Laurie Petrou is an artist, writer and professor of design and digital media at Ryerson University’s School of Radio and Television Arts. She has shown her work in Toronto and internationally. Both her fine art and fiction deal with themes of nostalgia and memory, of transition and bittersweet development. She typically uses archival photographs and manipulates them digitally and with traditional media to capture the visceral quality of memories. Laurie completed her MA in Ryerson and York’s Communication and Culture program, her final project an experimental video that was exhibited at Amsterdam’s Next Five Minutes festival of tactical media in 2004. She is currently working towards her PhD in the same program, the thrust of her work being her first book of short fiction, Between, to be published by Pedlar Press this year. Contact Laurie at lpetrou@ryerson.ca.

Lori Beckstead is a professor of audio and multimedia in the School of Radio and Television Arts at Ryerson University. She is particularly interested in creating environments using sound, and how sounds transposed from one environment to another can bring new meaning to what might otherwise be considered everyday sound. Her recent work Aur(e)ality touched on themes of location/dislocation and nature/culture. Listeners controlled their own listening experience by moving through a space wearing wireless headphones that allowed for soundscapes to change according to the physical location of the listener. Lori spent time in Australia, where she recorded the soundscapes featured in Aur(e)ality while studying sound and new media at the University of Technology, Sydney. She can be contacted at lbeckste@ryerson.ca.