Team
Yun-Jou Chang, Executive Director
Born in Belgium, with a childhood that spanned Taipei and Prince Rupert, Yun-Jou grew up navigating the interstitial spaces between two languages and two cultures, knowing that the question of identity is often complicated and unanswerable. She has always been powerfully drawn to language, literature and the stories we tell, and how these things inform our ability to connect with one another, form groups and build community.
Jenniffer Tai, Operations Manager
Jenniffer is an arts administrator and researcher, interested in databases, systems, and the construction of textiles. Jenniffer’s involvement with Cinevolution started in 2014, as the Box Office Manager for the Your Kontinent Festival. Finding the enthusiasm and dedication of the team to be infectious, Jenniffer has remained with the organization since. During this time, Jenniffer has been involved in programs such as DocuAsia Forum and Digital Carnival and has worked in various capacities over the years before stepping into the role of Operations Manager.
Jian Ping Su, Production Manager
Jian Ping, an award-winning producer and cinematographer, joined Cinevolution Media Arts Society in 2010. He worked as a producer and videographer at Shaw TV Vancouver for nearly ten years where he produces television programs. Jian Ping was also Line Producer for the Canadian Screen Award-winning docudrama ‘Tricks on the Dead’. He is currently working on an international co-production documentary series about the life of Dr. Norman Bethune as Executive Producer, Producer and Cinematographer. His latest production The World is Bright is the nominee for Best Cinematography and the winner of the Best Director and the Best Canadian Feature Award at the 2019 Vancouver Asian Film Festival.
Ying Wang, Artistic Director
Born and growing up in Beijing, Ying came to Canada in her late 20s, first as an international student and then became a landed immigrant. As the co-founder of the organization, she made up the name “Cinevolution” in a daydreaming afternoon in September 2007, hoping to create a niche space for her and people like her who were newcomers to this land to do something imaginative in a liberating way. Ever since then, the organization became her art school, where she learned from everyone encountered, whether it’s an artist, a social justice activist or a walking-in audience at the events. Over a decade has passed, she is awed to see the impact the organization has in the community. After completing her documentary The World is Bright in 2020, which she also started in 2007 and won multiple awards, she is now working with the dedicated team to continue exploring the independent vision and voice of Cinevolution.
Minah Lee, Associate Curator
Minah was born and raised in South Korea, then came to Turtle Island in 2007. As a new settler with her history of immigration struggles on unceded Coast Salish Territories, she is privileged to do grassroots work with a dedicated team at Cinevolution. Minah’s collaboration with Cinevolution began as an artist for the organization’s site-specific multimedia festival in 2016. Her curatorial involvement began and evolved through DocuAsia in 2017 and Digital Carnival 2018-2019. She curated the online exhibition and public program components of Digital Carnival Z in 2021. Her recent and ongoing passion is to fuel (not-fossil-fuel) creative climate resiliency deeply entangled with racial justice.
Board Members
Sean Cao, Chair
Sean Cao is an artist and community organizer; as an immigrant-settler, he currently resides on Coast Salish lands. Cao holds a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He strives to bring his experience as a visual artist with a passion for socially engaged art to Cinevolution. His background as an organizer working with non-profit organizations adds depth to his role at Cinevolution. With a commitment to upholding Cinevolution’s vision and values, Cao aims to contribute his expertise to the organization’s redevelopment efforts, promising opportunities for creative growth and accessible public engagement.
Daniel Chen, Director
Daniel Chen 陈丹宁 (he/him) is an aspiring documentary journalist and currently wrapping up his BA in Asian Studies and Asian Canadian and Asian migration studies at the University of British Columbia. Daniel’s life has been segmented into periods of living between Los Angeles, Beijing, and his current home, Vancouver. Inspired by his multicultural upbringing, Daniel has developed a particular fondness towards documentary storytelling, and particularly narratives surrounding immigrant culture. Daniel has had the privilege of working on story-telling projects in exhibitions such as the A Seat at the Table, Richmond Museum, and most recently, Paper Trail.
Marina Szijarto, Director
Marina is a professional visual artist, animist shrine maker and ritualist with a diverse and eclectic arts practice working within the mediums of community engaged rites and celebrations, site-specific installations, theatre/ performance and ritual crafts.
Her community engagements arise from the impulse to co-create spaces for magic to happen in collaboration and in relationship with the physical and imagination/liminal realms. They create with and for human peoples, plant peoples, rock and mineral beings, animal peoples, landscapes, seasons, the dead, the spirits of place and the elements – for personal & cultural transformations.
Her art practices include contemporary & sacred arts, traditional and ancestral crafts, shrine making, animist based rituals in collaboration with landscapes, seasons, human and other than human peoples, and ancestral lineage repair practitioner ( certification with Dr Daniel Foor / Ancestral Medicine). She has been the Artist in Residence at Mountain View Cemetery and co-creator of the annual All Souls at MVC Vancouver B.C. Canada.
www.marinaszijarto.com | www.anightforallsouls.com
Sophia Mai Wolfe, Director
Sophia (she/her/hers) is a queer, Japanese-Canadian independent artist whose practice is ever-changing. She holds an MA in Screendance from the London Contemporary Dance School, and is the founding Artistic Director of F-O-R-M (Festival Of Recorded Movement).
Through completing her MA, she became interested in making work that challenges and slows our attention, and uses film and dance to invite connection and empathy towards the bodies we witness on screen, as well as invite sensation within the bodies of those witnessing.
Her dance practice has led her to performing and touring internationally with companies and independent choreographers such as Company 605, Co-Erasga, Chick Snipper, Cindy Mochizuki, Lisa Mariko Gelley, Kelly McInnes, Antonio Somera, Zahra Shahab, The Only Animal and New World Theatre.
Sophia is also involved with videocan as a video archivist and on the research team which is an online archive of Canadian performance directed by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim and has curated screenings for New Blue Dance Festival (Toronto), Vancouver Art Gallery, DOTE (Vancouver) and Body+Camera (Chicago).