Our Team

Catherine Bush – Team Leader

Catherine is the Coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA and an Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies. She is the author of five novels, including the recent climate-themed Blaze Island (2020), a Globe & Mail Best Book of 2020. She was a 2019 Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Germany and has written and spoken internationally about addressing the climate crisis in fiction.

Liane Miedema Brown – Team Leader

Liane is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph, researching landscape ecology, with a focus on the effects of land mosaics on forest communities, plant functional traits and human-environment interactions. She seeks to find new ways to uncover the connections between living things and their surroundings—both through her research as well as through art and other forms of interdisciplinary work. 

Natasha Greenblatt – Collaborator and Inose/Field Trip Producer

Natasha is a storyteller, exploring mediums such as theatre, film and creative nonfiction. Her play The Election, written in collaboration with Yolanda Bonnell and the Company, was produced in 2019 by Common Boots Theatre, Nightwood Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille and Theatre Direct. Natasha is currently an MFA candidate in the University of Guelph’s Creative Writing MFA program, researching water and grief.

Madhur Anand

Madhur is the author of the book of poems A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (McClelland & Stewart/PHRC, 2015) and the memoir This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (Strange Light/PHRC, 2020), both highly acclaimed and considered trailblazing in their synthesis of art and science. Her second collection of poems will be published by McClelland & Stewart in Spring 2022. Dr. Anand is a full professor of ecology and sustainability at the University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.

Shoshanah Jacobs

Shoshanah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the University of Guelph.

Alicia Barbieri – Website Consultant and Curator, Farmer’s Market Petals, 2020

Alicia is a photo-based artist from Airdrie, Alberta. She is currently taking her MFA at the University of Guelph and completed her BFA at the University of Lethbridge in 2020. She explores the tension within our systems of care and how healing processes are not a linear path but a tangled web of relapses and progressions through mental and physical illness during and post trauma. Through handmade and photographic practices, she explores how the body can exist within systems that promote idealization and consumption. aliciabarbieri.com

sophia bartholomew (they/them) – snow flower sunset lake, 2017

sophie is a non-binary person and interdisciplinary artist. they use text and textiles, objects and photographs, performance and video to explore inter-subjectivity, reciprocity, physical fragility and decay.

Rihab Essayh – Jardin Automate/Automaton Garden, 2017-2018

Born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1992, Rihab Essayh is a multidisciplinary artist based in Guelph. She obtained her BFA at Concordia in 2017 and is pursuing her MFA at the University of Guelph. She is interested in social relations in the digital age shaping part of our identity and social encounters online. Her work has been presented at the Montreal Art Souterrain, the FOFA Gallery, Never Apart Center, Artscape Gibraltar Point and Montreal Art Council.

Andrew Maize – saskatoon (puzzled), 2019

Andrew Maize is an everyday artist whose playful and meandering research-based practice draws upon language, relationships and technology as catalysts for conversation and change. Maize is often found in a field, and he can’t wait to cook, laugh, eat, debate, dance and make a mess with you around the table again, one day soon. www.andrewmaize.ca

Emma Sultmanis – Keep Scanning the Environment, 2020

Emma is an emerging artist whose paintings, prints, and drawings explore the ambiguity of memory, the dichotomy of nature and technology, and the relationship between humans and the environment. Keep Scanning the Environment (acrylic painting), featured on Imagining Climate’s landing page, is a reflection on how technology (specifically cameras and species identification apps) is both a tool to enhance one’s understanding [of nature] and can simultaneously prevent us from connecting to a place or object. You can see more of her art on Instagram.