2025 Events at the IMC

Artist Bio

Michael Benson’s work focuses on the intersection of art and science. It spans a range of media, from large-format photographic images to nonfiction books and essays, illustrated books, films and visual-effects sequences. Over the last decade, Benson has staged a series of increasingly ambitious shows of digitally-constructed extraterrestrial landscapes, both in museums and art galleries worldwide. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other venues. A recent Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab, Michael Benson is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities. For the last few years Benson has been using scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) to focus on natural design at sub-millimeter scales for a project titled Nanocosmos.

Guest Speaker Bio

Ann Thomas was Senior Curator of Photographs and Interim Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Canada, retiring in March 2021. She is currently working as an independent expert on the history of photography and as a curator of photographs.

Over her career of more than forty years she has lectured, participated on panels and juries, done portfolio reviews, organized numerous exhibitions and installations and is the author of several catalogues and publications Among the major publications she has authored are Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science (1997) Lisette Model (1990), No Man’s Land: The Photographs of Lynne Cohen (2001) and more recently The Extended Moment: Fifty Years of Collecting Photographs at the National Gallery of Canada (2018). Max Dean: Portrait of the Artist as Artist September 2022-March 2023 (Portrait Gallery of Canada – online). She is currently researching and writing on the work of Canadian artist, Spring Hurlbut.

Curator Bio

Paul Roth has been Director of The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University since 2013. Previously, he served as Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC; as Executive Director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York; and as archivist of the Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Since 1990, he has organized (or co-organized) more than 100 museum exhibitions and film programs, including Stories from the Picture Press: Black Star Publishing Co. and The Canadian Press (2023-2024); Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story (2018); Jim Goldberg: Rich and Poor (2018); Edward Burtynsky: Oil (2009); and Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (2008). He is author and co-editor of Gordon Parks: Collected Works (Steidl, 2012), among many other titles.

Speaker Bio

Luz Sierra, born in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico, is a Toronto-based professional in photographic collections and preservation. She holds a BA in Photography with a minor in Art History from the University of Puerto Rico and an MA in Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University. Sierra has worked as a researcher and cataloguer for the Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2022) and as an archivist for ARCHIVO at Sur Gallery (2023), and has participated in numerous conferences on cataloguing in Toronto and Puerto Rico.

Speaker Bio

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, and engineering. His solo exhibitions have been held at major institutions such as the Smithsonian, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Fondazione Prada. Paglen’s projects include launching artwork into orbit, contributing to the film Citizenfour, and creating a radioactive sculpture in Fukushima. He has authored several books and articles on experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, and photography. A MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, Paglen’s work has been featured in prominent publications like the New York Times and Wired. He holds degrees from UC Berkeley and the Art Institute of Chicago.