The Team
Artistic Director
Karen Miranda Augustine
Karen Miranda is a visual artist and writer. Her work is influenced by the sacred arts and explores memorialization, gender, loss, and interconnectedness. The founder of ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM caregiving artists collective, she is a death worker who specializes in peer bereavement. She holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from York University.
Email | karenmirandaaugustine.com
Advisory Board
Bushra Junaid
Bushra is a multidisciplinary artist-curator whose work probes the African diaspora and the history of Atlantic Canada, memory, identity, and placemaking. The author of The Possible Lives of WH, Sailor, she is a former arts manager at the Ontario Arts Council and holds an MA in Architecture from the Technical University of Nova Scotia.
Chrystal Toop
Chrystal is an Anishinaabekwe-euromix matriarch and member of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation. A social services worker and storyteller committed to restorative healing justice, she is a co-founder of Aunties on the Road — an Indigenous full-spectrum doula collective — and the Indigenous Death Doula Collective. She has trained 1,312 BIPGM doulas globally.
Advisory Committee, Symposium
Belinda Ageda
Belinda is a multidisciplinary artist, emerging death-care worker, and facilitator whose practice weaves together artmaking, ritual, grief work, and ancestral wisdom. With a background that spans expressive arts, end-of-life care, meditation, and spiritual inquiry, her work centres Black healing, sacred creativity, and reclamation.
Thandy Younge
Thandy is a queer, seventh-generation African-Canadian. A health-care worker and end-of-life doula, her background in community support, advocacy, activism, and case management has made her an expert in finding creative, client-centred solutions. She works primarily with people who are Indigenous, refugees, street-involved or homeless, and from LGBTQ+ communities.