Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory Board and Artists
Our Team
Bill Burns' socially engaged art about nature and civil society has been shown and published widely including projects at Hippolyte, Helsinki (2014); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2007); MOCA, Toronto (2006, 2014). He is past president and director at Toronto's Art Metropole and is currently Artistic Director of Big Pond Small Fish where he has produced collaborative projects with youth in video, audio, and performance in Toronto, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Tasmania Australia. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College - University of London (1988). Bill is a founding member and Artistic Director of Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory.
Zoë Lepiano is a freelance collections manager, curator, and visual researcher. She has worked with artists’ private collections and in public institutions including, Sally Mann, Wendy Snyder McNeil, Rosemary Kilbourn, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Hamilton, the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She supports Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory’s born-digital photograph collection. Lepiano holds an MA in Film and Photographic collections from Ryerson University (2016). She is the recipient of the Howard Tanenbaum Fellowship (Ryerson Image Centre, 2017) and the Heather and Erin Walker Humanitarian Award (Concordia University 2010).
Kachely Peters is a visual artist and contributing sound and media artist to Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory. Since 2020, Kachely has made wonderful, thought-provoking contributions to The Farm and the City and the Radio (2020) and Home + House (2021-2023). Her work has been featured in numerous shows including the Malvern Town Centre (2015), Doris McCarthy Gallery (2019 and 2020), and Cedar Ridge Creative Centre Gallery (2019). Kachely has an Honours BA in Studio Art (University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, 2019).
Krys Verrall is an artist, founding member and Artistic Programmer of Big Pond Small Fish. She has been instrumental in developing BPSF’s philosophical approach to collaboration with vulnerable participants. Her approach elicits and then collaboratively develops the stories, drawings and perspectives of participants into experimental choral, art and video productions. Krys holds a PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education from Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto (2007). She has presented her writing on young peoples culture in Canada, Denmark, USA, and Australia and her publications have appeared in anthologies and Topia (Toronto); Canadian Journal of Communication Studies (Montreal) and Jeunesse (Winnipeg).
Our Board of Directors
Geoff Bowie is the President of the Board of Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory. He has been making documentaries for television for 30 years. For Geoff it is about telling stories about important subjects with strong characters. His films have been screened at national and international film festivals including the Toronto International Festival, New York Festivals where The Hospital at the End of the Earth won a Silver Medal and the Columbus International Film Festival where When is Enough Enough, a story about a First Nation trying to deal with the Alberta tar sands, won a Bronze Plaque.
Andrew Zukerman is a multi-disciplinary artist. His practice encompasses the fields of experimental music composition, screenprinting, painting, film, installation, writing and small-edition publishing. Though these applications are diverse, the tendency toward collage and humorous re-appropriation is at the heart of his work. Andrew is the secretary of Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory. He lives in Toronto.
Anupa Perera is a cellist and visual artist who grew up in Colombo, Sri Lanka where she collaborated in numerous musical ventures in theatre, opera and film with her father, composer Premasiri Khemadasa. Since 2004 Anupa has been living in Toronto where she has been collaborating with its arts community. She has performed and produced opera widely in Sri Lanka, Europe, Canada and the USA. She has won major national awards for her musical work in Sri Lanka and is resident musician with Toronto’s, Mammalian Diving Reflex. Anupa also manages the Khemadasa Foundation - an institute established in 1993 to give free education in music and arts to the underprivileged youth of Sri Lanka. She has recently agreed to join the board at Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory.
Jeffrey Canton He has been a community-based storyteller. His work as ranges from the fantastic world of Hans Andersen to sharing original stories that dig deep into the strata of Toronto’s history including the Internment Camp at Todmorden Mills and the early years of the Jewish community. As a member of Queers in Your Ears (QIYE), a GLBTQ storytelling collective since 1996, he has developed original material which, as part of QIYE, he has performed widely including at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, This Ain't the Rosedale Library and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. He holds a BA in English from University College, University of Toronto (1986).
Jon Iñaki Etxeberria Vanneste is an experimental cartoonist from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, self publishing comics with a formalist bent in Toronto’s zine community, as well as playing in the DIY music scene. Jon has had comics published in the Klondike Sun and Enough Space for Everyone Else: An Anthology of Anti-Imperialist Science Fiction, as well as through Small Sword Press. Jon was awarded a BMO 1st Art award in 2015 and was a semifinalist for the Adobe Student Design Achievement Award in 2017. Jon is now working towards a Bachelor’s of Design in Illustration with an English minor from OCADu; the youngest member of BPSF, Jon is the social media coordinator and also designed the org’s logo.
Our Funders