Community Roundtable & Resource Launch: Terra Firma
Saturday, September 13, 2025 | 1 - 3 PM (ET)
Hosted online
FREE, registration required
ASL Interpretation and live CART captioning provided.
You’re invited to the community roundtable launch of Terra Firma: an online resource designed to support artists, cultural workers, and arts organizations engaging with community-based approaches to new media.
Terra Firma brings together existing ideas, frameworks, and practices rooted in Black, Indigenous, and Disability Justice, offering a starting point for those seeking to think more critically and collaboratively about technological and new media culture.
The roundtable will begin with a guided walkthrough of the platform, which features a searchable database of community-led initiatives, a companion podcast series, and five resource packages. Developed through consultation, these resources draw on lived experience and collective strategies, offering practical tools, urgent questions, and real-world examples of communities shaping technology on their own terms.
Following the walkthrough, a panel of project contributors will reflect on their roles in shaping the project, speaking to the project’s possibilities and limits, and offering perspectives on the three themes that guided project development: disability justice futures, harm reduction, and cultural stewardship in new media.
About the Moderator
Belinda Kwan (she/they) is a program manager, designer, and strategist with a background in contemporary art criticism and curating. Shaped by their experience as a caregiver and person with an invisible disability, their work centres on building relationships between grassroots communities, non-profits, and for-profit industries, ensuring that lived experience, culture, and technology inform decision-making. Belinda’s practice has grown to include organizational change management, program development, and learning and development, always with an eye to supporting community-led priorities. They are a Project Management Professional (PMP®) and Certified ScrumMaster (CSM®) with training in UX design, working toward a Certified Human Resources Professional (CHRP) designation, and slated to begin a Master of Information in Data Science in Fall 2025.
Belinda is the Project Lead of Terra Firma, a multi-year Canada Council for the Arts Strategic Innovation project supported by InterAccess.
About the Speakers
Amanda Amour-Lynx (she/they/nekm) is a Two Spirit, neurodivergent urban L’nu-Scottish-French interdisciplinary artist and facilitator currently living in Guelph, Ontario and member of Wagmatcook FN. Their art combines traditional l’nu’k approaches, contemporary painting with new media and digital arts guided by Mi’kmaq cosmology, star stories, ecological knowledges, gender identity and language resurgence.
Jet Coghlan (they/them) is an Autistic, Latinx, Disabled, Mad researcher and performance artist. As an immigrant, they are committed to caring for and sharing the earth, combating individualism and selfish efforts to profit from the land. Despite the economic, physical, and psychological hardships of post-secondary education, Jet has demonstrated a decade-long passion for knowledge and experimentation across various fields. They currently collaborate with York and McMaster Universities, researching new methodologies that reject archaic, codependent systems of knowledge sharing. Jet currently serves as Digital Coordinator at Tangled Art + Disability, Terra Firma’s lead project partner.
Heidi Persaud (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and administrator. Her passions include training and mentoring the next generation of arts administrators; learning and collaborating with Mad, Deaf, and Disabled communities; relationship building with access workers; and finding ways to improve the user experience in Tangled Art Gallery. When she is not hyper-focused on the arts, she is learning restorative gardening practices and herbalism and trying to develop meaningful ways to co-exist in nature. Heidi serves as Gallery Manager at Tangled Art + Disability, Terra Firma’s lead project partner.
Samito (he/him) is a Maputo-born, Montreal-based musician, composer, producer, and cultural strategist whose work fuses acoustic and electronic textures, Afro-diasporic aesthetics, and contemporary storytelling. He is the founder and creative director of FEZIHAUS™, a label-inspired workroom and civic initiative dedicated to cultivating equitable, artist-led ecosystems. FEZIHAUS™ is a central Terra Firma project partner and co-produced "Conversas: Who’s Missing In This Room?", a public dialogue series confronting structural inequities in the arts shaped by colonial legacies.
Sapphire Woods (they/them) is a Black of Caribbean descent shapeshifter, cultural worker, and plant enthusiast living in Tio’tia:tke (Montreal). Inspired by their grandmothers to bridge the gaps in accessing land-based knowledge, food, and medicine, Sapphire’s ongoing work engages barriered Black and Brown communities through accessible education. IRL, Sapphire is involved in land-based arts and herbal medicine collectives in Montreal, enjoys reading, and taking naps. They have served as a consultant, artist-in-residence and speaker across Terra Firma programs.
Image Credit: Vector Festival 2023, shadow work, curated by Mitra Fakhrashrafi