Meet our new faculty

Reilley Bishop-Stall is a settler Canadian art historian whose research is centered on Indigenous and settler representational histories, contemporary art and visual culture with a specific focus lens-based media, archival practice and ethics, anticolonial and activist art. She received her PhD from McGill University and was awarded the university’s Arts Insights Dissertation Award for the year’s most outstanding dissertation in the Humanities. Her work as been published in a number of books and peer-reviewed journals including Photography & Culture, Art Journal Open, and The Journal of Art Theory and Practice. She has held a Horizon Postdoctoral fellowship with the Inuit Futures in Arts Leadership: The Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq Project, and was Scholar-in-Residence in the Department of Art History at Concordia University for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Meghan Moe Beitiks (she/they) works with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that examines relationships with the non-human. The work emerges as video, performance, installation, writing or photography depending on what arises from her process of research and improvisation.


She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied playwriting, acting, movement and scenic design. She has an MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied Bio Art, Social Practice, Environmental Chemistry, and performance methodologies.

She has presented work in California, Chicago, Brooklyn, Wales, London, Latvia, Australia and Russia. She has been a Fulbright Student Fellow in Theater to Latvia, a MacDowell Colony Fellow, an OxBow LeRoy Neiman Fellow, a Bemis Artist in Residence, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s recipient for the Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists.

Sofía Brockenshire is an Argentine-Canadian filmmaker living in Montréal. She studied Filmmaking at the Universidad del Cine (Argentina), received a Post-Doc Diploma in the Documentary Project Program at the University of Di Tella in Argentina, and holds an MFA in Film and Video at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.

Using cinema as a mode for excavation and searching, her films aim to reflect upon issues of displacement, disappearance, and the flow of transient lives. Her work has been selected and awarded at various international film festivals and cultural institutions around the world, including the Venice Biennale (Italy), BAFICI (Argentina), Itaú Instituto Cultural (Brazil) and Mana Contemporary (Chicago, USA), among others.

She has been awarded grants and funding from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ministry of Culture of Buenos Aires, Argentina, the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, (SAIC, USA), Arché at DocLisboa (Portugal), and the Biennale College Cinema (Italy).

She has also been selected for residency programs, including the Script Station at the Berlin Talent Campus (Germany) and the North Star Fellowship for Camden International Film Festival’s Points North Institute (USA).

Cindy Coady is a play-based drama therapist and Autism specialist. She graduated from the Concordia Drama Therapy department in its second cohort in 2000. Before joining Concordia as a teacher, She spent the last 15 years in private practice. Her work is founded on the principles of attachment and the importance of play in development. She helps parents of children with information processing disorders learn a powerful play technique that aids in reestablishing neuroconnectivity which prompts development. In conjunction with her private practice. Cindy has also facilitated trainings around play, Neurodiversity, and child development for school boards, CPE, and agencies across Quebec Ontario, the US, and China. She is excited to be back at Concordia as an educator where she will be able to teach, supervise and support future creative arts therapists.

Jens Richard Giersdorf is an international dance scholar with a research focus on choreographies of politics in a global context and as well as epistemological concerns in dance studies. Giersdorf is Professor of Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in Montreal/Canada and the former Vice President for Publication and Research of the Dance Studies Association. He has published in several journals, including Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, GLQ – Gay & Lesbian Quarterly, Forum Modernes Theater, Jahrbuch für Tanzforschung, Tanz, and Maska. His work has been translated and anthologized in the UK, USA, Switzerland, Italy, Serbia, Hungary and Germany. His monograph The Body of the People (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) is the first study on dance in East Germany, it was named “Outstanding Academic Title” for 2013 by Choice magazine and translated into German as Der Körper des Volkes(Transcript Verlag, 2014). Giersdorf edited Choreographies of 21^st Century Wars (Oxford Studies in Dance Theory Series, Oxford University Press, 2016) in co-authorship with Gay Morris and the third edition of the Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2019) with Yutian Wong. In his professional affiliations, Giersdorf is a member of Dance Studies Association and International Federation of Theater Research.

Sandra Huber is a writer, researcher, multidisciplinary artist, and educator based in Montreal / Tio’tia:ke / Mooniyang. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities from Concordia University and is currently Assistant Professor (LTA) and Area Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Studies and Practices in Fine Arts. Her PhD work combined English / Media Studies, Anthropology, and Fine Arts to look at communication with the dead and more-than-human kin within contemporary witchcraft. Through categories of mirrors, knots, and fluids, she examined how the tools and techniques of witchcraft destabilize a post-psychoanalytic focus on the “self,” the fixity of signs, and biases around who and what can and cannot communicate, as well as in what ways this communication materializes. In her work in general, Sandra is interested in approaching questions concerning the secretive or the occulted through embodied research. She wrote Assembling the Morrow: A Poetics of Sleep (Talonbooks, 2014).

Lilia Mestre (she, her) is a performing artist, dramaturge and researcher working in collaborative formats mainly in the fields of contemporary dance and choreography. Mestre works with scores, inter-subjective set-ups and other chance-induced processes as emancipatory artistic and pedagogical tools, which have been documented in various publications. She is interested in forms of organisation created by and for artistic practice as alternative study processes for social-political reflection.

For the past 8 years, she has been working on the concept of ‘artificial friendship’ which has been the source for the creation of methodological structures (scores) for exchange and collaboration in artistic research settings.From the black box, to the white cube, the classroom, the auditorium, to the public space, she has been developing performative strategies to engage in the questions of presence and situatedness, and what kind of singularities appear between the individual, the collective, the cultural and the environmental.

Mestre was dedicated to the postgraduate program a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies) in Brussels, as Artistic Coordinator (2017-2022), as Core member (2014-17)  and as Associate Program Curator  (since 2008 ). a.pass as an institution researches on transdisciplinarity, self-organization and collaboration as modes of practice that challenge notions of ownership  and knowledge production in a neoliberal economy. Mestre was latest Artistic Coordinator and co-founder of Art Laboratory Bains Connective in Brussels (1997-2017).

From 1994, Mestre has worked as a dancer, collaborator, dramaturge and/or researcher, namely with Vera Mantero, Les Ballets C. de la B. with Hans Van den Broeck and Christine de Smedt, Martin Nachbar, Kate Macintosh, Mette Edvardsen, Nikolaus Gansterer, Elke Van Campenhout, Kristien Van den Brande, Varinia Canto Vila, Heike Langsdorf – Radical_Hope, Daniel Kok and Miho Shimizu, David Helbich, Philippine Hoegen and Marcos Simões among others.

Marianna Milhorat is an American-Canadian filmmaker and artist. She has presented her work at festivals and galleries worldwide, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Whitechapel Gallery, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Curtocircuíto International Film Festival, Kassel Dokfest, Videonale, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Her work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Film Board of Canada, Finlandia Foundation National, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Milhorat’s films examine ecology through human and nonhuman relations. Taking extended approaches to nonfiction film, her work pushes form and aesthetic to provoke new ways of seeing and thinking about the current geologic era and to create a more fluid, evolving picture of nature. She is currently in post-production on her debut feature, Nightwatchers, a creative non-fiction film tracking the state of contemporary wildlife conservation through scientists and citizen scientists involved in nocturnal wildlife monitoring efforts. Milhorat’s teaching engages students in some of the same questions that drive her research: What forms can lead to more nuanced understandings of complex contemporary realities and what it means to be alive today? Milhorat holds an MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University. She previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Loyola University, Chicago; the Illinois Institute of Art – Chicago; and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Bea Parsons is a printmaker, drawer, and painter, originally from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, now living and working in Montreal. She holds a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City. She is a full-time professor of Painting and Drawing at Concordia. Her practice has primarily focused on black and white monoprints and, most recently, coloured pencil drawings on archival paper. Her haunting and seductive world is filled with characters, landscapes, and symbols culled from a wide variety of sources, from the personal, to the esoteric, to the art historical. A highly recognizable and intimate style of graphic and abstracted motifs congregates in these compositions, creating a pleasurable and emotionally charged pictorial atmosphere. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Franz Kaka in Toronto and Tappeto Volante in New York City. Her works have been acquired by the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Musée de Joliette, Hydro-Québec, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and Equitable Bank.

Amanda Power is an art therapist and artist. Originally from Newfoundland, she’s called Montreal home for the last eight years. Amanda works with vulnerable youth in a youth protection setting on a multi-disciplinary team. Her focus is working with clients using trauma and attachment informed approaches, building on their resilience and strengths through accessing their creativity. She has been supervising internships at the youth protection agency and is dedicated to supporting art therapists in training to build their clinical skills and identities as art therapists. Teaching in the art therapy program has brought things full circle as Amanda is also a graduate of the masters program.

Florence Brisson-Dyens is an experienced art therapist, couple and family therapist, and psychotherapist with nearly a decade of experience working in private practice and university settings. She has served a wide variety of populations in the Montreal community and most recently in Luxembourg including children, teens, couples, and university students. Florence was appointed LTA Lecturer for the 2022-2023 academic year at Concordia University in the department of Creative Arts Therapy. She is passionate about helping students understand the value of theory and innovative art-therapy interventions in practical settings, as well as supervising students to improve their applied clinical skills.   

Dr. Farrukh Rafiq is an art historian and art educator originally from Mississauga, Ontario. Since receiving his doctorate at Queen's University in art history, he has been teaching art history courses at the University of Toronto. His recent focus in art history has been on decolonization efforts and experimenting with inclusive pedagogies in his classrooms. His teaching methodology focuses on amalgamating a multitude of interdisciplinary lenses to provide learners with a varied and comprehensive approach to art. He has also developed and taught a variety of visual and digital arts courses at a number of art galleries and museums in the Greater Toronto Area. He utilized these efforts to reimagine and rebuild education departments at institutions such as the Gardiner Museum and the Art Gallery of Burlington. 

Balbir K. Singh is Assistant Professor of Art and Racial Justice in the Department of Art History, as well as the Faculty for Fine Arts nominee for a Tier II Canada Research Chair. She is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in cultural theory and ethnic studies. Broadly, her work centers the racial, gendered, and sexual politics of embodiment, surveillance, and policing. Currently, she is working on her first book, “Militant Bodies: Racial/Religious Opacity and Minoritarian Self-Defense,” which takes a materialist feminist approach to explore questions that center post-9/11 racial and religious hyper-policing of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Through a politics of religious dress, hair, and adornment, this project interrogates the related racial, gendered, and queer life of turbaned and hijabi bodies to analyze the twinned expansion of contemporary Islamophobia and surveillance culture. She received her PhD from the University of Washington, held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign and the University of Texas - Austin, and was an assistant professor at Virginia Tech. She currently serves as Reviews Editor for the College Art Association’s Art Journal. Singh has been published in journals including Sikh Formations, Critical Ethnic Studies, QED,Surveillance and Society, Rhizomes, and the Journal of Asian American Studies.

Baron Tymas comes to Concordia’s Department of Music from North Carolina Central University, where he taught guitar, jazz arranging, jazz composition, jazz combos and other courses for over twenty years. His NCCU jazz combos earned national recognition in the U.S, both through live performances and recordings. He has given many clinics, workshops and lectures on five continents. He has released three CDs as a leader. His 2017 release, Montréal, was recorded in Concordia’s Oscar Peterson Concert Hall. It features Concordia professors Charles Ellison, Jeri Brown and Joshua Rager and was engineered by Mark Corwin.  The recording is a collection of original compositions written during Baron’s 2015 Fulbright Research Fellowship and was dedicated to life in this beautiful city. His two previous CDs are Insight at Midnight (2009) and Blues for the Tribe (2007).  

Baron recently played guitar on the 360 Jazz Initiative recording Please Only Tell Me Good News (Summit Records, 2022), which featured Roland Barber, Rahsaan Barber, Stephen Anderson and Montréal’s own Rachel Therrien. He has performed dates with many great artists and groups, including Branford Marsalis, René Marie, Dennis Chambers, Yoron Israel, Black Sheep reggae band and the NC Symphony Orchestra.

A Washington, DC native, Baron earned a master of music and a bachelor of arts in English from Howard University.

Andrea Young is a performer-composer of instrumental and electroacoustic music, specializing in a sound-controlling voice enabled through feature extraction and data-driven live electronics.  

Her scores, recordings and articles have been published by Redshift Records, The Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press USA), Éditions Musique Sisyphe (Moncton NB, Canada), EXOENDONOISE (Canada/USA), and La Camera Verde (IT). Recent commissions have been for No Hay Banda, Architek Percussion, Quatuor Bozzini and Array Music. She is a member of Phth (experimental vocal ensemble), S[ILK]S (duo with Jennifer Thiessen), and Teo Dora An Drea (duo with Teodora Stepančić). Andrea has been working with poet Donato Mancini, cinematographer Van Royko and post-disciplinary artists Electronic Countermeasures (Emery Martin and Kerstin Hovland).

Compositions have been presented in Canada by The Music Gallery, Array music, No Hay Banda, Vancouver New Music, Calgary New Works, Open Space New Music and Innovations en Concert. She has performed her work internationally for REDCAT and Automata (Los Angeles), eavesdropping (London UK), and ICMC (Athens, Greece).

Andrea studied vocal performance and composition at The University of Victoria (2001), electronic music at The Institute of Sonology, The Hague (2007), and completed the Performer-Composer DMA from The California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (2014). Her creative work, travel and studies have been enabled by several awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des Arts du Quebec, the BC Arts Council and The Herb Alpert School of Music.