Dr. Cheryl Thompson
In 2021, Dr. Thompson was a recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2021-26) titled, “Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives Through Storytelling,” this project aims to catalogue Ontario’s Black archival collections, and through ethnographic interviews with the province’s creative community, collect stories about the collections that will culminate with a public exhibition curated by Dr. Thompson and her research team, which includes postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Karen Cyrus. In addition to publishing in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, Dr. Thompson has also appeared on numerous podcasts and media platforms in Canada and internationally. Dr. Thompson holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. She previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Theatre, Drama & Performance Studies, and the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Department of English & Drama. In 2021, Dr. Thompson was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
In 2021, Dr. Thompson was a recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2021-26) titled, “Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives Through Storytelling,” this project aims to catalogue Ontario’s Black archival collections, and through ethnographic interviews with the province’s creative community, collect stories about the collections that will culminate with a public exhibition curated by Dr. Thompson and her research team, which includes postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Karen Cyrus. In addition to publishing in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, Dr. Thompson has also appeared on numerous podcasts and media platforms in Canada and internationally. Dr. Thompson holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. She previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Theatre, Drama & Performance Studies, and the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Department of English & Drama. In 2021, Dr. Thompson was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
Enna Kim
Enna Kim is a Toronto based interdisciplinary artist, researcher and storyteller. She explores the dimensions between her hyphenated Korean-Canadian identity through animation, world-building, long-distance running, murals and zines. Enna started working on BREC at the start of 2021 while completing her Master's degree in the Communication and Culture joint program between XU and York University. As a racialized storyteller, it is important for her to find ways to retell stories and uplift those that have been overlooked and forgotten. This is why BREC matters; it is a starting point to provide a new framework that critiques the ways in which race, gender and power deeply permeate into cultural institutions, policies and value systems all originating from blackface. While creating educational video series for BREC, she has learned the importance of contextualizing difficult historical content by experimenting with various forms of digital media, while also developing a stronger sense of collaborative creative processes.
Emilie Jabouin
Emilie Jabouin is a PhD candidate in Communication and Culture whose work focuses on black women's intellectual histories, expressive cultures and performance in the early twentieth century. She grew as a scholar while working under Dr. Cheryl Thompson for her SSHRC-funded project, "Newspapers, Theatres, and the Spaces of Black Performance in Toronto, 1880s-1930s" from 2018-2020. Transcribing texts, visuals, co-publishing for the Toronto Metropolitan Archives' blog and presenting at different institutions on the challenges of accessing and navigating archives were essential to Emilie's skill development as a communications and performance scholar. BREC will provide a hub of information on performance history in Canada while focusing on black performance and larger social, cultural and political histories foundational to cultural studies, performance, communications and journalism studies.
Carianne Shakes
Carianne Shakes (she/her) is a Toronto-born multidisciplinary media artist, researcher and writer. Her work employs intersectional, Black feminist, and anti-capitalist theories to explore nuanced negotiations between race, class and gender. Carianne began working on BREC as a research assistant during her second year of undergraduate studies in Toronto Metropolitan University's (TMU's) Creative Industries program in May 2020. In this role, she created a record of over 600 images and newspaper clippings, including a citation for each source, cross-referencing them into themes, categories, year, and location. The archive's interdisciplinary, transhistorical framework explores the relationship between newspapers, touring American theatre, Black choral performance, blackface and audiences in Toronto. This is why BREC matters; it offers readers an exhaustive catalogue that addresses the complexities of Black resistance and community in Canada within the context of 19th- and 20th-century anti-Black racism in unprecedented ways. BREC's focus on both anti-Black racism and Black resistance provides the subjects explored in the archive's artifacts agency in a manner that is seldom present in historical accounts of Black life. Through her work on BREC, Carianne gained extensive experience handling images, curating visual pieces, and creating detailed cataloguing records.
Lucy Wowk
Lucy is a researcher, designer, and educator interested in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. They began work for BREC in 2019 with the design of the Blackface Minstrelsy Timeline during the first year of their M.A. in Communication and Culture (TMU/York U). Lucy has since catalogued and transcribed over 300 Canadian newspaper articles on the subjects of blackface, performance, and race, spanning 1840-1950. They have also developed and designed the website and online database. Working with Dr. Cheryl Thompson is influential in their growth as a researcher, in terms of approach, methods, and research dissemination. The insights gained through direct work with archival materials have been pivotal to their knowledge of Black Canadian history and visual representation. BREC is a crucial resource for expanding public consciousness — its documentation of anti-Black racism alongside Black community resistance serves as a catalyst for the critical conversations on race we need to be having in Canada.