Digital Archive Team

Principal Investigator, The Family Camera Network
Associate Professor, Western University

Thy Phu was born in Vietnam, and grew up in Toronto, where she lives with her family and three cats. Since completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, Thy joined Western University in 2005 where she is presently an Associate Professor of English and Writing Studies. She has also held a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and presently serves as a research associate at the Royal Ontario Museum. Her work focuses on the visual representation of race and gender among diasporic communities, and has received supported by SSHRC Connection, Insight, and Partnership Development Grants. She is the author of Picturing Model Citizens: Civility in Asian American Visual Culture, and co-editor of Feeling Photography, a book that examines our deep emotional attachment to images.

Dan Mishra Curator of South Asian Art & Culture, Royal Ontario Museum
Associate Professor, University of Toronto

Deepali Dewan is a Senior Curator in the Department of World Cultures at the Royal Ontario Museum and an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto, where she specializes on the art and visual culture of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.  Her research concerns questions about colonial and modern art, vernacular and hybrid visual forms, art education, and the production of knowledge. Her current research focuses on the photographic image, with a view toward understanding how the practice of photography has shaped contemporary ways of viewing and being in the world. She is the author of Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-Century India (2013, co-authored with Deborah Hutton), Embellished Reality: Indian Painted Photographs (2012), and the editor of Bollywood Cinema Showcards: Indian Film Art from the 1950s to the 1980s (2011). All three were accompanied by exhibitions.

Associate Professor, University of Toronto

Elspeth Brown is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, where her research concerns the history and theory of photography; modern American cultural history; queer and trans* history; and the history of US capitalism. She is the author of award-winning The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Johns Hopkins 2005) and Sexual Capital: A Queer History of Modeling, 1909-1983 (forthcoming, Duke University Press). She has co-edited two volumes: Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014; Thy Phu, co-editor) and Cultures of Commerce: Representation and American Business Culture, 1877-1960 (Palgrave, 2006). Brown currently directs the The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a five-year digital history and oral history research collaboration that connects archives across Canada and the United States to produce a collaborative digital history hub for the research and study of gay, lesbian, queer, and trans* oral histories (http://lgbtqdigitalcollaboratory.org). She is a founding member of the Toronto Photography Seminar (http://www.torontophotographyseminar.org).

Digital Consultant

Julienne Pascoe is the Lead Metadata Architect at Canadiana.org and instructor in the graduate course Digital Applications for Collections Management in the F+PPCM program at Ryerson University. A recent graduate from the Digital Stewardship Certificate program at Simmons College (Boston), her focus is on developing access and preservation strategies for digital and cultural heritage resources. Previous positions include Collections Information Assistant, Art Gallery of Ontario and Special Collections Technician at Ryerson Archives and Special Collections.

Digital Archivist, The ArQuives: Canada's LGBTQ2+ Archives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives)

Lucie Handley-Girard recently graduated with a Masters of Information in Archives and Records Management from the University of Toronto. Some of her interests lie in the performative potential of archives, community archives, the politics of representation, and how archives can be conceptualized as spaces for activism, resistance, identity formation, and grounding.

She has been an avid photographer her whole life.

Assistant Curator, Royal Ontario Museum

Jennifer Orpana is currently Assistant Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, where she is working with Dr. Deepali Dewan and The Family Camera Network to establish a public archive of family photographs and oral histories at the museum. She was a member of the curatorial team for The Family Camera exhibition (ROM & AGM, 2017), and was recently a co-instructor for OCADU's graduate course: "Digital Futures: Family Camera at the ROM." In 2015, Jennifer completed a PhD in Art & Visual Culture at Western University and her SSHRC-funded research focused on community-engaged photography projects in the context of urban neoliberalism. Her writing has been published in RACAR and Fuse Magazine, and she recently co-edited a Photography & Culture issue on family photography with Sarah Parsons (July 2017). Jennifer has also worked in Education, Outreach, and Development at the Art Gallery Ontario, the National Ballet of Canada, and Soulpepper Theatre Company.

Research / Technical Assistant

Celio is a Media Preservation and Collections Management specialist, assisting in the collection, processing and preservation of The Family Camera Network's archive materials. He has recently earned his M.A. in Film+Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University. His thesis focuses on Meiji Period Japanese photographs and their connections to Edwardian Canada. He has a background in interdisciplinary art making, multimedia production, exhibition curation, international arts planning and gallery operations management.

Video Editor

Mark Kasumovic is a Hamilton, Ontario born artist. His current body of work investigates the relationships between photography, technology and knowledge production within the context of scientific research. He holds a BFA from Ryerson University and an MFA from NSCAD University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Fine Arts and Visual Culture at Western University (2013-2018). Kasumovic’s work has recently been acquired by The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, The Beaverbrook Provincial Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Peel. His work has been supported by emerging artist grants from Culture Nova Scotia, The Ontario Council for the Arts, The Social Science and Humanities Research Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Associate Professor, Western University

Kelly Wood is a photographer and practicing artist whose research focuses on subjects that relate to the environmental impact of waste accumulation, waste economies, and all forms of visible and invisible pollution. She is currently involved in the collective project Visualizing the Invisible: see more at http://www.visualinvisible.com/index.html. She is also a member of the research collective The Toronto Photography Seminar (http://www.torontophotographyseminar.org). Her photography has been broadly exhibited in Canada at the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Art Gallery of Ontario; The Power Plant; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery. Her work has been shown internationally at the Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin; Museum Van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; Fotoinstituut, Rotterdam; and Artspace in Sydney, Australia. artist's website: http://the-woods.org

F+PPCM MA Candidate, Ryerson University

Vitor Pavão moved from Brazil to Toronto in 2017 in order to pursue a Master’s in Photography Preservation and Collection Management from Ryerson University. He is currently completing his residency at the ROM, where he is developing collection management protocols for born-digital vernacular photographs from The Family Camera Network Collection. In 2016, he earned a post-graduate certificate from FAAP (São Paulo, Brazil) in Photography: Cultural and Artistic Practices.. He has 8 years of experience as a professional photographer and worked as an summer intern at the Photography Department of The Art Institute of Chicago. Vitor also volunteers at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives (formerly the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives).