Introducing core members of the care team for I Love My Gig Ontario and Caring Cultures 2025. You can reach the whole team via email at care@artspond.com. Stay tuned for updates as we will announce additional supporting mentors, peer advisors, and other team members in the coming days.
Sania Khan, Care Doula
sania@artspond.com
Sania Khan (b. 1994, Pakistan) is a queer, multi-disciplinary futurist, creative technologist, filmmaker, researcher and trauma-informed somatic facilitator.
Sania’s art-alchemy practice engages the technologies of story, soma, and spirit to forge liberated futures where we live in right relationship with(in) ourselves, each other, the natural worlds, and unseen worlds.
Sania’s praxis infuses a decade-long career in human rights advocacy with a parallel journey of solo world travel, rooted in an ethos of animism, healing justice and interdependence.
Najla Nubyanluv, Care Doula
najla@artspond.com
Three time graduate of The Watah Theatre & alumni of bcurrent’s mandiela rAiz’n in the Sun ensemble, Najla Nubyanluv is a queer, Black mother, multi-disciplinary artist, producer, educator, and doula. Following her 2017 Spolrusie Arts Fellowship focused on holistic mental health recovery for Black Women through fellowship and afrofuturism, her afrofuturist monodrama I Cannot Lose My Mind World Premiered co-produced by The Watah Theatre and Crow’s Theatre.
While producing at Why Not Theatre, Nubyanluv completed a ThisGen Producer Fellowship and co-lead produced Sunny Drake’s Award winning audio series Climate Change & Other Small Talk and a workshop of Quote Unquote Collective’s UNIVERSAL CHILD CARE. Nubyanluv is the author & illustrator of I Love Being Black and other publications. She was a co-curator for Black Wimmin Artists’ The Feast and a founding member of OCAMA Doula Collective. Passion for laughter and joy filled futures has driven her nearly 20 years of community work, mentorship and art. Nubyaluv currently teaches in the Sheridan College in the Musical Theatre Conservatory and the UTM joint Theatre program.
Teniesha (Nenookaasi/Neno) Ochrym, Care Doula
neno@artspond.com
Emmy Pantin, Care Doula
emmy@artspond.com
Emmy Pantin is a mixed race, mixed media interdisciplinary community-media artist based in Toronto. She has led workshops for youth and adults about community radio, super 8 filmmaking, digital storytelling, podcasting and zine-writing. Emmy holds a bachelor’s degree from Trent University in Cultural Studies, post-graduate certificate in radio broadcasting from Humber, and is currently pursuing a master’s in fine arts from the Interdisciplinary Art Media and Design program at OCADU.
Gaitrie Persaud, Care Doula
gaitrie@artspond.com
Gaitrie Persaud is a Tkaronto-Guyanese raised Deaf actor, activist and mother of three based in Toronto. An ASL coach and ASL music performer, she is also the founder of Phoenix the Fire, a theatre and film community hub for BIPOC Deaf artists, where she is building the support structure she finds lacking in Canada. Gaitrie is currently a news presenter on Sign 1 in Atlanta as well as a regular on Nickelodeon Jr. Blues Clues & You and CBC Gem’s Silly Paws, she is also on Squeaky Wheel Canada as Arianna and her documentary film on Breaking Characters on AMI.
Rana El Kadi, Associate Producer
rana@artspond.com
Rana El Kadi is an immigrant settler woman of colour from Lebanon with a Master’s and a PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from the University of Alberta. She is passionate about using the arts and culture to imagine just societies and caring communities and to bring about deep systemic change in the midst of various planetary disasters.
Since 2019, Rana has been engaging in disability justice research that amplifies Mad, D/deaf, disabled, and aging people’s histories, stories, and future imaginaries, with a focus on collaboratively designing access. She is a Co-Founder and Curator at Emergent Futures CoLab, and she has been working as a Researcher and Contract Lecturer in Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University.
During her Master’s, she researched how Lebanese artists use free improvised music to engage with the sonic violence of shelling and collective memory of civil war, while gesturing towards a non-sectarian society. Rana’s PhD research explored how arts-based methodologies may facilitate a space for immigrant and refugee junior high students in Canadian schools to test out new pedagogies, challenge racism, and imagine intercultural friendships. She has shared her work widely at national and international conferences and in scholarly journals and community publications.
Jessa Agilo, Founder and CEO
jessa@artspond.com
Jessa Agilo is Founder and CEO of ArtsPond / Étang d’Arts. She is a queer, transgender, disabled (Mad, neurodiverse, immunocompromised), integrated arts creator, producer, changemaker, caregiver, and entrepreneur with a 36-year career in Canadian arts and culture. Jessa is a white settler devoted to bolstering justice with, by, and for equity-deserving groups of all kinds. She was a fellow of Toronto Arts Council’s Leaders Lab in 2019 and Wolf Willow’s Positive Deviants in 2021. She has been featured in stories by The Canadian Press, CBC, CityTV, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Feral Arts (Australia), and Culture24 (UK).