Archives des Artist — MAI | Montréal, arts interculturels

laura caraballo

Laura Caraballo is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bacatá [Bogotá] and based in Tiohtià:ke [Montréal]. Her work explores the use of technology to reimagine and create interactive and sensorial, physical, and virtual spaces that represent and engage communities in meaningful conversations. She is particularly interested in examining how we shape, and are shaped by, the spaces we inhabit within a temporal context while exploring themes of home, memory and consciousness.

Deeply influenced by her upbringing in Bogotá, Laura infuses satire and grunge into her work as a means of processing emotions and experiences. Her time in Montréal has further shaped her career, encouraging a bold embrace of experimental aesthetics and unconventional narratives.

Laura works with a variety of new media art forms, including 3D sculpting, virtual reality, and mixed-media installations, with experimentation as the cornerstone of her practice. She views new media art as a powerful tool for cultural retrieval, resilience, and preservation, particularly for those in the diaspora, creating accessible spaces for connection and knowledge-sharing.

For the PRIM | MAI residency Laura seeks to develop her next project “Tributo A un Perro Libre” a two-channel two-voice audiovisual installation exploring the dynamic interplay between adhd and courage in the context of immigration.

“Tributo A un Perro Libre” is the story of a dog full of dreams. A dog born into a dog-eat-dog world. But this dog doesn’t bite. This dog has ADHD. Misunderstood. Misplaced. Overflowing with love. Overflowing with fear. But above all else, always a free dog.

rayanne fawaz + chanel cheiban

Rayanne Fawaz and Chanel Cheiban are the recipients of the 25.26 CAM + MAI Joint Support Program.

Open to professional choreographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, the mentorship program offered annually by the Conseil des arts de Montréal and MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels) aims to foster the development of dance artists living in the territory of Montreal and to support them in a process of research, creation, and production of work.

This joint support program offers the selected artist a package of mentorship and support, including a $5000-10,000 stipend and hours at the CAM and MAI rehearsal studios.

The artist is invited to carry out an artistic and technical residency in the MAI studios and to present in season 26.27.

Rayanne Fawaz is a choreographer, performer, and dance researcher from Lebanon, currently based between Montreal and Beirut. Trained in classical ballet in Beirut, she holds a Bachelor’s degree in Bioresource Engineering from McGill University. In 2024, she shifted towards professional dance, developing a practice that explores memory, migration, and the dance forms of the Levant, particularly dabke. She has participated in residencies in Beirut and Montreal. Her work approaches tradition as living matter, intertwining oral archives, everyday gestures, and community dances. Her interest in dabke stemmed from her studies of sustainable agricultural practices in Lebanon, where she rediscovered the repetitive everyday gestures in local dances, thereby questioning the movement’s origins.

Originally from Lebanon, Chanel Cheiban works as a choreographer and performer in a variety of artistic projects in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). She holds a diploma in contemporary dance from Collège Montmorency, a CID-recognized certification from UNESCO in the BIGBANG training program, and is a graduate of the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal. Chanel also practices the art of the qanun, an Oriental stringed instrument from the zither family.

In January 2025, she will present her multidisciplinary work El kamar bi zaher at Tangente, which she choreographed and performs, as well as PLAYGROUND, co-created with Maude Laurin-Beaulieu in 2022. She also founded Wholeness Mouvement in 2020, a dance video project in collaboration with Étienne de Durocher, which allowed her to develop her skills as an artistic director, director, and self-taught video editor. Chanel Cheiban explores processes of cultural transmission, interactivity in dance, and the intersections between traditional practices and contemporary languages. She reflects on how to revive rituals and traditions while creating moments of collective unity and individual authenticity.

Buzur is a multidisciplinary project by Fawaz and Cheiban which unfolds through two complementary components: a documentary project and a choreographic creation. This collaboration aims to create a space for co-creation, memory and reinvention, and resistance, in connection with diasporic realities and current struggles, the ongoing genocide in the Middle East, and the colonial past.

eric leong

Eric Leong (they/he) is a queer artist of Chinese-Bruneian descent who performs as Komodo. Their artistic journey began with over a decade of classical piano training through the Royal Conservatory of Music, later evolving into an autodidact dance practice spanning salsa, voguing, whacking, and burlesque. As the founder of Paifang, a queer cultural event series in Montreal’s Chinatown, their artistic practice is deeply rooted in community, exploring themes of intergenerational connection, queerness, and diasporic identity.

Queer Diasporic Movement: Blending Whacking & Chinese Folk Dance to Taiwanese Campus Folk Songs is a dance project that reimagines Taiwanese Campus Folk Songs (校園民歌) through the lenses of memory, queerness, and intergenerational connection. Bringing together Chinese-speaking seniors and queer diasporic youth, the work fuses Chinese Folk Dance with Whacking—a queer dance style born in 1970s Los Angeles—to create a vibrant dialogue between tradition and self-expression.
Originally written by Taiwanese university students during the martial law era, Campus Folk Songs blended poetic lyricism and folk-inspired melodies. They became deeply rooted in the Mandarin-speaking diaspora, carrying stories of love, longing, and migration across generations. For many Chinese Canadians, these songs embody a bridge to homeland and family memory.
This project aims to explore these nostalgic melodies via embodied storytelling through the intersection of the elegance and symbolism of Chinese Folk Dance and the expressive flair of Whacking. The envisioned result is a choreographic exploration of belonging, identity, and the possibility of new cultural futures—honouring ancestral aesthetics while amplifying queer diasporic voices that resonate across generations.

mohamed ben soltane

Visual artist, curator, and artistic director originally from Tunisia, Mohamed Ben Soltane has been living and working in Montreal since 2022. Trained at the Fine Arts Institute of Tunis, he also taught art history and directed the BAC Art Center, renowned for its socially engaged and transdisciplinary programming. His artistic practice—rooted in postcolonial studies, memory, and social critique—oscillates between mosaic, photography, installation, and text-based art.

For his new creation, Glitch in Arabic, Mohamed explores a phenomenon as subtle as it is revealing: the visual distortions that occur when Arabic text is misread by digital software. These “glitches”—separated letters, reversed direction, corrupted typography—become poetic and political fragments, reinterpreted as visual installations.

Through this project, the artist questions the symbolic forms of domination that are invisible to the eye yet embedded in digital systems. Glitch in Arabic opens a dialogue between artisanal traditions and contemporary technologies, while reaffirming the urgent need for cultural and aesthetic sovereignty in a fragmented digital world.

amaralina ramalho alvarez

Amaralina Ramalho Alvarez is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Her practice explores the political dimension of the ephemeral and of transmission, questioning the relationships between time, memory, and the body. She has participated in several group exhibitions, including Souviens-toi de nous quand tu regardes, presented in partnership with LABARD and the Georges-Vanier Cultural Centre. Her work has also been featured at the RIPA — Performance actuelle festival, in a public art project led with the City of Chambly, as well as at the 8th edition of the Artch Festival at Place Ville Marie. In 2027, she will present her first solo exhibition at the Georges-Vanier Cultural Centre. Amaralina also works as an illustrator and cultural mediator, and she is currently completing her studies in Visual and Media Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Her project addresses the continuities of colonial dynamics through past and contemporary agricultural systems, drawing parallels between the commercialization of tropical fruits – particularly those from Latin America – and the dynamics of local trade and agriculture.
It unfolds through three interconnected components: archival research, a residency in an agricultural setting, and the activation of a repurposed fruit cart conceived as a mobile space for creation, mediation, and poetic resistance.

stella lemaine

Stella Lemaine is a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist of Haitian descent whose practice lies at the intersection of performance, dance, and documentary film. Her work explores the body as a site of memory, resistance, and transformation. By weaving together archives, movement, and storytelling, she seeks to make visible the invisible traces of colonialism and to open spaces for collective healing.
Graduated in acting from UQAM’s Theatre Department, Stella first presented her debut documentary at the Montreal Black Film Festival. Documentary filmmaking became a medium through which she refined her gaze on intimate and political narratives. Her practice later expanded to the stage, performing in various theatre productions such as L’Ombre, directed by Marie Brassard and presented at Canada’s National Arts Centre, and to dance, through her training in Haitian folkloric dance at the Nyata Nyata Center.

Her project Corps Noirs, initiated in 2023, marks a turning point in her artistic journey: a documentary performance rooted in research on Black bodies, their invisible wounds, and their resilience. Inspired by somatic practices and decolonial thought, the work explores the possibility of rewriting memory through movement and embodied presence.

As an Afrofeminist and socially engaged artist, Stella envisions creation as an act of resistance and repair. Her work is nourished by a deep quest for humanity, a poetic relationship with reality, and a constant desire to build bridges between the personal and the political.

joliz dela peña

Joliz Dela Peña, also known as JDP 2009, is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist and a cultural worker born in the Philippines, now based in Tiohtià: ke/Montreal. Intimate connection to memories, identity, and immigration are recurring themes in Dela Peña’s practice. Through performance accompanied by installations, she pursues to relive realities, explore its complexities, and translate invisible tension/s into various visual and tactile qualities.
Shown in her work, she attempts to translate fragmented memories from her personal life as first-generation immigrant, drawing also from intersecting experiences, in order to construct an emphatic perspective. Her aim extends beyond mere contemplation, encompassing a dimension of activism.
Dela Peña’s work has been presented at various festivals across Quebec and Canada, including Art Souterrain Festival (Voies/Voix Résilientes, 2022), OFFTA (2023), Art in the Open PEI (2023), and Vibrance et Vacarme in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region (Caravanserail, 2024). Most recently, Dela Peña presented her work internationally in León, Mexico (Performance es utopia, 2025).
Just wanted you to know is a video installation series composed of durational performance works to be developed between Dela Peña’s home country, the Philippines, and her second home, Quebec. At its core, the project anchors itself in the dual identity of being both an immigrant in Canada and a non-official citizen of her birthplace. The work not only embodies a yearning to be heard but also serves as a direct statement addressing the social and political conditions that shape each performance.
Through long-duration performance, accompanied by the mundane wallpaper of both countries, Dela Peña will explore how gestures, fatigue, and presence become vessels for memory, survival, and resistance where art itself transforms into a form of protest, and performance is not merely a rehearsal for reality. This artistic research is deeply tied to her engagement as a youth activist, reflecting on the long history between the Philippines and imperialist powers. Ultimately, this project aims to embody a mix of softness and militancy. Dela Peña seeks to move, unsettle, and awaken empathy, transforming personal testimony into a shared call for understanding and change.

kalun leung

Kalun Leung is a Hong Kong–born, Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal-based performer-composer and trombonist whose transdisciplinary practice navigates the intersections of sound, movement, architecture, and cultural identity. His work prominently features the mubone—an augmented instrument he developed with creative technologist Travis West—as a tool for exploring embodied sonic performance through space and gesture. During his Alliance residency, Leung will develop Love Letters to a Third Culture Kid, an interdisciplinary solo audiovisual performance exploring his Hong Kong-Canadian immigrant identity through personal archives, movement, and spatially processed sound. The third work in a trilogy of autobiographical performances, Love Letters continues Leung’s research-creation practice that weaves together memory, diaspora, and intergenerational narratives.

Leung holds a Master of Music from McGill University and a Professional Studies Diploma from The New School in New York. He has collaborated with artists including Meredith Monk, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Sunny Jain, and the Experiential Orchestra (Grammy Award, 2021). His interdisciplinary work spans sound and movement duo ék with Émilie Fortin, live foley and mime performance, and sourdough sound installations with Felix Del Tredici. He co-leads the mobile experimental marching band Ambient Parade, performs in the improvising trio Williwaw, and has worked with the Martha Graham Dance Company, Orchestra of the Americas, and Ratchet Orchestra.

His work has been presented at festivals and venues including the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville (FIMAV), Carnegie Hall, Guelph Jazz Festival, Cologne Jazzweek, UNHEARD Music Festival (Hong Kong), and NYC Winter Jazzfest. He was awarded the Kranichstein Music Prize at the Darmstadt Summer Course in 2025 and has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.

abeer dagher esber

Abeer Dagher Esber is a Syrian writer and filmmaker based in Montreal. Her multidisciplinary practice bridges literature, cinema, and visual art, exploring how memory, exile, and architecture intertwine to shape personal and collective identity. A graduate of Damascus University in English Literature, she has authored several Arabic novels—including Freefall (سقوط حر) and Inheritors of Silence (ورثة الصمت)—and has worked in film and television production across Damascus, Beirut, and Montreal. Her current project, The Ninth Step, is a hybrid feature film combining fiction, documentary, and photo-roman aesthetics. Set between Damascus and Montreal, the film follows a woman who reconstructs fragments of her past—love, betrayal, and disappearance—through the architecture of both cities. Using still photography, voiceover, and layered sound design, The Ninth Step explores how urban space becomes an archive of trauma and desire, and how remembering itself becomes an act of survival. Blurring the lines between personal testimony and cinematic essay, Abeer Dagher Esber’s
work continues to investigate the fragile geographies of belonging, questioning how memory inhabits both the body and the city.

sam lee

Sam Lee (he/him) is a Korean-Canadian documentary photographer currently living and working in Montréal. Through visual investigations of the bizarre and surreal in everyday life, his practice investigates the concepts of collective memory and nostalgia, often through a diasporic lens. He prefers traditional photographic processes, shooting primarily on medium format and large format colour negative film and making optical c-prints in hiscolour darkroom. Sam was selected to participate in the 2024 cohort of ARTCH. Later in 2025, he will produce his first solo exhibition at the Etobicoke Civic Centre Ascent Gallery. His work has been exhibited, published, and funded by various Montréal-based arts organizations.