Working across contemporary dance and film, Kyana’s work explores phenomenology, identity, and the process of healing and transformation. She moved to Tiohtià:ke Mooniyaang / Montreal upon graduating from Toronto Metropolitan University’s dance program in 2018, formerly known as Ryerson University. This relocation allowed her to reconnect with her Anishnaabe roots, unraveling questions surrounding the significance of cultural relations and ancestral knowledge. She explores storytelling through movement as a way to expand and discern her indigenous identity within her contemporary practices.

Since 2020, her choreographic films have been screened in various festivals such as Hot Docs, Rhode Island Film Festival, REGARD, FIFA and Rendez-Vous Québec Cinéma. As a multidisciplinary artist, Kyana has nurtured her practice through commissions with Wapikoni Mobile, Migration Dance Film Project and dance-research initiatives with Linda Rabin, Caroline Namts and Rachelle Bourget. In parallel, she is also a company dancer in the Margie Gillis Dance Foundation: The Legacy Project since the fall of 2021 and is currently working as an interpreter for Lara Kramer’s next creation “Remember that time we met in the future?” Premiering at Festival Trans-Amérique in Montréal, Canada in 2026.

Tony Chong is a multifaceted artist, born and raised in Vancouver, and based in Montreal since 1994. He is a versatile choreographer, dancer, performer, and creative director with a deep interest in diverse artistic forms such as dance, theatre, new media, film, cooking, and photography. His creative work has been recognized by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Tony’s artistic journey has included pivotal roles such as Artistic Assistant Director for Cirque du Soleil’s Totem and Co-director of Le Groupe Dance Lab in Ottawa. These experiences led him to co-found the collective RNTF (Remember Not to Forget) with long-time collaborator Carol Prieur.

His film Revealing the Invisible—co-directed with filmmaker Marlene Millar—premiered at DWFNY2023 in New York. The film is currently broadcasting on BC’s Knowledge Network and is screening at festivals across Europe, Asia, and Canada. In parallel, Tony and RNTF are touring Invisible??, a 50-minute solo dance with lasers that explores cultural invisibility and systemic erasure since 2022. Tony, with his duo Wolves, recently performed at the 2025 Busan International Dance Festival in Korea and his solo, L’Inconnu at the 2025 Furies Festival in Marsoui.

Throughout his career, Tony has collaborated with celebrated dance companies including Compagnie Marie Chouinard, Carbon 14, La Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault, Système D (Dominique Porte), Louise Bédard Danse, Compagnie Flak (José Navas), Sinha Danse, Germany’s Steptext Dance Theatre, and Line Nault. He is also a core contributor to the Toronto/Brooklyn-based Bluemouth Inc. Collective, in the 2025 Dora Mavor Moor-winning immersive production Elephant, as well as apprenticing on their interactive AI project LUCY AI, developed with artist David Usher.

Born in Bogotá and now based in Montreal, Yesenia Fuentes is a contemporary dancer, choreographer, and Butoh practitioner whose work unfolds at the meeting point of memory, sensibility, and transformation. Her choreographic language emerges from the body as a living archive—one that listens, remembers, and continually reshapes itself through time. Movement, for Fuentes, is not only form but relation: a space of care where embodiment, attention, and connection with others become the very substance of choreography. 

Trained in contemporary dance at the École de danse contemporaine de Montréal and holding a BA in Human Relations from Concordia University, Fuentes has also pursued over ten years of Butoh training with esteemed artists such as Masaki Iwana, Moeno Wakamatsu, and Ko Murobushi. These practices deeply inform her approach to creation, grounding her work in slowness, poetic imagery, and an intimate listening to internal landscapes. Her design-based research explores the architecture and interplay between time and space, revealing movement as both a site of introspection and a catalyst for social transformation. 

Her works, presented across Canada and internationally, explore inner passages: how the body carries histories, crosses thresholds, and reinvents its relationship to time and space. Through pieces marked by delicacy and intensity, Fuentes shapes a presence that reveals both the fragility and the power of gesture. Selected creations include The Light From The Windows, Control, Insitu Connecting, On The Stairs, Stem, Körper, and Antikörper, the latter developed with sustained mentorship at MAI (Montréal, arts interculturels). Her co-creative projects include Ako with Danza Descalza Collective, Libertad with Edgar Zendejas, Once Upon No Time in Germany, and Thin Stem Cooper in France. 

Collaboration is central to Fuentes’ artistic practice. She works with performers as co-creators, valuing ways of making and knowing rooted in dreams, subconscious sense memories, and lived experience. Her recent work, Memory of a Body Through Time (2023), supported by all major Canadian funding bodies, investigates legacies of embodied violence through a collective choreographic process. The piece explores how movement and solidarity among dancers can help process, translate, and alchemize grief caused by state violence, while questioning the limits and possibilities of resilience. It asks how memories and trauma are stored in the body, and how they may be released, transformed, and reimagined over time. 

Committed to transmission and community building, Fuentes is the founder of Pandanza, a Montreal-based hub for performance practices inspired by Butoh, and regularly facilitates workshops across Canada. Grounded in a continuous dialogue between creation, reflection, and teaching, her practice opens a horizon where the body—in perpetual metamorphosis—becomes a source of freedom, poetry, and reconstruction.

Born in Paris and raised in Congo-Brazzaville, Zab Maboungou discovered the power of dance at a very young age. She studied philosophy in France, which she taught alongside dance in Montreal, where she settled. That’s where she founded Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata-Nyata (1987), as well as a dance training program, PEFAPDA (Programme d’Entraînement et de Formation Professionnelle en Danse, 2003), and a method of rhythmic alignment, LO.KE.TO.

Appointed artistic advisor to MASA (Marché des arts vivants de la scène) in 1994 by the Ivorian Minister of Culture, Zab Maboungou is in demand on stages, at festivals, and at conferences on four continents. Her choreographies, noted for their power, combine the mental and physical planes, exuding a spiritual force and deploying an art of rhythms that is matched only by the commitment of the bodies, dance, and music. In January 2024, her company acquired a new venue for its artistic practice, the Centre Création Danse Nyata Nyata.