Meet the Team

Sharon Stevens, an multi award-winning media artist and activist, is an instigator who’s made a career of integrating art, activism, feminism, and social justice into a series of projects that enlighten, enliven and entertain.

As the Executive Director of AMAAS since 2014, this is the 4th Conference she has produced and curated. She has developed new strategies for AMAAS, repurposed new programs from old, and has mentored many arts administrators who are going to take over the world.

Kayla Morin is a community care advocate and activist with a dynamic background in arts and cultural management and recently health care. She graduated from Mount Royal University in 2014. She went on to complete her Arts and Cultural Management diploma from Grant McEwan University in 2016 where she completed an internship at SXSW in Austin, TX the year the Obama’s were the keynote speakers. Kayla has also worked for Sled Island and the Calgary International Film Festival. She is currently completing her Health Care Aide Certificate at Robertson College and hopes to use her love of the arts and community by providing support to the diverse people living in Moh’kins’tsis.

In 2013, Audrey Burch started developing artwork using computer programming and electronics design as the medium, and exploring conceptual topics in sentimentality, generative poetry, and synthetic life forms.

She has always worked in technology, her first career was in live audio engineering. The odd combination of technical proficiencies led her down the road of media arts. She studied at the Alberta University of the Arts, and picked up a love of electronics and interactive media design.

Audrey currently researching machine learning and robotics, for the purposes of creating artworks that challenge our notion of what qualifies a life form as living or inert.

Joe Kelly is a Calgary-based filmmaker and media artist whose works have been screened and awarded internationally. He explores and experiments with analog and digital video, animation, photography, super 8, 16 and 35mm format film, and creates kinetic sculptures to present his video-based installations that blend the wonder of early cinema with contemporary media technology.

Emily Promise Allison is a conceptual artist who uses photography and performance to create images that embrace surreal, metaphysical, and dreamlike qualities. The purpose of her work is to activate curiosity, stimulate a sense of wonder, and enable a collapse of status and expectation concerning theoretical knowledge versus lived experience. Emily regards the imagination as a fundamental sense that allows us to find or create magic within systems regulated by logic; celebrating the surreal nature of existence and the absurdity of life.

Maria Wozniak is an independent artist and designer currently based between Italy and her home province of Alberta. Maria has worked with AMAAS as a contract employee since 2018. From event planning, to grant writing, to strategic planning, Maria has been involved in many different aspects of AMAAS administration. In 2019, Maria was the conference logistics coordinator for the previous AMAAS conference, On Sound. This year, she is contributing to the Out Of This World conference in a research capacity for an AMAAS media arts succession planning project.