Yoon Kyung Kim was an author and Japanese language instructor at the University of Toronto, living between 1989 and 2024. Born in Seoul, Korea, Kim moved to Vancouver, B.C. with her family in 2004. Kim attended the University of British Columbia, earning a B.A. in English and psychology in 2012. From summer 2009, Kim started to travel widely whenever she was able, and left impressions of the places she visited in fictional works, nonfiction prose, illustrations, and photographs. Kim moved to Toronto in 2013 and pursued an M.A. degree in East Asian studies at the University of Toronto, studying the politicization of court poetry in medieval Japan. After earning the M.A. in 2015, Kim went on to teach the Japanese language at the Department of East Asian studies in 2015, but gave up her post in 2017 to focus on writing. During the pandemic, her travellogues with illustrations gained popularity and international recognition. Kim went back to studying in 2022 and pursued an M.I. degree in archiving and records management at the University of Toronto. She died November 11, 2024. Kim is best known for her novel “Pen-Man-Ship,” an interpretation of the Korean folk tale “Keum-o sinhwa” in the contemporary Canadian context, “The Pelican Pilot,” and “Midnight Letters from Around the World,” a collection of illustrated travellogues.
Born January 1st, 1995 in Markham, David Slipetz grew up north of Toronto in Newmarket, ON. Here he attended Notre Dame Catholic Elementary School and Sacred Heart Catholic High School. He lived between Singapore and Malaysia in the summers of 2009 - 2012 during the summers of high school with his father that worked abroad. In 2012 he began his degree at McMaster University studying Anthropology. He lived and studied abroad in Japan for the school year of 2016 - 2017. He continued his studies of Anthropology with a focus on archaeology and participated in two academic archaeological expeditions during the following summers in Italy and Greece respectively. Upon return, he graduated with his degree in Honours Anthropology in 2018. He returned to graduate studies in 2024 as a Master's Graduate Student at the iSchool of University of Toronto studying Archives & Records Management & Museum Studies in the Combined Degree Program.
David Slipetz also travelled extensively. Living abroad for multiple months to years at a time. In 2022 he travelled to New Zealand and Australia where he lived for a year abroad on a Working Holiday Visa. After this year abroad he moved to Portugal in 2023 to partake in another Working Holiday Visa. As David extensively travelled around the world for his personal, professional and academic life he built a substantial photographic record. It appears that photography acted as an avenue of documentation and an artistic outlet for David which marked the beginning of his career in travel photography. As such, much of the fonds consists of the records of David's travel, photography and as persistent representations of the activities he engaged with.
Victoria Kwok was born in Hong Kong on February 5, 1969, to a first-generation family from Chaozhou, Guangdong. From 1987 to 1990, she attended the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) for her B.A. in Religious Studies and Italian Studies. Her year abroad in Siena, Italy in her undergraduate programme sparked her interest in food. Following her M.A. in Food Studies (1991-1993) at the University of Toronto (UofT), she completed an Italian cuisine chef training programme in the Scuola di Arte Culinaria from 1993 to 1995.
After working as a chef in Palermo, Italy, she returned to Hong Kong and held a research position at the University of Hong Kong from 2005 to 2015. During this time, her interest shifted from Italian cuisine to the food history of Hong Kong. In 2013, "A History of Cha Chaan Teng" was published.
In 2016, she migrated to Toronto and earned her PhD at the UofT in East Asian Studies (2016-2021), specialising in the Cantonese food culture in diasporic communities. She is a researcher at the same institution where she continues her food history research.
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Jae Kim is a second generation Korean-Canadian emerging archivist, writer, and community organizer residing in Toronto, Ontario. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on April 22, 2002, Kim relocated to Toronto, Ontario with their parents in 2013 and has lived there since. From 2013 to 2018, Kim maintained ties with important relationships in Vancouver through handwritten letters and email correspondences.
In 2016, Kim entered high school and joined the school’s only 2SLGBTQ+ club, which became their first formal connection to a queer community. Around the same time, he began exploring his gender identity through creative writing, publishing anonymously in online writing communities. These anonymous digital spaces were critical to his self-discovery, as many of their closest collaborators also identified as queer and/or trans. Kim’s first public and non-anonymous piece was “Selling Flesh,” published in the 2022–2023 edition of The Hardwire: The Undergraduate Journal for Sexual Diversity Studies.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kim began to identify as transmasculine, adopting he/they pronouns. Motivated by the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on marginalized groups, he co-founded a youth-led mutual aid organization that supported marginalized youth. Personal and academic events in Kim’s life drove his continued engagement with marginalized communities from then on. In late 2022, Kim experienced a significant estrangement from their biological family after coming out as queer and trans. In July 2023, he began hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and sought greater connections with other queer and trans BIPOC folks navigating familial rejection. In 2022, Kim added a Sexual Diversity Studies minor alongside their Book and Media Studies major and English minor, and graduated in June 2024 with a Bachelor of Arts. His coursework led him to focus on queer archives, and in 2023, Kim began working as an Archives Assistant at the Sexual Representation Collection.
In 2024, Kim was accepted into the Master of Information program at the University of Toronto, specializing in Archives and Records Management. He took on multiple professional roles during his first year (2024-2025), including becoming a Research Assistant at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2S+ Archives in November 2024 and the Blackwood Studentship position at the Art Gallery of Ontario in January 2025. In June 2026, he graduated with his Master of Information.
One of Kim’s most significant public-facing projects emerged from their volunteer work at The ArQuives. In September 2024, Kim began curating an exhibit focused on trans and gender-diverse individuals from the Asian diaspora in Canada. Drawing from archival materials and contemporary narratives, the exhibit centred on queer kinship and aimed to deconstruct the “coming out” narrative by showcasing the diversity of trans and gender-diverse experiences across time and space. This project concluded in July 2025. Afterwards, Kim partnered with Dr. Naveen Minai, a former professor turned close friend and mentor, to expand the work of the exhibit into a long-term research project.
Margarita Stappas is a Toronto-based mixed queer Asian artist and community organizer born in Markham, Ontario.
Margarita earned an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Ottawa in Women's Studies and History. They are pursuing a Master of Information at the University of Toronto.
They started playing tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, first through a Dungeons and Dragons campaign before joining other campaigns that used home brew systems. Margarita joined the Wyndermere Academy Campaign after meeting Sage through the Asian Community AIDS Service's youth program, Queer and Trans Asian Youth (QTAY) in 2021.
Dinah Samuel was born in 1999 in Toronto, Canada and spent most of her life in Pickering, Ontario from 2009 onwards. She was born to Eritrean Catholic immigrants to a family of five. She has attended St. Barbara Catholic Elementary School (2003-2009), St. Anthony Daniel Catholic Elementary School (2009-2012), St. Wilfrid Catholic Elementary School (2012-13), and Notre Dame Catholic Secondary School (2013-2017).
Her past education includes a BA at the University of Toronto Scarborough in History (2017-2021) and an MA in History (2022-2023). During her BA education, she was a member of the Historical and Cultural Studies Student Association (HCSSA) as the Vice President (External) (2019-2020) and President (2020-2021). Her Masters History paper was titled "The Eritrean People's Liberation Front Ideological Trajectory" detailing the Eritrean revolutions' ideological shifts and international relations from the 1960s to their independence in 1991.
Her past careers predating her current education include several summer positions as a Production Assistant at Celestica (2018-2020), a Collections Assistant at the Sharon Temple Museum and National Historic Site (2018-2019), and a Local History Assistant at the Oshawa Public Library (2022-2023) and Pickering Public Library (2025).
She is currently a University of Toronto student at the Faculty of Information studying Archives and Records Management, with an interest in community archives and decolonial archival practices.
Teofil Eugene (Ted) Kulczycky was raised in Toronto and has lived in Vancouver and Montreal. He is a non-fiction author, archival researcher, library worker and aspiring archivist.
He studied philosophy, film and popular music at Toronto’s York University from 1992-1996, when his studies were interrupted by an anxiety disorder. From 1997-2020, while earning a living in the restaurant and remainder book businesses, he continued to publish sporadic nonfiction writings, and was closely associated with WORN Fashion Journal. During this period, he also participated in other creative pursuits including songwriting and performing with the bands BedBugBites and The Chorus Barloff, directing the short film Real Me and the music video for Telefauna’s "Tombstone," DJing and event hosting as Teddy the K. Although he has long been collecting published materials relating to the Jonathan Demme/Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, since 2014, he has been actively developing Stop Making Sense project, a multi-media research mission which includes original documents and firsthand research.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Kulczycky completed his bachelor’s degree in philosophy at York University, and in 2021 began a masters degree in information studies part time at the University of Toronto. Since spring of 2022, Kulczycky has been a page at the Toronto Reference Library. At the same time, he has also been doing archival research for documentary films, most notably Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks.
On August 22 2023, Kulczycky was critically injured when struck by a car upon exiting a Toronto streetcar. Most serious among his injuries were multiple spinal fractures. Despite the severity of his condition, and still being hospitalized, Kulczycky was permitted to attend a Talking Heads reunion/Stop Making Sense 40th anniversary screening at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival on September 11 2023. Upon discharge, Kulczycky managed to attend over twenty theatrical screenings of the film over the subsequent weeks, which garnered him a degree of media attention, resulting in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper deeming him an “Artist of the Year 2023.”
Kulczycky gradually resumed his educational, creative and professional pursuits over the following two years.
Chloe Peters (b. 1996-) is a Medieval historian and information professional from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. During the course of her academic career, Peters earned both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts with a focus in Medieval Studies. Peters is currently in Toronto, Ontario earning a Master of Information in Archival Studies. Influenced by her upbringing, Peters’ areas of research include numismatics, paleography, pedagogical gamification, women, Christianity, collections, and memory.
Peters grew up in a non-religious household with a Catholic mother and an atheist father. Baptised Lutheran, Peters experienced numerous Christian religions during her childhood, attending Trinity United Church with her mother and Superb Mennonite Church with her paternal grandmother. At her mother’s behest, Peters received a Catholic school education, attending St. Dominic Elementary School between 1999 and 2010 and Bethlehem Catholic High School from 2010 to 2014.
Between 2014 and 2020, Peters attended the University of Saskatchewan where she earned a Bachelor of Arts Double Honours in Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies (CMRS), and History as well as a Certificate in Classical and Medieval Latin. Throughout her undergraduate degree, Peters participated in numerous extracurricular activities and held multiple research positions. From 2016 to 2018, Peters was the President of Comitatus, the CMRS student group for undergraduate students, where she organized numerous activities and fundraising events. From 2016 to 2020, Peters was a volunteer coin cataloguer at the Museum of Antiquities at the University of Saskatchewan. During this degree, Peters worked on several major projects including the creation of two Medieval card games, Virtus and Distaff, and her museum exhibition and bachelor’s thesis on the coinage of King Alfred.
Peters moved to Vienna, Austria in 2021 to study at Central European University. During this degree, Peters’ research centered on ants in Medieval Latin manuscripts, and, in 2022, she completed her thesis “Some Ants Go Marching Two by Two, Others Dig for Gold: The Visual and Textual Representations of Ants in the Medieval Period” and earned her Master of Arts in Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies. Peters remained in Vienna following the completion of her degree, where she travelled around Europe and took several German language courses. Throughout her academic career, Peters has presented her research at numerous academic conferences, including the Kalamazoo International Medieval Congress and the Leeds International Medieval Congress. In the fall of 2023, Peters returned to Saskatoon. In 2024, Peters moved to Toronto, Ontario to pursue a Master of Information from the University of Toronto.