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Alston So was born to Chinese immigrants on May 3rd, 1999 in Vancouver, BC. He was an experienced artist, writer, and amateur archivist. At a young age, Alston was interested in drawing and writing, hence why some sketchbooks and journals have survived to this day.

He studied fine arts at Emily Carr University in 2017. He specialized in the ceramic and drawing medium. Through the art community, Alston participated in many student-run art shows that supported queer artists. In 2019, Alston So decided to drop out in order to take a break from academics.

During this break in 2020, Alston was generating a large amount of textual material through creative output. A self inspired project, he created many journals that detailed serious issues, his life, and the mundane. He took on many odd jobs, such as a baker, bartender, library page and a clown at one point.

Alston was accepted into the University of British Columbia in 2020. He obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in Asian Studies and creative writing minor at the University of British Columbia in 2024. Many of his research and publications during this period focused on the Asian Diaspora, through a critical queer lens.

By 2022, Alston relocated to Tokyo University of Foreign Studies to further his academic knowledge. He began exploring Tokyo’s underground art scene, taking in inspiration for his own writing and art. Between 2022-2023, Alston So created hand-bound zines and distributed them between emerging artists across Japan. At Tokyo University of foreign studies, he focused his learning on Japan and Asia as a whole. There, he met Dr. Iris Haukamp, a professor of Asian film and art studies. Under the tutelage of Dr.Haukamp, Alston completed his senior thesis titled “Evolution of Asian Art through the Asian Diaspora”. After, Iris became a close confidante and supported Alston’s studies back in Canada.

In 2023, Alston returned to Vancouver to complete his studies. One of the most significant publication Alston released, is “A Study of Asian Ceramics: 1000 years of history” (2024), commissioned by Keishirou Nakamoto, a professor at the University of British Columbia. The partnership between Keishirou and Alston was fruitful, as his report went on to help in the creation of an exhibit hosted at the Museum of Anthropology. After graduating from UBC, Alston was accepted into the Master of Information program at the University of Toronto. He chose to focus on Archives and Record Management and Library Information Sciences.

Unfortunately, Alston was unable to complete his studies. On March 10th, he was declared missing and was last seen at Crother Woods. Alston So’s body was found on March 17th and declared deceased.

Brittany Taylor Jeans (b. 1998-) is a studying archivist and cultural heritage enthusiast from Lewisporte, Newfoundland. She studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland from 2016 to 2022, obtaining a Bachelor and Master of Arts in English. Her research areas centre around book history and print culture, with special focus on Protestant literature and women’s educational history. Through her academic career, she connected with heritage institutions and adjacent communities in the St. John’s area in the early 2020s. In 2024, she began working towards a Master of Information at the University of Toronto. Brittany has amassed a variety of Newfoundland heritage items and documentation from her studies, work in the heritage sector, and job as a custom framing designer.

Brittany moved from her hometown of Lewisporte to St. John’s to attend Memorial University in 2016. For her Bachelor’s degree, she declared an English major and history minor, deciding to narrow her scholarly focus on book history and print culture. She joined the English honours program in 2018, and convocated in 2020 after submitting her honours essay, titled “The Role of Sixteenth-Century Print Culture and Paratext in Canonizing Chaucer.”

Following completion of her Bachelor’s degree, Brittany joined the Pharmacy Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador as a collections assistant for the 2020 fall season. She was involved in reorganizing artifact storage and developing online and in-person exhibits.

She returned to Memorial University to begin her Master of Arts in January 2021, during which she produced a major research essay titled “The ‘vaine studye’ of ‘vertuous ladies’: Negotiating Female Authorship in the Paratext of Margaret More Roper’s and Lady Anne Cooke Bacon’s Translations.”

Throughout her time at Memorial University, Brittany held several research positions and student assistantships, including at the Queen Elizabeth II Library’s Digital Archives Initiative in 2019.

After convocating from her Master’s degree in 2022, she became a custom framing designer at Newfoundland Canvas, a locally-owned and operated printing and framing shop. Here, she adopted an active role in the local art community, supporting some of St. John’s most recognizable artists in producing their framing orders and art prints. In her capacity as framing designer, she helped plan and implement art installations, and preserved local heritage items and artwork in a variety of mediums for both public and private display.

In 2024, she moved to Toronto, Ontario to pursue a Master of Information from the University of Toronto, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. She obtained an archival internship at the University of Toronto Archives and Records Management Services (UTARMS) through the Toronto Academic Libraries Internship (TALint) program.

Chloe Thierstein (b. 1999) is a graduate student pursuing her Master of Information in Archives and Records Management at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Her academic and professional interests involve cultural memory preservation, forgetting, large-scale digitization, information management, and appraisal.

She grew up in Edmonton Alberta, where she attended the Victoria School of the Arts (Formerly known as the Victoria of Performing and Visual Arts) and McNally High School. In these institutions, Chloe gained an appreciation for arts and culture, practicing ceramics, drawing, photography, and other visual arts. In 2017 she enrolled at the University of Alberta, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. Her coursework focused on a wide ranges of subjects such as demography, secularization, and slavic history. During a study abroad term, Chloe studied in Cortona, Italy where she learned about global iterations of crime and punishments and economic history. Following her graduation, she attended the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information’s Bachelor of Information program. In this program, she gained an interdisciplinary knowledge of the information field, exploring UX/UI design, GLAM, culture and technology, and data science. This experience broadened her horizons and led her to apply to the Master of Information program following her graduation.

Since joining the program,Chloe has continued to explore the social-cultural impacts of cultural institutions and influence of AI, here she integrates her interdisciplinary background to aid in her studies. She has also continued her artistic pursuits. She has become well integrated into digital ceramics and knitting communities, developing glaze recipes and knitting patterns. She has also continued in her passion for travel and photography, ensuring key moments of her life are preserved.

Shiyang Sun (2002– ) is an archivist and museum collections professional whose interests focus on cultural preservation, curation, and language revitalization within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM).
In 2018, Sun enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto, where she pursued a double major in Linguistics and East Asian Studies. Her undergraduate coursework and research explored intersections between Chinese culture, history, and sociolinguistic changes, particularly emphasizing the adaptation of Chinese languages in North American contexts. In her third year, Sun worked as a research assistant in the Heritage Language Variation and Change (HLVC) Lab under the supervision of Professor Naomi Nagy. In her fourth year, she conducted independent research analyzing linguistic variations within Chinese communities in North America, presenting her findings at national academic conferences. Sun graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 2023.
In 2024, Sun started her graduate studies at the Faculty of Information (iSchool), University of Toronto, shifting her academic focus toward applied cultural preservation, archival practices, and the management of cultural heritage collections. She continued integrating her linguistic and cultural studies background into her professional objectives, completing her combined Master's degree in Information and Museum Studies in 2027.
After graduation, Sun worked at the Canada Language Museum as an exhibition assistant and later became the Archives and Special Collections Manager there. Her responsibilities encompassed language documentation and collaboration with curators to create and deliver language-focused exhibitions throughout Canada.
Throughout her academic career, Sun was actively involved in volunteering. Between 2020 and 2022, she provided online English tutoring to students in remote regions of China, simultaneously coordinating volunteer recruitment and program administration. From 2025 to 2027, she volunteered at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, assisting with collections management and improving accessibility for researchers.

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.

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.

Madeleine Vien (b. 2002) is a Métis writer, researcher, and graduate student living in Tkaronto (Toronto), Ontario. She received an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto and is currently pursuing a Master of Information, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. Her academic and creative work reflects a sustained engagement with Métis identity, memory, and decolonial approaches to information practices. Vien has worked with community archives in both digital and physical capacities, contributed to exhibition curation, and created original works in poetry and multimedia. The records described in this fonds document her academic, artistic, and community-focused activities from 2020 to 2025.

Katherine Victoria Robertson (born 30 October 1997) is a full-time student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. She grew up in Scarborough, Toronto as the eldest child with three younger brothers, and is the first in her family to attend university. In the Interest of providing transparency and positionality she self identifies as a middle class, white, settler, disabled, queer, cis gender woman.
Katherine attended high school at Cedarbrae Collegiate Institute from 2011 to 2015, during which time she volunteered as a summer school teacher's aide in 2013, and worked as a summer school bus monitor and elementary-level teaching assistant in 2015. She went on to complete her Honours Bachelor of Arts at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus from Fall 2015 to Winter 2023, where she majored in history and minored in anthropology and women’s and gender studies. Her research interests examined histories of gender and sexuality, race and post-colonial studies, and Ethiopian history. The duration of her degree was longer than usual due to balancing school commitments with working as a Locations Support Person for Entertainment Partners Canada Inc. from 2015 to 2019, necessary accommodations for her learning disability, and unforeseen obligations resulting from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these hurdles she achieved the Historical and Cultural Studies Emerging Scholars Award in 2018, the Dean's List in 2023, and graduated with High Distinction. Following the completion of her undergraduate degree she was invited in 2023 to present her course paper “Myth and Conflict Under the Solomonic Dynasty: A Case Study of Queen Gudit and the Queen of Sheba,” as part of a panel “Reckonings and Re-imaginings: The Ethiopian ‘Dark Ages’ (6th-12th centuries)” organized for the annual conference of the Canadian Society of Medievalists, in association with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences annual congress. In Fall 2024, Katherine began her graduate studies in the Combined Degree program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool). She is enrolled in the Archives and Records Management concentration and has focused her research on engagement between GLAM institutions and Indigenous communities. She is also working with Dr. Michael Gervers to publish a volume on the Ethiopian Dark Ages, which includes her paper “Myth and Conflict Under the Solomonic Dynasty.”