Finding Flowers

Lead Researchers

Lisa Myers (she/her)
Lisa Myers is an independent curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Her recent work involves printmaking, stop-motion animation and performance; since 2010 she has worked with anthocyanin pigment from blueberries in printmaking and stop-motion animation. Her participatory performances involve sharing berries and other food items in social gatherings reflecting on the value found in place and displacement; straining and absorbing. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in venues including Urban Shaman (Winnipeg), Art Gallery of Peterborough and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her writing has been published in a number of exhibition publications in addition to the journal Senses and Society, C Magazine and FUSE Magazine. Myers is a member of Beausoleil First Nation and she is based in Port Severn and Toronto, Ontario. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (formerly Faculty of Environmental Studies) at York University.

Dr. Sheila Colla (she/her)
Dr. Sheila Colla is a classically trained ecologist that uses scientific principles to address real-world conservation issues. Her research thus far has focused on the conservation of lesser understood native species such as bees, butterflies and flowering plants. As pollinators and pollination have become important issues among policymakers and the public in recent years, her work has become more interdisciplinary; today she works closely with environmental NGOs, landowners, academic partners and government agencies at the municipal, provincial and federal levels to implement conservation management based on the best available science. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (formerly Faculty of Environmental Studies) at York University.

Research Associates

Dana Prieto
Dana Prieto is an Argentine visual artist and educator based in so-called Toronto. Her art practice responds to the sites the work is based in, manifesting in sculpture, installation, performance, writing and collaborations. Her work examines intimate and collective entanglements with colonial institutions and power structures, calling for a careful attention to our ways of relating, thinking, making and consuming in the Anthropocene.

Kennedy Halvorson (she/they)
Kennedy Halvorson completed their MES in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in August of 2021. She worked in partnership with Semaa, observing the plants in constant, distinctly non-human modes of communication with all that exists around them through the rhythms of their nectar secretion.

Current Student Collaborators

Shelby Gibson
Shelby Gibson is a PhD student in York University’s Department of Biology, interested in understanding sustainable agriculture systems, with specific regard for biodiversity conservation in agricultural settings. Her work investigates the pollinator networks and systems of Common Bearberry, Hopi Tobacco, and Three Sisters Gardens.

Past Student Collaborators

Jacqueline Dwyer
Jacqueline Dwyer is a founding member of the Toronto Black Farmers and Growers Collective, the Global Family of Farmers, the Afro-Indigenous Food Security Festival and a partner in the Afro-Caribbean Farmers Market. An avid gardener with a seasonal garden, she saw the need to create “clean food” for her plant-based diet, expanding this idea into local GTA neighborhoods. Through community partnerships, she works to create safe spaces to engage in education, training, and activism, and to dismantle racial inequality, food poverty and “clean” food insecurity for herself and family, sharing the tools and resources with others to do the same for themselves

Dali Carmichael

Jess Buckley

Sophie Landon

Partnerships

Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery

Hosts of Mike MacDonald's Garden - Podcast Collaborators