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Nourane Abdelshafy (1996-) is an Egyptian Canadian researcher, educator, writer, and artist. She has held positions as a Lecturer at the Department of French Studies at the University of Waterloo (2018-2020) and the University of Toronto (2024). In addition to her academic roles, Abdelshafy has also occupied various roles in academic and not-for-profit institutions. Committed to education and community engagement, she served as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Waterloo (2015-2018) and Wilfrid Laurier University (2017-2018), as well as a French Language Assessor at the YMCA Greater Toronto Area (2023-2024).

Born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, Nourane Abdelshafy completed her primary and secondary education in her native country. In 2014, she immigrated to Canada, where she pursued higher education at the University of Waterloo, earning her Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 2014 and Master of Arts (M.A.) degrees in French Studies in 2023. In 2024, she enrolled in the University of Toronto’s Master of Information program, pursuing a career in Archives and Records Management.

As a researcher, Abdelshafy focuses on the use of materiality as a narrative device in francophone autofiction from the 20th and 21st centuries. Her scholarly interests also encompass transcultural representations in French novels. Later in her career, she expanded her research to include ecopoetics in French Canadian literature, exploring the intersection of ecology, poetic expression, and identity. Abdelshafy has extensively written on the works of notable authors such as Annie Ernaux, Patrick Modiano, Riad Sattouf, and Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba. Her contributions to literary criticism and analysis of these authors' works were published in journals such as the International Journal of Francophone Studies and Canadian Literature.

In addition to her academic and research pursuits, Nourane Abdelshafy is a published writer and artist. Her debut autofiction novel Sumac (2022), explores themes of migration, displacement, belonging, and the fluidity of identity, drawing from her own experiences as an immigrant. As an artist, her works were exhibited in galleries across Canada, such as Gallery 44. Her artistic productions often reflect her scholarly interests, incorporating elements of materiality and ecopoetics. Through her photography and paintings, she explores the relationship between nature, culture, and personal narrative. Her exhibitions, such as Bodies of Water (2021) and Transscapes (2023) explore the fluidity of identity as transitional, transitory, and transformative.

Omar Al-Samadi is a multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and information professional based in Tkarón:to (Treaty 13) / Toronto, Ontario. Born in 1986 in Burlington, Ontario, to a Seychellois-Creole mother and Iraqi-Arab father, Al-Samadi was raised in a mixed-race household and came of age in the post-9/11 era. They experienced early educational barriers as a result of systemic racism, including academic streaming in high school that delayed access to university level education until their mid-thirties. These formative experiences continue to inform their commitment to equity, representation, and memory work.

Al-Samadi’s early professional life began in wealth management, where they worked as a financial advisor at Scotiabank and Scotia Capital from 2007 to 2009. A departure from the corporate sector led them into the music and cultural industries, where they spent over a decade as an artist manager, event producer, and community organizer. During this period, they held leadership roles at Embrace Presents and Culvert Music, co-founded Rare Beef Records and the monthly dance music event Course of Time, and later founded the consulting firm Ovātus Group while collaborating with the inclusive nightlife collective Deep Gold Presents.

Working under the artistic moniker Abandoned Affair, Al-Samadi has maintained a longstanding creative practice in photography. Using primarily 35mm film, their visual work explores portraiture, landscape, and urban documentation, and has been featured in magazine publications such as PhotoED and NAKID. Their work is rooted in narrative, contemplation, and aesthetic care.

Returning to formal education in 2019, Al-Samadi completed a Social Service Worker diploma with honours at George Brown College, followed by a B.A. in Social Development Studies from the University of Waterloo in 2024. During this time, they worked and volunteered in harm reduction, notably with Breakaway Community Services for their Pieces to Pathways program providing peer support and counselling for 2SLGBTQ+ youth who struggle with substance use.

As of 2024, Al-Samadi is pursuing graduate studies at the University of Toronto in the combined Master of Information and Master of Museum Studies program, specializing in Archives and Records Management. Their research interests include decolonial archival theory, community-driven archiving, inclusive appraisal methodologies, and the preservation of marginalized voices. A significant moment in their archival trajectory occurred in 2022 during a visit to the Seychelles National Archives, where they uncovered historical records of their East-African enslaved ancestors—an experience that continues to shape their scholarly and creative pursuits.

Al-Samadi is fluent in English and French, with additional proficiency in Arabic and Italian. Their work across disciplines is guided by a desire to build bridges between artistic expression, institutional critique, and community memory. Their fonds reflects a layered and evolving narrative of lived experience, creative practice, and critical inquiry.

Born in Toronto, Ontario to Ghanaian immigrants, Alexie Ankomah spent her early childhood between Toronto and Kumasi, Ghana before her family decided to permanently settle in Toronto in 2006. In 2016, Ankomah would begin to attend A.Y Jackson Secondary School where she was a participant in the equity council, curling team, flag football team, photography club, where she began to take portrait photographs of friends and family, and the Black Student Society, where she would develop an interest in learning about Black Canadian and American history. Ankomah would graduate from A.Y Jackson Secondary School in 2020 and would begin to attend Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson University).

Ankomah would major in History before transferring to the Criminology and History major in 2021. During her time at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ankomah continued to develop her interest from high school by taking a variety of Criminology and History courses related to the treatment and experiences of Black Canadians and Americans. During her third year at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ankomah would take a course focused on archives where her interest began to shift to becoming an archivist and participating in archival activism focussed on changing the physical and intellectual structures of archives in order to allow Black Canadians to have greater access to archival material as a means of bringing social change in the archival field. In 2024, Ankomah would graduate from Toronto Metropolitan University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminology and History and would begin to attend the University of Toronto Faculty of Information as a Masters of Information candidate in the Archives and Records Management concentration to pursue her goals.

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August was born on June 22, 2000, to an American mother and a Canadian father. Growing up in Toronto's East York neighbourhood, he was aware of his dual identity from a young age due to the alternating Christmasses he spent with his relatives on the East and West coasts of the United States. He was an active member of his local Scout troop until high school, when he began to take a greater interest in film. During adolescence and university, August completed several video projects, mostly for school assignments. In 2018, he was a layout editor for his high school's yearbook team.

In 2018, he started attending the University of Guelph, majoring in Computer Science. Soon realising he was more interested in and better suited to the humanities, August changed majors, graduating in 2023 with a Bachelor of Arts - History (Hons.). As a history student, he was a co-editor for the 2021 issue of "Footnotes: The University of Guelph's Undergraduate Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Social Change" and had a paper published. For his academic achievements he was awarded both the Marion McKenzie Scholarships for Outstanding Achievement in History and the W.S. Reid Undergraduate Thesis Prize. He worked for several of his professors as a summer research assistant and transcriptionist, but his most notable position was as Webmaster for the Rural Diary Archive under Dr. Catharine Wilson. This work endeared him to primary sources and the value of archives, and in 2023 he applied for a Master of Information in Library and Information Science at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information.

August studied at the University of Toronto from 2023 to 2025, graduating in June 2025. He was hired as a TALint student intern at the UofT Media Commons Archives, making connections which helped him apply to study at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation in Rochester, New York, to which he was accepted in April 2025. He also founded Film Freaks Club UofT, a student organization which hosts weekly film screenings and events, in October 2024.

August had long been interested in photography, but in summer 2024 - inspired by his work at the Media Commons Archives - he begin learning to shoot film photography. Though this did not extend far beyond that summer, the experience familiarized him with the fundamentals of photographic technique; in early 2025, he purchased a digital camera from a friend. When asked, he says he will keep it as a hobby for life.

Robyn Bachmeier is an archaeologist, Classicist, and currently an archival student at the University of Toronto in the MI program. She was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1996, and moved to Burlington, Ontario in 2000 with her family. She went to McMaster University in Hamilton for her undergraduate degree in Classics and master’s degree in Classics and archaeology (2014-2021). While a graduate student at McMaster, she worked as a Teaching Assistant for the Classics department for two years (2019-2021). For the completion of her MA degree, she conducted original research on Roman numismatics and on findings from the excavation of the archaeology site “The Villa of Titus”, in Italy. She spent four field seasons in Italy working on archaeology sites as a supervisor with McMaster University (2017- 2022), and she worked as an archaeologist in Ontario, Canada for two years (2022-2024).
She presently volunteers at an archive in a Canadian military museum in Toronto, Ontario. Her current and future interests are in working with and preserving historical archival materials, archaeological materials, rare and ancient books and in the study of Classical Latin linguistics and literature.

Bangyue Qi (5 November 2000 – ) is a Master of Information student at the University of Toronto, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. He is a former Chinese second-grade athlete in swimming and was a member of the Dalian Maritime University Junior Swimming Team from 2011 to 2016. Academically, he focused on research related to Canadian Indigenous history and Canadian colonial history during his undergraduate studies, and now focuses on archival studies in his master's program.

Born and raised in Dalian, China, Bangyue Qi attended the Middle School of the Attached School of Dalian University of Technology from 2014 to 2016. He became interested in swimming at the age of 10 and was selected for the Maritime University Junior Swimming Team due to his outstanding performance. In 2016, he participated in the 4 × 100 medley relay at the Liaoning Junior Swimming Championship, where his team placed eighth. After the competition, he received certification as a Chinese second-grade athlete. After not achieving the desired result in the High School Entrance Examination in 2016, he left the swimming team and chose to focus on his studies. He attended high school at Dalian Maple Leaf International School, where he joined both the golf club and the model club. In his second year of high school, he became vice-president of the Golf Club and was responsible for negotiating cooperation with the Youyi Jinshi Valley Golf Club in Jinshitan, Dalian. In his third year of high school, he developed an interest in ship model making and participated in a model exhibition in Guangzhou, where he presented his model of HMS Rodney.

In 2019, Bangyue Qi enrolled in the History program at York University and moved to Toronto. He focused on ancient Roman and Greek history during his first two years. After attending a class on Indigenous residential schools in his third year, he shifted his interest and research toward Indigenous and colonial history in Canada. Bangyue Qi completing his Honours Bachelor of History degree in 2023. In the summer of 2023, he moved to Shijiazhuang, China, and began an internship at Dongtie Electromechanical Technology Co., Ltd. During this time, he participated in the China International Medical Equipment Fair as a translator and was also responsible for organizing customer information. During this period, he developed an interest in historical documents at the First Historical Archives of China and decided to pursue a career in the archival field. In July 2024, he enrolled in the Archives and Records Management concentration of the Master of Information program at the University of Toronto.