Virtual Production

IM4 offers workshops for Indigenous artists, storytellers, producers, media creators and community members to learn about XR and develop skills to create their own VR/AR and 360 video productions.

INSTRUCTORS

AMELIA WINGER-BEARSKIN

RENAE MORRISEAU

RUEBEN MARTELL

DALLAS FLETT-WAPASH

NANCY LEE

SHENAZ BAKSH

MICHAEL RUNNING WOLF

MAREK TYLER

CASEY KOYCZAN

CHEYANNA KOOTENHAYOO

AMELIA WINGER-BEARSKIN

Instructor

Bio coming soon.

RENAE MORRISEAU

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.

RUEBEN MARTELL

Instructor

Bio coming soon.

DALLAS FLETT-WAPASH

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.

NANCY LEE

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.

SHENAZ BAKSH

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.

MICHAEL RUNNING WOLF

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.

MAREK TYLER

Instructor

ASKO is a teaching lodge that you enter into with hesitation and humility. It is an immersive experience in which, if you bring an open heart and an open mind, you will learn to listen in a different register and come out of the lodge with a different perspective than you entered. ASKO is a coming together –a meeting of emotional and intellectual knowledge, a meeting of the heartbeat and the sound of thought travelling through space. It is a place that teaches us how to listen to the energies and forces that continually create nêhiyawak worlds in spite of and despite the noise of colonialism.

CASEY KOYCZAN

Instructor

To create with unrestricted freedom. To make the unrealistic a reality. To imagine environments unbound by the laws of physics. To imagine our people and stories within future generations.

CHEYANNA KOOTENHAYOO

Instructor

DJ Kookum is an Indigenous-renowned DJ and producer from the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation and based in Vancouver, BC. Known for her versatile skills and ability to transcend genres, Kookum is always cooking, keeping the atmosphere alive, fresh, and electrifying. Blending EDM, hip hop, bass music, and global sounds, Kookum creates high-energy performances that resonate with music lovers of all backgrounds. With an extensive music library, Kookum ensures each performance is tailored to the crowd, igniting a shared sense of connection through the power of music.

VIRTUAL PRODUCTION

JANA HAFEZ

DEREK JACOBY

JANA HAFEZ

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.

DEREK JACOBY

INSTRUCTOR

Derek Jacoby is a PhD computer scientist who has spent the past 6 years running a team of 12 on a National Research Council contract in geospatial analytics. During this time education/outreach projects include engagements with the Nuu-Chah-Nulth nation on site selection for kelp farms, mentorship of students in the Verna J Kirkness program and the creation of VR tsunami simulations which have been displayed to middle schoolers across the province. Derek founded and runs the local makerspace and has secured over $750k in work-integrated-learning contracts over the past two years through his education non-profit, the Pacific Coastal Computing Association (PCCA). In prior decades, Derek ran the speech recognition team at Microsoft Research and filled various roles on the Windows team at Microsoft. Derek has been involved in synthetic biology since 2008 and has deep interests in genetics and medicine, he is currently on the teaching team for an MIT course called How To Grow Almost Anything. Besides publishing highly cited remote sensing and AI research, Derek is a passionate educator who is focused on equity and diversity in AI education. Derek is a sailor and has recently built an off-grid home near Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island.