Mentor

Luke Peters is a creator, producer and director hailing from Toronto. Luke has lectured and performed in cities like Chicago, London, Liverpool and Toronto. A graduate of Ryerson’s media production program Luke has been a creator of content for 6 years and has been teaching media for four.  He presents Back Lane's Smartphone photography program.

Diana Nazareth is a certified teaching artist, professional lifestyle photographer and the founder of Project Kids & Cameras. Her programs are informed by an extensive study of key progressive methods such a Literacy Through Photography, PhotoVoice and Visual Thinking Strategies and she has facilitated several photography workshops for schools, community art centres, libraries and community-engagement initiatives throughout the GTA. She received her B.A. in Communications/Photojournalism from Temple University, and her Teaching Artist Certification from The University of The Arts, Philadelphia, PA. She lives in Toronto, a city she loves, with her husband and two teenage boys.

At any point, you can probably find Kelly with a camera on hand. She resonates with both photography and film as an active medium and accessible space to reclaim archival materials and documentation. She is a graduate from the Masters of Environmental Studies program at York University with research on placemaking, spaces of intimacy, citizenship and storytelling through food. Her favourite food is any kind of noodle soup.  Kelly will be teaching video programs for kids Saturday mornings at Back Lane. She has taught with Diana Nazareth's  Project Kids & Cameras .

Rick Walters has been building software for over 30 years, working with a wide variety of technologies and in a number of different sectors, including entertainment, education, energy, public health, medical and scientific research and, most recently, solution architecture and delivery management for large scale financial projects in Europe and North & South America. He has taught and presented extensively, and has made the mentoring and development of young talent a consistent part of his practice. Rick is generously helping to build our Mapping our Memories website, bringing his software expertise, his project management skills and his mentoring commitment to the project. He raised his family and been active in the Roncesvalles community since 1999.  

It’s complicated. That’s how Keesha describes her artistic life — a life that includes a past career as a designer (and purveyor) of Afro-Caribbean inspired clothing, with a repertoire of hand-dyed, hand-printed and hand-painted fabrics. Keesha’s current creative pursuits manifest in her personal journals where she plays with watercolour and acrylic paints, stenciling, collage and whatever else she can get her hands on. She enjoys art journaling and wants to share the practice with others. If you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking about joining our workshop. We hope that you will and look forward to art journaling with you.

Susie is a writer and visual artist who creates whatever she wants. She has led workshops for 20 years and is trained in the Amherst Writers and Artists’ Method of facilitation (AWA). Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, several Canadian journals, and in the book “My Wedding Dress: True Life Tales of Lace, Laughter, Tears and Tulle”, which she co-edited with Anne Laurel Carter for Knopf Random House in 2007. Her art work appears on her walls, fridge, friends’ birthday cards and in her Art Journal (thanks to Keesha).

 A writer and comedian, she cut her teeth at Yuk Yuks and hasn't stopped bleeding since. Selected TV credits include This Hour Has 22 Minutes, CBC COMICS and Chilly Beach. Produced plays include Mixed Media (CBC Radio) Pure Convenience (CBC Radio), Runtkiller, The Short List, Canis Familiaris and Sick Kids Wanna Talk To You. She won the 2013 TIFF Studio Screenwriting Intensive Jury Prize for her feature comedy The Mac and Watson Springtime Reeferendum Show. She was part of the 2017 Thousand Islands Playhouse Playwrights' Unit where she developed the play The Monarchists. She wrote, produced and performed in the solo show Double Down Helix in July 2018 at the Kingston Storefront Fringe Festival. Her debut novel, Please Stand By, will be released by Vancouver's Now or Never Publishing in Fall 2019. Bennett co-produces and performs at Hirut Hoot, a monthly stand-up showcase in Toronto at Hirut Fine Ethiopian Cuisine. A former Board Member of the Revue Cinema, CB helped secure the Ontario Trillium Foundation grant for the cinema. She was honoured with the Volunteer of the Year Award in 2014. Day jobs include a stint as a senior writer for government. Carolyn Bennett enjoys the perks of sharing the same name of a prominent federal cabinet minister.

Bob Sandler admits his professional career can be described as going from the sublime to the ridiculous. He wrote the screenplay for Cannibal Girls, starring Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin, and edited the Governor-General’s Award winning non-fiction book Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. He has written extensively for television, as staff writer on children’s shows (Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street, Sharon Lois and Bram’s The Elephant Show) and adult dramas (Street Legal and Traders). His production company, Creative Anarchy Inc., established in 1997, has made the pioneering documentary/reenactment series on crime called Exhibit A: Secrets of Forensic Science, which aired for five seasons on Discovery Canada and TLC in the U.S. He travelled to time zones around the world to film the martial arts series Deadly Arts, the doc series Extreme Clergy and the one-off Real Voodoo, and most recently the series My Pet’s Gone Viral for Animal Planet Canada, UK, Asia-Pacific. He also produced the volunteer-made short RevueCinema: The Big “100” to mark the Roncesvalles theatre’s centennial.

Jeana McCabe, as a veteran educator, filmmaker, producer, has shared her expertise both here and abroad. She studied psychology at York University and later her B.Ed. from U of T. in music. Her interests in media literacy led her to Concordia University for a graduate diploma in Communications. She has produced over 150 social justice documentaries with her students, designed and implemented new media curriculum and founded the 'Just' Docs Festival. Jeana has taught in Africa, produced documentaries in Nicaragua, Argentina and Thailand and has coordinated workshops on Social Justice teaching through digital technologies in partnership with NFB’s Mediateque and Centennial College.

Michael Goldberg has over 10 years and 3,000 hours of live TV experience. Over the course of his career he's worked as a technical director at CP24, helping teams bring live and breaking news to the largest city in the country. He's been a web producer for Canada's Got Talent where he aided in the design and build of the website, as well as working with contestans to create blogs. And now, as a Producer/Editor at Global News' Multi Market Content program Michael is helping to usher in a new way of doing local news across the country. Outside of the control room Michael is known as a comic book nerd, and an excellent cook.

Luis Garcia, who studied film at York University, has written, directed and produced films and videos in a variety of genres, including documentary, drama, music video and animation. His issue and art-oriented documentaries have taken him to Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua and back to Chile. Since his award winning production Under the Table first brought attention to his work, his films have been featured at film festivals across Canada and internationally. His films have aired on CBC, Bravo!, TVO and PBS.

Geoff Bowie is a documentary filmmaker working in English and French. His most recent work is My Heart is Like a Bomb (Doc Zone on French CBC, 52 minutes, 2014). He wrote and directed Courage (2012 NFB) about the growing gap between the 1% and the majority in Canada focusing on the working poor in Ontario. Other work includes the feature length Waiting for My Real Life about the obesity epidemic in North America; for the CBC’s series The Nature of Things: Ghosts of Futures Past: Tom Berger in the North about the Mackenzie Valley pipeline; The Hospital at the End of the Earth about the Aral Sea environmental disaster; and When is Enough, Enough? about a First Nation trying to slow down the growth of the Alberta oil sands. His feature length The Universal Clock: the Resistance of Peter Watkins is about the commodification of the documentary, and Walk Naked Singing, a documentary musical about marijuana, the state, and idealism. Several of these films have been selected for screenings at national and international film festivals, and have been nominated and won awards. He has also directed, shot and edited several short 5 minute documentaries for the internet including: The People’s Guru for TVOntario’s Why Poverty? Series, as well as Le stress, c’est la vie, Le taxage, ça touche tout le monde, and Fais moi signe for the National Film Board of Canada’s TONDOC website and for the website Ta parole est en jeu.

Shane Azam is a filmmaker committed to the development of creative Canadian content for broadcast. As the co-founder of Toronto's Splinter Unit Film Collective, he has made numerous films, many of which have gone on to screen at the Seattle Independent Film Festival, the NYC Global Revolution Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. Shane, who studied film at York University, began his career as host and producer of TVOntario's two-time Gemini nominated series VOX.

Onyeka Oduh is a young freelance filmmaker whose work focuses on pop culture, the question of gender identity and race, and telling stories that would otherwise go untold. She is currently completing a media certificate and working towards a bachelor in film + television production at Humber College. She has been featured at the Just Docs Film Festival, winning several awards for editing and direction and has screened at the Maryland Film Festival as a part of a youth film exchange program. She was also a judge at the St. Patricks' Student Film Festival. She is also a published author, freelance illustrator and the co-founder of Black Coffee Zine, an art collective that focuses on the alternatives to typical city life.

Award-winning Canadian film composer Isaias Garcia is fast becoming one of the most sought-after talents in the world of scoring for media, having impressed audiences and producers with his beautifully crafted, story-driven scores. At 25 years of age, he has already amassed a plethora of awards: A 3-time SOCAN Award winner; 8-time Hollywood Music in Media Awards nominee; and winner of the 2014 HMMA “Best Video Game Score” award for Dream Revenant, as well as the 2015 HMMA for “Best Score in an Independent Film” for The Moment I Was Alone. Isaias has also received premieres for his solo, choral, and symphonic works in Canada, US, Poland, Portugal, Argentina, and the UK. From 2009-2014, Isaias served as the composer-in-residence with the Celebrity Symphony Orchestra (Toronto), directed by Dr. Andrzej Rozbicki, and in 2014, he co-founded the film & video game scoring company, MASTR Studios (Media Arts Symphony of Toronto & Recording). The company has already completed projects for Coca-Cola, BRAVO, HBO, CityTV, CANAL+ (Europe), and over 50 films and video games. Most recently, Isaias recorded the soundtrack for the feature film,Quarries, (dir. Nils Taylor) with 5-time Juno winner Liona Boyd on guitar. Isaias is a proud graduate of BMTM's arts program in Toronto.