Brett is a local playwright, director, and drama instructor. Her credentials includes directing many plays in the Ottawa Fringe Festival, including: “Finished Girls: A Tale of the Colonial Sex Trade”, “Ex-Cathedra”, “The Night of the Living Impaired”, “Hey, Bartender”, “What Goes Around”, “Bonkers”, “Harlequin”, and “In the Year of Our Lord, 1495”. She received her education through Algonquin College’s Theatre Arts Program and then moved onto the University of Ottawa’s Theatre Arts Program, where she received a B.A. with Honours, a Specialization in Theatre Arts and a Concentration in Religious Studies. Brett enjoys teaching drama to the next generation and spent many years in Gananoque teaching theatre to youth at a performance arts school. She also taught for The Not So Amateur, Amateurs in Kingston. She just recently finished a contract teaching drama to youth with the Native North American Travelling College. Recently, Brett started to offer drama workshops through an offshoot of The Not So Amateur, Amateurs, that will be centered around the Cornwall and SDG area.

Jean-Roland brings proven organizational skill, as a result of nearly 40 years as a teacher, school administrator and university professor. He has always demonstrated tenacious support of the Arts in all its forms, as well striving for fair treatment and recognition for all individuals practicing their art. Jean-Roland is presently the CEO of Swan Records Ltd. and Chief Administrator of the Riverdale School of Music.

Virginia Lake is a wise women, an entrepreneur, wife and grandmother. She has walked many paths in her life, from businesswoman to shaman. She is known as a healer and listener to spirit talk. Clients of her work as a lifestyle coach and energy practitioner find her to be a healing, supporting and inspiring influence. Her art style and medium express her inner world with flow and vibrant colour. She was excited when a piece was chosen for display in the juried Exhibition of TAG Cornwall Spring 2013. Her life and art weave a tapestry of laughter, storytelling and poetry. “I discovered vibrant felt pens as way of expressing dreams, impressions, ideas, encounters and visions. I love the flow and surprise that appears out of shapes and colour. To date my creations have been received warmly by family and friends as gifts and now wish to share them with the public. They are expression my observing and imagination, displaying light and dark, hidden depths and the obvious equally well. I love the simplicity, flexibility and freedom of this media.”

Danielle Vaillancourt, a classically trained mezzo-soprano, has many roots that run deep in the Cornwall area and SD&G. Her grandparents, Ronald and Dorothy Sullivan, have been crucial forerunners in the development of culture and the arts in Cornwall; it was just so fitting that Danielle leads on where her grandparents have left off. Danielle completed her masters degree in Opera Performance at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, where she has performed in many operas in and outside of her studies, worked with world renowned artists, and won and placed in many different prestigious competitions in Canada and abroad. As active as she is at singing, she is also in the midst of completing her masters degree part-time at the HEC [Hautes Études Commerciales] in Management in Cultural and Artistic Organizations in Montréal. Her number one passion, of course, is singing and performing. However her passion is swaying towards contributing her musical abilities, artistic coordination and expertise in Cornwall & the Counties in hopes of it becoming one of the most sought out artistic regions in Ontario.

Todd has been part of the management team at the local Farm Boy store here in Cornwall where we have enjoyed the support of our community, and with that, we have seen steady growth. Before that, Todd owned and operated a Wonder Bread Franchise in Cornwall and the surrounding area.

Director

Ina Schneider is a Canadian painter, living in Cornwall Ontario, who uses vibrant colour palettes to create moods. In her Fractured group of paintings, she uses geometric and curvilinear forms mixed with colour to create images that harken to a past where the world was described in shapes and patterns. She explores colour and texture in her series of Hidden Glass images where she created a style using a mixture of mediums that lets the viewer look for hidden images in a fun childlike framework.

Richard Salem is a security graphic designer who started out as a Mechanical Engineering Technologist in 1986. While in school, he was exposed to the first Computer-Aided-Design programs available for the new personal computer. It was so new there was no one to teach it, so Richard, motivated by his hatred of manual drafting, taught himself. He learned well and quickly, and the college hired him to create and teach their first AutoCAD course. Richard learned many other CAD programs, teaching and consulting to the throng that glommed onto the CAD phenomenon. Converting paper drawings for use as digital files led to map publishing, where Richard found a way to make high-quality digital negatives for printing large maps - the first of their kind. He published on the topic in trade journals and his work was featured at trade shows internationally. Always the tinkerer, Richard, fascinated by the artwork on banknotes, submitted some of his digital versions to a local bank note company. Thus began his adventure with security graphics, a 25 year affair involving every type of document of value you can imagine. Frustrated at the exorbitant cost of security graphic design software, Richard wrote Dove, the Document of Value Engine, a suite of programs for creating security graphics, and was awarded a U.S. patent for his digital security graphic screening system, DoubleTake. He resides in Long Sault with the Skype images of his two grown sons. In his spare time, Richard works with the developmentally challenged, and is an avid improvisational comedy performer, workshop facilitator, and enthusiast.