Marlon Griffith attended the John S. Donaldson Technical Institute, Port of Spain, Trinidad. He has been an artist in residence at Bag Factory and City + Suburban Studios in Johannesburg and the Mino Paper Art Village in Japan. He has also participated in workshops in Martinique and Guadeloupe and has shown his work internationally in New York, Johannesburg, Kingston, Gwangju, Cape Town, and Toronto, among other locations.

Marlon Griffith is 2010 Commonwealth Connections grant recipient and will be living and working at Popopstudios from November – January, 2010.

James Pappas is currently on the faculty as an associate professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

He has had over 50 exhibitions and lectured widely in the field of Applied Media Aesthetics where he specializes in Black Cinema studies.

Pappas will be living and working at Popopstudios from October 29 to November 26, 2010.

Amarachi Okafor also works as a curator for the National Gallery of Art, Abuja, in Nigeria. She has a Bachelors degree in Painting from the University of Nigeria Nsukka in 2002, and an M.F.A in Sculpture from the same University. She has received a couple of awards and residencies worldwide. Her artwork is exhibited in Nigeria, as well as internationally.

Christina Zeidler is a film and video artist with over twenty film and video titles in distribution, which have shown internationally at festivals and appeared on television. In 2003 Christina was named one of Toronto’s 10 best Filmmakers by Cameron Bailey, and won the Best Canadian Media Award at the 2004 Images Film Festival for her recent films Machine Guts and Kill Road.

Zeidler is interested in combining small gauge, hand-processed, and camera-less film techniques with digital and electronic media. Recently, she has founded FREESHOW SEYMOUR, a film collective, with artist Allyson Mitchell, to explore their mutual crush on film. Together they have begun to travel a retrospective tour of their film work, which was presented by Pleasure Dome and will be part of the Albright Knox Beyond/In Western New York Biennial.

Her video and photo installations have shown at galleries in Toronto including Lennox Contemporary, Katherine Mulherin Art Projects, and Zsa-Zsa, and has participated in TAAFI. Christina Completed an artist designed room at the Gladstone Hotel called “Snap Shot”, based on a combination of furniture design and photo-based work.

She completed the web-based/CD-ROM project Bulk Bin during the “Big Rocky Candy Mountain” residency at The Banff Centre.

Curatorial work includes: “Come Up To My Room” alternative Design Event with Pamila Matharu (03-06, Gladstone Hotel). Series of collaborative films: Queen St. By Numbers (03) and House Call (04), a collection of one minute pieces by 30 artists scored live with musician and performers.

As one half of the euro-electronica-pop-diva sensation INA UNT INA, she pursues her love of performance and music. Christina helped spearhead the community-based project: THE PLAYGROUND working with youth-at-risk across Toronto for two years, producing over one hundred video titles. In ’98 she co-published the infamous PETZINE, which sought to radicalize the representation of pets. Christina is currently developing the GLADSTONE HOTEL in Toronto.