Signals from the Ruins

Paria Shahverdi was born in Tehran, Iran. She studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Tehran before immigrating to Canada in 2004. Her drawings were selected annually for the Toronto Annual Drawing Exhibition, and she later developed a mixed media series that was presented in solo exhibitions in 2016 and 2018. In 2017, she received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council in support of her second body of work.

In 2026, she was awarded a prestigious grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, supporting a year long development of her artistic practice. Throughout her career in Canada, she has received multiple awards and grants recognizing her contributions to contemporary art. Her exhibitions have garnered media attention, including interviews on CBC Radio and CBC Television.

Her work has been exhibited in New York State, USA, and across Canada and Iran. As an honorary student, she completed a second Bachelor of Fine Arts at York University, where she later earned her Master of Fine Arts.

Alexey Yurenev is an artist, visual researcher, and educator whose work explores the intersections of memory, technology, and production of knowledge. He teaches in Columbia University and the International Center of Photography (ICP). His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including FOAM (Amsterdam), Hangar (Brussels), MOMus Modern/Costakis Collection (Thessaloniki), and Rencontres d’Arles. He is the author of the book Seeing Against Seeing (2025). Yurenev’s projects have been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, Literary Hub, and Topic. His work is held in collections such as Johns Hopkins University Special Collections, FOAM Museum, and the Anti-Krieg Museum. He has been recognized by Photographer of the Year International and received the Silurian Society Award for excellence in arts and culture journalism. He has also been nominated for an Emmy Award and the FOAM Paul Huf Award. He is the co-founder of FOTODEMIC, an online platform for innovative visual strategies, and the founder and executive producer of Living Room, a monthly public program for ICP alumni.

Elias C Dills is an draftsman and multimedia artist, working in philosophical fields of ontology and phenomenology. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia and graduating from The Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, his work currently interrogates the tuning and articulation of self perceptive spaces within drawing, installation, and writing, attempting to draw out the relationships between the genesis of the creative act and the perception of oneself, the spaces and times of creative being. Dills is currently an artist in residence and administrator at Arts Letters and Numbers in Averill Park, NY.