Hiro Kanagawa is a Vancouver-based writer and actor. His play Indian Arm received the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. His other plays include The Tiger of Malaya and The Patron Saint of Stanley Park, both of which have been performed across Canada. Also a sought-after script doctor and consultant, Hiro was story editor on the critically acclaimed Canadian series Da Vinci’s Inquest, Da Vinci’s City Hall, Intelligence,and Blackstone. As an actor he is perhaps best-known for his numerous recurring and guest-starring roles on popular television and streaming series such as Star Trek: Discovery, Altered Carbon, The X-Files,and many more.
A lawyer by training, Mark Sakamoto has enjoyed a rich and varied career, having worked at a national law firm, a national broadcaster, and served as a senior political advisor to a national party leader. He is Executive Vice President of Think Research, a leading global digital health company with over five hundred employees operating on four continents. In 2014, Mark authored his first book, Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, which went on to be a #1 national bestseller, winning CBC Canada Reads in 2018, and hitting #1 again for a second time. In 2020, Mark hosted and was an executive producer on Good People, a five-part documentary series that explores humanity’s biggest problems, co-produced by Vice Media and CBC. He lives in Toronto and Prince Edward County with his wife and their two daughters.
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, audio fiction, performance, animation, drawings and community-engaged projects. Her works explore the manifestation of story and its complex relationships to site-specificity, the transpacific, invisible histories, archives, and memory work. Her artistic process is often research-based and moves back and forth between multiple sites of cultural production considering language, performativity, chance, and improvisation. She has worked extensively on a large body of work that is informed by and within Japanese Canadian communities in B.C and Japan. In these projects she works with members of these communities and often includes her paternal family’s history both within the internment camps and their experiences as repatriated Japanese Canadians in Japan in the post war.
