UNIT/PITT is excited to welcome Roxanne Panchasi, Molly Randhawa and Eleanor Wearing to the Board of Directors, joining Sunny Nestler and Terra Poirier. U/P would also like to thank Emma Metcalfe Hurst and Patrick O’Neill for years of service as Treasurer and Chair respectively, and most recently, for assisting with the hiring of a new Executive Director. 

Sunny Nestler (Chair) is an artist whose work is rooted in drawing and studies mechanisms of biological life using a process that mimics DNA replication and mutation. They also work in video, installation, performance, and painting. Their subject matter cross pollinates biological processes, DIY communities, and unusual landscapes with the political affect of relatedness and adaptation. Sunny completed an MFA at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2013, where they teach drawing and natural science. Sunny is also the programs manager for the Bike Kitchen and has been involved in community bike shops since 2007 as a founder, organizer, mechanic and administrator. Sunny is originally from New York and was raised in Arizona, where they helped run an artists’ collective and underground venue that was a hub for a diverse range of activists, artists and musicians.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University who works on modern French culture, politics, memory, military technologies/imaginaries, and film. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (2009), and her current research focuses on nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. The founding host of New Books in French Studies (a podcast series on the New Books Network since 2013), Roxanne is the mother of one sassy kid, and the owner of one absurd little dog.

Terra Poirier (Secretary/Vice-Chair) is a photographer and book artist interested in memory, contested space, labour and (in)visibility. Many of her projects are activist interventions or autobiographical graphic narratives concerned with storytelling, agency and the disruption of erasure. Terra is the creator of the 2018 artist book Non-Regular: Precarious academic labour at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, made in collaboration with 26 instructors and artists. Terra’s activist art is informed by her experiences as a queer teen mother, her previous anti-poverty and prison justice organizing, and her day job translating social justice research into accessible forms. She also works with long exposure pinhole photography to explore memory, place, and their disruptions. Terra’s films on mothering, queerness and poverty have screened at festivals worldwide, and she’s mentored through the Gulf Islands Film and Television School, the Access to Media Education Society, and the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. terrapoirier.ca / @t.pois

Molly Randhawa is a writer, editor, independent publisher, events producer, radio host, and curator based in Vancouver, BC. Founder of independent arts collective and publication, Contrast Collective, her focus remains in facilitating open and honest discourse, and cultivating spaces for marginalized artists. 

Eleanor Wearing (Treasurer) brings experience from the local music community, where she has spent 5+ years as an organizer, musician, writer and radio producer. She has worked at local record label Mint Records, spent time as a volunteer and director for Music Waste Festival, written for Weird Canada, and worked as the Volunteer Manager of CiTR Radio and Discorder Magazine. Eleanor holds a BA in Human Geography from UBC. She is interested in challenging and shifting the predominately white, cis and male artistry in Vancouver’s music community, through examining how it has been supported historically and how it is upheld today. She is also interested in accessibility, and how Vancouver’s arts communities approach this issue in its variety of forms.

Outgoing

Emma Metcalfe Hurst is an artist, writer, curator, recorder, organizer and arts administrator from the unceded Coast Salish Territory of Vancouver. Recent collaborations include Recollective: Vancouver Independent Archives Week with Dan Pon at grunt gallery; SPIT with Christian Vistan on writing, experimental publishing, radio and workshop projects; Artspeak Radio Digest with Artspeak and Vancouver Co-op Radio; Acts of Transfer at the Western Front; and Coming out of Chaos: A Vancouver Dance Story with Karen Jamieson Dance. She holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and is currently an MAS student at UBC’s iSchool. She held the position of Treasurer at Unit/PITT from 2017-2019.

Patrick O’Neill is an artist and arts educator for youth having previously worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Arts Umbrella. He received his BFA in Visual Arts from UBC (located on the unceded, occupied, and traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations) and is currently pursuing his MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. He engages with local found materials, exploratory mark-making, and various forms of language to produce assemblages, paintings, and text-based work. His practice explores habits of thought and behaviour to consider the self as something inextricably subjective, social, and political.