Meet at the Crossroads Guest Hosts

Each month, Báyò and Aerin, along with all of our fellow fugitives had the pleasure to journey into the offices, living rooms, kitchens and even the farms of our friends and kin around the world. These were our six guest-hosts:

Stephen Stohn: Guest-Host MATC I – October 2020

Longtime Executive Producer of the television series franchise Degrassi, whose latest iteration streams worldwide on Netflix in over 17 languages, Stephen also executive produced the critically acclaimed series Open Heart, Instant Star and The L.A. Complex and their related websites, webisodes, new media and social media initiatives. For nearly twenty years, Stephen was a Director and then Chair of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) and Executive Producer of The Juno Awards, Canada’s national music awards show. Currently serving as Chancellor of Trent University, Stephen is also Chair of Orange Lounge Recordings, and a Director of ISAN Canada, the Canadian Retransmission Collective, and the Producers Audiovisual Collective of Canada. In 2018 Dundurn Press released his book, Whatever It Takes: Life Lessons from Degrassi and Elsewhere in the World of Music and Television.

Vidhi Jain: Guest-Host MATC II – November 2020

Vidhi is the co-founder of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Re-thinking Education and Development and specifically with the Udaipur as a Learning City process-project. She has been a Learning Activist in Udaipur, India for the past nineteen years. She works with the Families Learning Together experiment and supports worldwide Unschooling initiatives, as well as projects related to community media in India. She is interested in traditional knowledge and is working on something called the Grandmother’s University. She is very passionate about slow food and helps support the Hulchal Saturday Café and many local food festivals. Vidhi and Manish are unschooling their daughter, Kanku. Before co-founding Shikshantar, Vidhi spent two years working for Lok Jumbish, a grassroots project in Rajasthan. In this capacity, she designed and ran a program in rural villages to raise awareness and design inclusive schooling services for children with special needs. Prior to that, Vidhi worked directly with children in Delhi with Spastics Society of Northern India.

Alnoor Ladha: Guest-Host MATC III – December 2020

Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and practices a form of mystical anarchism. Alnoor’s political work focuses on the intersection of community organizing, narrative work and economic alternatives. He was a founding member and the Executive Director of The Rules (TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and ecological breakdown around the world. He was a Board Member of Greenpeace International USA and a visiting lecturer at New York University (NYU), Columbia University and the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). Alnoor holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics. He is the Council Chair for Culture Hack Labs and a member of the Defend the Sacred Alliance. He lives in northwestern jungle of Costa Rica as a community member and co-worker at Tierra Valiente.

Hayley Matthews: Guest-Host MATC IV – January 2021

Hayley Matthews is a contemporary dancer, Rolfer (structural integration posture and movement specialist), and the initiator and caretaker of a fugitive global network of dancing women called Sanctuary on the Fault Line. She always danced but steered away from conservatoires. From 2006 she embarked on a rich, determined independent scholarship in dance taking herself to Accra, Ghana to dance with Noyam. Hayley largely curates and dances in her own projects, both solos and collaborations, which you can learn about on the website ENSEMBLE. Hot for her are topics of intimacy, freedom, grace, the power of vulnerability and authenticity, fugitivity, woman, the unleashing of creative life-force, dancer’s health and potential and what she believes is the yet to be fully untapped and realised potential of dance performance, it’s potency and power for the human family.

Michelle Pressend | Nazeer Sonday: Guest-Hosts MATC V – February 2021

Michelle Pressend is currently a lecturer in Environmental Sociology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her interests lie in rethinking political-economy to respond in new and relational ways to the many social-ecological challenges faced in South Africa and globally. Michelle’s PhD project in the Environmental Humanities South program engages in ontological questions to cultivate ways of thinking and being beyond human mastery over nature and extractive logics within the renewable energy discourse and practices.

Nazeer Sonday is a small-scale farmer and chairperson of the Philippi Horticultural Area Food and Farming Campaign. He was born on a smallholding in Philippi outside Cape Town. Sonday has been involved in community development since 2008, when he started the area’s first non-racial civic association and an emerging farmers’ group. These organizations merged in 2013 and became the PHA Food and Farming Campaign. Check out the Vegkop Polyculture Farm website, as well as the following article: Lockdown Validated 10 Years of PHA Food & Farming Campaign Work.

Sharon Chang: Guest-Host MATC VI – March 2021

Sharon Chang is a globally recognized creative and thought leader with deeply rooted  experience across design, architecture, film, media, technology, entrepreneurship and impact investment. After a successful career as Chief Creative Officer at 19 Entertainment – the company behind mega-hits American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance – she turned her attention and resources to focus on how co-creation and systems thinking might solve complex problems through cross-sector collaborations. She develops interdisciplinary projects within an ecosystem of operations that includes Yoxi, her impact investment practice dedicated to funding inquiry; 19340, her film financing and production company behind notable films such as BAFTA-nominated The Eagle Huntress; and her experimental family office that examines how wealth intersects with culture and society. These projects sit at the intersection of the old and the new, working to explore the best ways for humanity to build itself a more just, equitable, and beautiful future.

Getting tired of describing herself as a multi-hyphenate and sensing a growing need for new language to contextualize our rapidly changing world, Sharon coined the term future architect to represent her primary identity. Her latest endeavor is the Guild of Future Architects. Launched in July 2019, it drives the field of future architecture, which builds shared futures designed to animate more enlightened cultural, social, and political systems by rebalancing our economy and ecology. As a membership organization, the Guild provides future architects with education, connections, mentorship, and access to financial resources, so that they may pursue their bold visions to transform the world with positive impact.