Instructor

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is also the founder of the AI Climate Justice Lab, the Talk To Me About Water Collective, and the Stupid Hackathon.

In 2022 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP Fellowship cohort for her project CLOUD WORLD / SKYWORLD which was part of The Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series.

In 2021 she was a fellow at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence, made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF).

In 2020 she founded Wampum Codes, an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation, while a Mozilla Fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.

In 2019 she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharmsala, India.

Instructor

Renae is a Cree/Anishinaabe, multifaceted, intertribal artist involved in music, theatre, film, and television within various communities across Turtle Island. Through her community-oriented art practices, she has been a director, writer, and facilitator, dedicating herself to sharing Indigenous stories that move beyond resilience to create hope and love.

She has been the manager and vocalist for M’Girl Music, an Aboriginal Women’s Hand drum vocal ensemble, for almost two decades. Her musical works have been featured in films such as Broken Angel (2022), Angela’s Shadow (2024), and Heartland (2009), as well as in Public Service Announcements related to the COVID crisis (2020) and in theatrical productions like The Secret to Good Tea (2025), White Noise (2023), and Weaving Reconciliation (2017).

Moreover, Renae has directed documentary television programming, including Down2Earth (2014) and Quest Out West (2023, 2024), for its second and third seasons.

Recently, she finished writing her debut feature film and is exploring the subsequent steps for its production.

Currently, Renae is an instructor in the Indigenous Digital Film Program at Capilano University.

Instructor

Born November 3rd, 1976 and raised in Waterhen Lake First Nation in Northern Saskatchewan, Rueben Martell was enamored with the oral tradition of storytelling. Having heard Cree tall tales from his grandmother from a young age, his imagination pushed him to make the images more physically represented in a visual media.

His first experience came as an extra in a CBC movie Revenge of the Land. The experience changed his opinion on the industry, where he wanted to be behind the camera. Starting as a production assistant for Seventh Generation (1999, 2000) for two seasons. After working with Big Soul Productions, they pushed him from production assistant to 1st assistant trainee for Season 1 (2003) of Moccasin Flats, then 3rd AD for Season 2 (2004).

Rueben was asked to teach aboriginal youth the basics of film making. Detour Youth centre (2007) and University of Saskatchewan’s Aboriginal Peoples Program (2008). Made the jump to Directors Observer on Rabbit Fall (2007) and Corner Gas (2008).

Between 2009 and 2015, he took a step back to raise his two sons. He took work as a pipeline supervisor and as a videographer for Land claim depositions. In between time, he wrote screenplays to keep the creative side alive. He developed one based on the life of Dwayne Jocko, a known cigarette smuggler during the Oka situation entitled Jocko Road. He also directed the music video for George Leach’s Juno award winning song Let it go.

As of January 2020, he has finished principal photography on his first feature film Don’t Say Its Name for Chaos Films and has been presold to Super Channel Canada. Currently developing a tv series RedWater, a feature film script A Life Less Empty and Tied for Raven Banner.

Instructor

Dallas Flett-Wapash is an Ininew/Saulteaux digital artist working with video game design, expanded reality, and other interactive technologies. His practice is an ongoing digital reconstruction of his cultural identity – including cosmology, culture, language, and lifestyle – using video game aesthetics. Raised primarily by Swampy Cree Matriarchs in the educational sector, the sharing of practical and technical knowledge is one of the key elements of his Arts career. He has taught digital arts workshops for many arts and educational organizations. Recent exhibitions include After Effects: Emerging New Media Artists in Winnipeg at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown PEI, Azimuth Nitehi at VideoPool in Winnipeg MB,and DAiR v1:Video Games by Artists at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina SK.

Instructor

Nancy Lee 李南屏 is a Taiwanese-Canadian media artist, DJ, XR creator, curator, and cultural producer known for their interdisciplinary works. They ventured into XR with the 2017 360 dance film “Tidal Traces,” produced by the NFB, and co-created “Telepresence” in 2018, blending VR with live performance. Lee’s art has been showcased internationally at Cannes, SXSW, MUTEK (Montreal & Japan), Centre Phi, and the Berlin Film Festival.

Dedicated to community engagement, Lee teaches VR/AR/XR workshops at IM4 Media Lab and supports emerging artists at the Festival of Recorded Movement. They co-founded Chapel Sound, an electronic music and art collective, and CURRENT, a multidisciplinary initiative supporting underrepresented artists. Additionally, they serve as a board director for Love Intersections and Normie Corp, uplifting queer voices in media arts and music.

Lee operates a vibrant studio in Vancouver’s Chinatown, serving as a creative hub for cross-genre performances, workshops, and artist residencies. As a community consultant, Lee collaborates with Creative BC and Music BC, providing grant coaching and outreach to improve funding accessibility. Their commitment to promoting gender equity in the music industry is underscored by their participation in the Keychange EU Innovator program across Canada and Europe. They have offered programming consultation to VIFF and MUTEK Montreal.

As a Sundance Institute New Frontier Alumni and artist-in-residence at the Society of Arts and Technology (Montreal), Lee collaborates with Kiran Bhumber on “UNION,” a speculative sci-fi exhibition exploring 3D scanning/printing, XR, and multi-channel A/V dome theatre performance. Recently, they shifted focus towards performing dance and composing in their new show “OSMOSi: 422 Unprocessable Entity,” and a multi-channel documentary project titled “Woven Memory” alongside Soledad Muñoz.

Photo by Zuleyyma

Instructor

Shenaz Baksh serves as the Director of the Screen Industry Training Hub (SITHub), an Unreal Authorized Training Centre (UATC) dedicated to empowering diverse storytellers through accessibility and skill development, professional industry workforce upskilling, and community development initiatives. She is of Guyanese heritage and respectfully acknowledges that her work takes place in Tkaronto, the traditional and unceded territories of numerous Indigenous peoples, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat nations.

With over thirty years of experience in film and television production and screen industry education, Shenaz leads training programs in Analogue, Digital, Virtual Production, VFX, Animation and Extended Reality for Film, Television, Games and Interactive Experiences. She collaborates with the IM4 Media Lab Society and their team to remove barriers to technology, positively impact skill development and support individual growth in the evolving industry ecosystems. In 2023, she led the first-ever national IM4 Virtual Production Storytelling Microcredential, and in 2024 a series of Creative Masterclasses and an Unreal Animation program. These groundbreaking initiatives by the IM4 provided crucial training and skills development for Indigenous creatives in the rapidly evolving field of virtual production and integrated technologies.

Learn More: www.sithub.ca

Instructor

Michael Running Wolf (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota/Blackfeet) was raised in a rural prairie village with intermittent water and electricity on his mother’s reservation in Montana. His grandmother only spoke her tribal language, Cheyenne, which like many Indigenous languages is near extinction. Michael is an AI ethicist who envisions an Indigenous future where Indigenous communities, alongside reclaiming their languages, attain technological sovereignty while addressing data ownership and systemic barriers to Indigenous AI.

Michael has a Bachelor and a Master of Science in Computer Science from Montana State University in Bozeman, USA. He has professional experience as an engineer for IBM, AT&T Wireless, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Amazon’s Alexa. He was faculty at Northeastern University teaching AI, computer science, and mixed reality, and is currently the Vice-President of Software Systems at an AI startup.

Michael has been leveraging his engineering skills to benefit Indigenous language technologies and empower Indigenous futures since 2014. He is a published poet and co-author of the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper, demonstrating Indigenous values applied in technological practices. Michael co-founded and is Board President of IndigiGenius, a nonprofit in the USA dedicated to increasing the representation of Indigenous people in computer science through culturally informed curriculum, programs, and initiatives. He is also co-founder and Lead Architect of First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR), housed at Canada’s foremost AI research institute, Mila. FLAIR partners with multiple Indigenous communities across the Americas to drive the next chapter in Indigenous language reclamation through the use of immersive AI technology. Among other awards, his work researching an automatic speech recognition system for highly polysynthetic languages has been recognized with a MIT Solve Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Centri Tech Social Justice Innovation Award, the Patrick J. McGovern AI for Humanity Prize, and honored as The Tech for Global Good 2024-25 Laureate.

Michael serves on industry advisory boards, is invited as keynote speaker and to events at the United Nations as well as the US and Canadian governments. In his applied research, consultant work, and speaking engagements, Michael provides perspective, expertise, and insights that inform policy, future vision and decisions in the areas of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (XR) technologies as well as artificial intelligence and Indigenous data sovereignty. Michael is an advocate for Indigenous ways of knowing, data justice, and AI ethics, contributing to the ecology of thought represented by the Indigenous.

Instructor

Jana Hafez is an XR Director and educator focused on immersive storytelling and virtual production using Unreal Engine. She leads creative projects at UP360 and has experience teaching game art and interactive media at SITHub and Virtual production at George Brown College. Her work bridges cutting-edge technology with narrative design to shape the future of immersive experiences.

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