The Beacon Project: Cross-Cultural Conversations is a series of multimedia creations developed in collaboration with Indigenous communities along The Great Trail—including Metepenagiag First Nation (New Brunswick); Pasqua, Standing Buffalo, Sakimay, and Cowessess First Nations (Saskatchewan); and Fort Smith and Fort Resolution (Northwest Territories). A companion project to the feature documentary 500 Days in the Wild—filmmaker Dianne Whelan’s five-year, 24,000 km ecological and reconciliation pilgrimage—The Beacon Project engaged youth, artists, Elders, and Grandmothers in a collaborative process of listening, reflection, dialogue, and kinship. The resulting films are rooted in shared experiences and honour Indigenous worldviews as we continue to imagine new pathways into the future. Featuring Dianne Whelan, Ann Verrall, Cecelia Brooks, Elder Howard Augustine, Elder Jeannie Bartibogue, Marie Kryszko, Sacred Wolf Singers. With gratitude to Canada Council for the Arts, CBC Gem, and all the cultural, arts and community organizations who supported this journey.

At We’koqom’a Mi’kmaw School in Waycobah, Cape Breton, Elder Ma'kit Poulette shares her story of surviving the Shubenacadie Residential School. When she arrived at just four years old, her doll was taken away. In response, she began making dolls from cleaning rags — a practice that became a lifelong act of resilience and remembrance. As an adult, Ma'kit searched for a doll that resembled the one stolen from her. In this project, she recounts her story and teaches students how to make rag dolls of their own. Produced by Ann Verrall & Off Centre Collective. Created by Ma'kit Poulette, students of We’koqom’a Mi’kmaw School, Rob Smith, Lindsay Dwn Dobbin, and Ann Verrall. In partnership with the Centre for Art Tapes. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Nova Scotia Communities, Culture & Heritage, and the Sisters of Charity.

Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism with Ingrid Waldron and curated by Lindsay Dawn Dobbin centered Black and Indigenous solidarity through cross-cultural exchange and collaborative creation in response to environmental racism in Mi'kma'ki. This gathering brought together speakers and performers to share stories, experiences, and embodied responses to environmental injustice through storytelling, dance, spoken word, song, and graphic art. Featured collaborations included: Africville – Irvine Carvery and Rebecca Thomas; Pictou Landing First Nation – Michelle Francis-Denny and Kwento; Sipekne’katik – Dorene Bernard and Liliona Quarmyne; Shelburne – Vanessa Hartley and Leelee Oluwatoysi Eko David; Design and graphic recording by Bria Miller; With support from I’thandi Munro. The project was presented by Nocturne, with additional support from Visual Arts Nova Scotia, Arts Nova Scotia, Canada Council for the Arts, Kairos, The Leap, and PSAC.

In Millbrook First Nation, Nova Scotia, the youth drumming group Samqwan Boyz share what drumming means to them. Samqwan means water in Mi’kmaq. Through conversations with Elders Doreen Bernard and Jean Martin, this community collaboration explores the deep connection between drumming and water. A project of Quiver Artist Collective and the Millbrook Culture & Heritage Centre, and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, this initiative centered youth voices and cultural knowledge exchange. I contributed as a sound collaborator, working as composer, field recordist, audio editor, and mentor to youth in sound practices.

The Beacon Project: Cross-Cultural Conversations is a series of multimedia creations developed in collaboration with Indigenous communities along The Great Trail—including Metepenagiag First Nation (New Brunswick); Pasqua, Standing Buffalo, Sakimay, and Cowessess First Nations (Saskatchewan); and Fort Smith and Fort Resolution (Northwest Territories). A companion project to the feature documentary 500 Days in the Wild—filmmaker Dianne Whelan’s five-year, 24,000 km ecological and reconciliation pilgrimage—The Beacon Project engaged youth, artists, Elders, and Grandmothers in a collaborative process of listening, reflection, dialogue, and kinship. The resulting films are rooted in shared experiences and honour Indigenous worldviews as we continue to imagine new pathways into the future. Featuring Dianne Whelan, Ann Verrall, Elder Jane Dragon, Angus & Dorothy Beaulieu, Earl Evans, Lynn Napier, Dianne Dul, Lois Edge, Julie Beaver, Julie Lys. With gratitude to Canada Council for the Arts, CBC Gem, and all the cultural, arts and community organizations who supported this journey.

The Beacon Project: Cross-Cultural Conversations is a series of multimedia creations developed in collaboration with Indigenous communities along The Great Trail—including Metepenagiag First Nation (New Brunswick); Pasqua, Standing Buffalo, Sakimay, and Cowessess First Nations (Saskatchewan); and Fort Smith and Fort Resolution (Northwest Territories). A companion project to the feature documentary 500 Days in the Wild—filmmaker Dianne Whelan’s five-year, 24,000 km ecological and reconciliation pilgrimage—The Beacon Project engaged youth, artists, Elders, and Grandmothers in a collaborative process of listening, reflection, dialogue, and kinship. The resulting films are rooted in shared experiences and honour Indigenous worldviews as we continue to imagine new pathways into the future. Featuring Dianne Whelan, Ann Verrall, Elder Lorraine Yuzicapi, Elder Harold Henderson, Danna Henderson, Janine Windolph, Jhaik WindyHair, Holly Rae Yuzicapi, David Roman. With gratitude to Canada Council for the Arts, CBC Gem, and all the cultural, arts and community organizations who supported this journey.

Featuring Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ingrid Waldron, Katy Payne, Michelle Sylliboy, Mike MacDonald, Shalan Joudry, Daniela Gesundheit, Irvine Carvery, Rebecca Thomas, Michelle Francis-Denny, Kwento, Dorene Bernard, Liliona Quarmyne, Vanessa Hartley, Leelee Oluwatoyosi Eko Davis, Bria Miller, Nicholas Dourado, Andrew Jackson, Jacques Mindreau, Nicole Rampersaud, Dr. David Barclay, Johnny Spence. Nocturne, Kjipuktuk/Halifax's art-at-night festival, attracts some 60,000 people to art presented throughout the city, and has hosted international, national and local artists for over 15 years. In 2020, the year I was selected to be the curator, the festival had to pivot due to the coronavirus pandemic. The final programme included 152 artists, and featured the following Anchor projects: Meeting Waters: Cross-Cultural Collaborations on Environmental Racism, Returning Current, What Does the Earth Ask of Us?, Thirteen Echoes of Kmətkinu, Touched by the Tears of a Butterfly.

The first sound art I made was in my bedroom at my grandparents’ house. Thanks to my grandfather’s flea market skills, by the time I was four or five I had a tape recorder and a turntable/8-track/radio combo. I would spend hours listening to albums passed down from my great-grandmother’s collection, falling in love with the textures of radio static as I turned the dial in search of a signal in rural Wabanaki. I recorded tapes pretending to host a radio show, cueing up selections from records, mixing in interviews with my cat and Acadian great-grandmother, and layering it all with the sounds of nature drifting through the window. Sound was a magical thread that tied together my intimate yet infinite world. The original signal—the song, the station—was never entirely clear. It was always beautifully distorted by people, place, and time. Now an adult, I share my love of sound with children through teaching and creative collaboration. Children relate to sound in ways that are playful, intuitive, and grounded in sensory experience. Their approach to listening is often free from the fixed meanings and assumptions adults carry. This openness invites wonder, experimentation, and a relationship to sound that resonates with the values of deep listening. My work with children centres on nurturing that openness—cultivating sound making as a relational creative practice. Together, we improvise, explore, world-build and deconstruct, and learn through shared, process-based discovery. Whether we’re making instruments from recycled materials, recording the wind, remixing rhythms, tuning into underwater soundscapes, or mapping sonic relationships between place and body, sound becomes a space of connection, curiosity, and co-creation. These playful and emergent practices invite participants to reimagine what sound can be and how listening shapes our understanding of the world and each other. Alongside this, I teach foundational sound practices like field and studio recording, mixing techniques, and sonic storytelling—with a focus on analogue methods and open-source tools that make sound work more accessible and earth/community-bound—DJ-ing the everyday with sound as a dynamic, responsive medium for transformation and collective play.