Olivia Mater is an emerging visual storyteller, artist and aspiring documentary filmmaker. She is a recent graduate from Trent University’s Indigenous Studies Program. As a settler of Celtic descent, Olivia feels a call to take up her responsibilities as a guest on Turtle Island. Raised by the Grand River watershed on the territory of the Attawandaron, and carrying within her bones the ocean waters of the British Isles, Olivia finds belonging in the entanglement of the two. Having the privilege to live and learn in both Nogojiwanong within the homelands of the Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg as well as Gaw Tlagee in the unceded archipelago of the Haida Nation, Olivia owes much of the knowledge, teachings, and responsibilities she carries to the lands, waters and people who have held her so generously. Her work unveils the interconnections of socio-ecological grief, silenced truths, and the broken beauty that surrounds us everywhere we walk.  Her newest work, Starborn, is a testament to these confluences and is a call to action and remembrance for the human spirit to tend these wounds and to live a life for the ones yet to come.

Double bassist and composer Garth Stevenson was raised in the mountains of Western Canada, where nature became his primary inspiration and the common thread between his life and music. His three full-length solo albums, Alpine, Flying, and Voyage, are informed by his experiences carrying his 150-year-old double bass to the woods, beach, desert and other remote locations including Antarctica and Tuva. Of Flying, iTunes praises, “Garth Stevenson joins the likes of Brian Eno and Sigur Rós as a practitioner of this ethereal yet accessible genre… ‘The Southern Sea’ offers the aural equivalent of effortlessly swimming underwater without ever needing to come up for air.” As a film composer, Garth collaborated for the second time with director John Curran (The Painted Veil) on the 2017 biographical drama Chappaquiddick, starring Kate Mara and Jason Clarke. Curran and Stevenson’s first collaboration was on the 2013 dramatic biography, Tracks which featured Mia Wasikowska and Adam Driver. Stevenson’s music accompanied the character’s long desert trek with an ethereal score that blows through the film like a warm breeze. Stevenson attended the Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship and received a degree in Performance and Jazz Composition. He has appeared on David Letterman, Craig Ferguson, at Bonnaroo, and other music festivals in Europe, Japan, Russia, Canada, and South America.