SPEAKERS
Norman Armour – Director of the Push Festival
Norman Armour is the Artistic & Executive director of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. He is the co-founder of the PuSh Festival, as well Rumble Productions, an interdisciplinary theatre company that continues to be a mainstay Vancouver’s independent theatre scene. Since graduating from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts in 1986, he has collaborated on over 120 works for the stage and other media. His career includes producer, director, actor and producer, covering a range of creative interests: devised works and new writing for the stage; contemporary and classical adaptations; site-specific endeavours; large-scale interdisciplinary events; dance/theatre collaborations; and live-remote radio broadcasts. You can catch him on the odd rerun of X Files, as well as films such as Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote. He recently directed the premiere of Pauline, an opera by Tobin Stokes and Margaret Atwood on the life and art of Métis poet Pauline Johnson.
Thomas Bevan – Symbolic Capitalism
Website | Instagram
Thomas is a developer and urban planner driven by a social purpose to help transform real estate for the benefit of community. The root of his professional mission is to make cities inclusive, where beauty is accessible, and places we can all be proud of and responsible for. Over the past six years, Thomas has been working to redevelop the former Vancouver Police Headquarters @ 312 Main Street into a Centre for Social and Economic Innovation.
In the evening, Thomas draws inspiration from books including A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, the Well-Tempered City by Jonathan Rose, and Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher. Thomas has a Master of Urban Planning degree from the University of British Columbia.
Chris Doray – Designer & Academic
Website | Instagram
Born and raised in Singapore, Chris Doray began his architectural career as an apprentice after completing high school. He enrolled into the school of architecture in his late twenties and recently completed his postgraduate studies in History + Critical Thinking at the AA School of Architecture. Chris is a tried and true advocator that education never ever ends. Winning international competitions early in his career launched him into the global arena, earning him commissions from Asia, Middle East, Europe and inevitably it was a short-list competition that brought him to the west coast of Canada. Within five years in Vancouver, his tenacious personality landed him the most prestigious project: The Wall Centre. At the start of the millennium, he took the position as Design Director with Bing Thom placing the practice under his design leadership and into a new context while garnering international interest. Chris Doray Studio was established in 2011 and throughout all of this time, teaching and mentoring has remained a passionately constant endeavour. Now as he embarks into his next era of his career, Chris is determined to devote most of his time towards the academia for encouraging and nurturing the city’s emerging generation of architects and designers.
Kate Hennessy – Media Anthropologist
Kate Hennessy is an Associate Professor specializing in Media at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT). She is a cultural anthropologist with a PhD from the University of British Columbia. As the director of the Making Culture Lab at SIAT, her research explores the role of digital technology in the documentation and safeguarding of cultural heritage, and the mediation of culture, history, objects, and subjects in new forms. Her video and multimedia works investigate documentary methodologies to address Indigenous and settler histories of place and space. Current projects include the collaborative production of virtual museum exhibits with Indigenous communities in Canada; the study of new digital museum networks and their effects; ethnographic research on the implementation of large-scale urban screens in public space; open-access and innovative forms of publishing; and, the intersections of anthropology and contemporary art practices.
Candy Ho – Intergenerational Aging in Place
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Candy’s Leadership Brand: An infectious force of positive energy, engaging and inspiring to build new horizons with vision and integrity.
As Element’s Director & Vice President, Candy is responsible for driving company innovation; building corporate culture on vision, purpose and values; brand building; community, investor and media relations; strategic development, and leading project sales and marketing. It has always been Candy’s ideal and passion to contribute to society through her daily work. She is grateful for a career that brings deep fulfillment and is rooted in a sense of purpose. To her father, Don Ho’s, Aging in Place model, she added intergenerational living to break through stigma around “old folks homes”. This intergenerational model won OASIS by element a global award, winning over 950 projects assessed worldwide.
Candy holds a B.Sc. from UBC, where she majored in Integrated Health Sciences, and led 13 professional health disciplines under Health Sciences Students’ Association as President, mentoring under Dr. John Gilbert, Order of Canada and Senior Advisor on WHO. During university, she volunteered and researched at hospitals, rehab centres and retirement communities. She holds a Certificate in Project Management and a Real Estate Trading Services License, both through UBC’s Sauder School of Business
Paul Plimley – Musician
For the past 40 years, Paul Plimley has been actively developing his music out of the continuum of American and European music traditions – composition and improvisation. Playing piano, guitar, and vibes/marimba he’s toured with many great internationally acclaimed improvisers and ensembles in North America, Europe, China and Cuba. Plimley has released over 30 recordings and three BRAVO TV music presentations. Paul has won awards in computer multimedia, various music magazines and books (eg: Down Beat, Gramophone, JazzIZ, Jazz Times and the Penguin Guide To Jazz), FACTOR and the Canada Council. His many hundreds of compositions cover all media: orchestra, Big Bands, small groups, solo piano/vibraphone/guitar, CD ROM, and movie soundtracks. As a writer, he has written poetry, comedy sketches, two radio plays and several dozens or so narratives/stories covering dream-like and imaginary actions.
Taylor Owen – Journalism Professor/ Writer
Bio
Taylor Owen is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, a Senior Fellow at the Columbia Journalism School. He was previously the Research Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University where he led a program studying the impact of digital technology on the practice of journalism, and has held research positions at Yale University, The London School of Economics and The International Peace Research Institute, Oslo where his work focuses on the intersection between information technology and international affairs. His Doctorate is from the University of Oxford and he has been a Trudeau and Banting scholar, an Action Canada and Public Policy Forum Fellow, the 2016 Public Policy Forum Emerging Leader, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). He is the author, most recently, of Disruptive Power: The Crisis of the State in the Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2015), The World Won’t Wait: Why Canada Needs to Rethink its Foreign Policies (University of Toronto Press, 2015, with Roland Paris), Journalism After Snowden: The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State (Columbia University Press, 2017, with Emily Bell) and The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley Re-enginnered Journalism (Tow Center 2017, with Emily Bell), His work can be found at www.taylorowen.com and @taylor_owen.
Ken Tsui – Creative Director of Here There Studio
Ken Tsui is a multi-disciplinary creative director of Here There, an unconventional experiential marketing studio that activates brands and community ideas in pursuit of the unexpected. With an inadvertent life as a filmmaker, pop-up cook, program director, event producer, marketer and clearly a person who has trouble saying ‘NO’, he continues to bring ideas to life through hybridized creative thinking and resourcefulness.
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