Staff

Anthony Meza-Wilson – Volunteer and Facility Manager

Anthony is an educator, anti-oppression nerd, self-taught artist, and occasional puppeteer. Much of his work has focused on facilitating member-run organizations such as democratic schools, youth-run centres, and cooperatives. He has organized with radical mad folks such as the Icarus Project and the Bay Area Radical Mental Health Collective. Anthony moved to Vancouver Coast Salish Territory from Michigan, 1836-ceded Odawa and Ojibway territory in 2009 to pursue a Master’s degree in Educational Studies from the University of British Columbia, which he earned in the summer of 2012. He greatly enjoys eating wild raspberries, has a tendency toward long wanders, and is a cat person.

volunteer@gachet.org

Cecily Nicholson – Finance Administrator

Cecily Nicholson (MA, Kroc Institute, University
of Notre Dame) has worked in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood since 2000. Eleven of those years were with the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre. She is experienced in project and crisis management. Her work with and of communities impacted by poverty and stigma spans two decades. Her work as a poet, both creative and social, is often in collaboration with artists and spaces for education. She is an appointed member of the Emily Carr Research Ethics Board and the author of Triage (Talonbooks, 2011) and From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014), winner of the Dorothy Livesay prize for poetry.

operations@gachet.org

Micaela Kwiatkowski – Interim Programming Coordinator

Micaela Kwiatkowski is a curator, artist, and educator. She has worked in the areas of youth visual arts programming, arts administration, and teaching at the post-secondary level. Her work and practice engages with critical feminist discourse, intersecting contemporary, colonial, art historical, and queer dialogues. Kwiatkowski was born on the traditional and ancestral territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) peoples and is currently completing a Masters of Art degree in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University.

Kristin Lantz – Programming Coordinator

Over the past 7 years Kristin has been developing socially-engaged art programs that make use of creative exhibition strategies in order to document, highlight and share the possibilities of institutional and community collaboration. She considers and evaluates her responsibility as a cultural worker in each of these gestures, and uses her place within institutions to open spaces that nurture the intersection of art and community. Her practice is informed by her formal studio arts education in NYC, her memories of growing up on the flat farmlands of Ohio, and by accepting care and friendship into her life as a way of living and working in Vancouver. Kristin is grateful to be the Resident Curator at the Purple Thistle Centre and to have co-curated Nothing About Us Without Us at Gallery Gachet in 2013. She likes being silly, laughing with people that she cares about and sharing silent moments of connection with others. She currently doesn’t live with a dog but hopes to some day care for one so they can play outside together and fall asleep on the couch. She also loves to swim.

programming@gachet.org

Sylwia Kisynska – Communications and Design

Sylwia is a graphic designer with a passion for photography and fine art. She developed her knowledge of art in Fine Art High School through to completing her Masters in Art History. Sylwia moved to Canada from Poland in 2006. She graduated from Design Essential program offered by British Columbia Institute of Technology and Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2011. This program taught her how to use her background in Fine Arts to create various design solutions. Sylwia has been working at Gallery Gachet as a communications and design assistant since 2011.

communications@gachet.org