Morning Networking

Kate Macdonald and Carmel Farahbakhsh will facilitate a closed space for those who identify as 2S, Queer, Trans, or BIPOC to discuss solidarity and community-building, and Jessica Brown will facilitate a session open to anyone, to engage new connections and experience-sharing. 

CARMEL FARAHBAKHSH Carmel Farahbakhsh (they/them) is a community educator, arts maker, and youth worker. They have collaborated on the Khyber Centre for the Arts board for four years, and are enjoying their new position as co-director of local music festival EVERYSEEKER. In 2020, they transitioned from a five-year term coordinating South House Sexual and Gender Resource Centre to working as the Executive Director at The Youth Project, seeing a direct link between this community work and access to creative spaces and the arts community. As the Executive Director of The Youth Project, Carmel holds a youth-centric approach to organizational movement and support. Carmel builds their vision from their community education background and aims to apply an anti-racist and trauma-informed framework to their work. They also collaborate and organize with local initiatives, artist-run-centres, and community partners with an aim to create wider 2SQTBIPOC community and support systems within the province. 

KATE MACDONALD Kate Macdonald was born and raised in Kjipuktuk (popularized as Halifax). Macdonald studied Performance Acting at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, ON. Kate is a Community Facilitator and Youth Programmer, as well as an artist. Her art practice is vast, curative and explorative. Themes that are of particular prominence in Macdonald’s work are self expression, movement, tension, release, justice, healing, joy, magic and natural and ancestral connection. In 2020, Kate, Trayvone Clayton and DeRico Symonds created an African Nova Scotian community based, youth-led initiative called The Game Changers. After a year of working together in advocacy, activism, and community they decided to collaborate officially. Macdonald’s hopes are to remain curious, disruptive and to continue creating space to experience joy and encourage self celebration. Kate is currently a Project Manager at The Youth Project. 

JESSICA BROWN 

Jessica Brown has been working in the film and television industry since 2003. In 2012 she incorporated Peep Media Inc. with award-winning writer-director Jackie Torrens. Since 2012, they have completed five documentary films which include Bernie Langille Wants to Know What Happened to Bernie Langille, Small Town Show Biz: 2 Dreams from a Harbourtown, Edge of East, My Week on Welfare, and Bernie Langille Wants to Know... Who Killed Bernie Langille. Brown also produces in the scripted world, including the low-budget feature film Noon Gun; the short films My Younger Older Sister and The Toll; and the short film/digital media project Hidden Window. In 2008 she produced her first feature-length documentary film Chasing Wild Horses, which has screened around the world, and has won awards at the New York International Independent Film Festival and Worldfest Houston. She currently works as head researcher/contracts for CBC’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes.