Japan native Kimihiro Yasaka is an active pianist, a recording artist as well as an enthusiastic educator. He began his piano studies at the age of twelve in Japan with Ms. Reiko Mizutani, and continued to complete his master’s degree in Piano Solo Performance under the supervision of Professor Kyoko Hashimoto at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. Mr. Yasaka’s repertoire includes a wide range of styles from Baroque to Contemporary music. He is an especially devoted performer of new music and has performed in several Montreal, Canadian and world premieres. A personal mission of his, is to make Japanese piano repertoires accessible to audiences in Canada and internationally.

Gagnant du prix Opus 2013 pour le compositeur de l’année, récipiendaire du premier Prix collégien de musique contemporaine 2014 et gagnant de l’International Busan Maru Composition Competition de Corée du Sud de 2014, Simon Bertrand connaît une réputation à l’internationale qui l’amène à composer pour des musiciens d’à travers le monde tels que le Musica Nipponia Ensemble (Japon), le Danish Saxophone Quartet (Danemark), l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, le Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra (Chine), le Gwandju Symphony Orchestra (Corée) et l’Orchestre National d’île-de-France (France). Il participe au projet Sanctuaire d’oiseau en composant des créations originales.

Yukiko Watanabe a étudié la composition et le piano à la Toho Gakuen School of Music Japan avec Keiko Harada et Michio Mamiya. Her music has been performed in several countries in Europe, America and Asia. She lives in Nagano, Japan. From 2017, she is the artistic director for own project which aims to give support to young musicians by providing the opportunities to develop their creative skills. Currently, she lives in Nagano, Japan.

The multidisciplinary artist, Khosro Berahmandi, of Iranian origin, arrived in Canada in 1983 at the age of twenty-two. Khosro lives and works in Tiohtia’ke – Montreal.Khosro studied Visual Arts at the University of Concordia in Montreal and the University of Paris VIII. He is a distinguished and prolific artist accomplishing over fifty group and solo exhibitions throughout the past three decades. His career has encompassed projects held in Canada, Europe, and the United States, with an accent upon interdisciplinary creation concerted with an international contingency of artists.

The art of Khosro Berahmandi enacts a microcosmic singularity, one derived from a personal mythology, that echoes the pictorial approach of the iconography of Indo-Iranian miniature painting that constitutes a captivating and prodigious trial within the field of contemporaneous practice. His creative trajectory demarcates an exquisite aesthetic embodied in the perpetual labyrinth of aggregate and enigmatic beings, a semi-figurative “bestiary” which both challenges and fascinates audiences, as predominant aesthetic aspects born of Euro-centrism pale in contrast with his signatory innovations in leitmotif, poetical symbolism, and individual compositional strength.

Hadi Jamali is a Montreal-based intermedia artist whose research encompasses interactive installation, video, and photography. In 2003 he graduated from Science and Culture University in Tehran, Iran, in Visual Communications. He also received his BFA and MFA in Intermedia Art from Concordia University. Jamali’s research and creation rely on recuperating images, words, sounds, and marginalia from archival or historical documents. His most recent work uses spatialized sound and moving images to examine the link between dominant visual traditions and varying registers of contemporary (dis)location: not only geographic but also cognitive, temporal, and moral.