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Our board is the backbone of Bloomsday Montréal. Their commitment to the festival and community engagement charts our course, and energizes the fundraising and event-planning that defines our path of continuous improvement.
Our heartfelt thanks go to all our board and hard-working committee members. The ongoing dialogue and interaction we enjoy is crucial to our evolving relevance and sustainability as a learning organization.
Kevin Wright, a retired educator, is the president of Festival Bloomsday Montreal. He is also the leader of the Finnegans Wake reading group in Montreal, The Boaters and Sifters of ALP, which meets every third Wednesday of each month.
Writer, curator and critic in the visual arts, particularly photography.
Born in Montreal in 1950, Robert Graham studied at McGill University, where he received an M.A. in Communication Studies. Since 1980, he has written on photography for art magazines and institutions, such as Parachute, Ciel variable, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, bringing his particular communications education to a variety of artistic and non-artistic photographic activity. For Le Mois de la Photo a Montreal in 2001, he curated an exhibition entitled Picture This! Documenting the Future, based on the way in which photography can be used to illustrate yet unmet aspirations. He has served on the administrative boards of Parachute magazine (1985-1991) and Dazibao arts centre (1999-2004). Married to Sharon Sparling, father to three children, grandfather.
David Schurman is the past-president and founder, with the late Judith Schurman, of Festival Bloomsday Montreal. He is a retired educator and administrator at Champlain Regional College in Saint Lambert. Despite having a background in science, he is an avid fan of the works of James Joyce, and it is from a study group at the McGill Community for Life-long Learning that the spark for a Bloomsday festival in Montreal was ignited.
Susan’s love for James Joyce’s ground breaking novel Ulysses, and Irish literature, art, culture and music in general, has been a driving force in her commitment to the Arts. Growing up with her mother from Co. Mayo and her father from Co. Dublin, she has a diverse and deep understanding of her heritage and all the richness and complexity that goes with it.
She holds an Honors BA in English Literature, a B.Ed. and certification in teaching ESL. In the course of a long teaching career, the highlight was being part of a core group of four teachers who created an alternative programme for at-risk high school students.
Susan’s passion for theatre began when she was a child in ballet class, acting the character of a most menacing spider to Little Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet. She has performed in community theatre with roles as varied as Lysistrata, Samuel Beckett’s All that Fall radio play, Jack of Diamonds, Robin Hood pantomime with the Hudson Players Club, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest as well as variety shows, marionette theatre and Bloomsday Montreal events since its inception in 2011.
Another major interest is StoryFest, a literary festival which is part of the Greenwood Centre for Living History in Hudson, QC. Authors from across the country are invited to showcase their work. Susan has had the privilege to present “In Conversation “ with Margaret MacMillan and Maestro Kent Nagano to name just two.
Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Marlene Chan is a lifelong learner and independent scholar associated with the McGill Community for Lifelong Learning (MCLL) and Concordia University, Seniors Non-Credit Programs since retirement as a bilingual Senior Policy Analyst, Department of Canadian Heritage of the Federal Government. She has 16 years experience in the Canadian Federal Government, Department of Multiculturalism in Performing and Visual Arts, Heritage Languages and Writing and Publications. Secondments were awarded as Cultural Officer for Canada 125; the UN/50 celebrations in collaboration with The Canada Council for the Arts; and Arts Education, Ontario Arts Council.
Academically, Marlene Chan holds two Bachelor degrees and two Masters degrees: a BSW (specialising in Community Development) and BA (major in French and minor in Psychology) from the University of Manitoba, Canada; an MA in Arts Administration from City University, London (UK) and an MA in the History of the Book, University of London (UK).
She participated in the engAGE Centre for Research on Ageing Concordia University International Summer School, Beyond the Body: Recasting Aging in 2019; Women, Ageing and Media (WAM) Summer School 2020 and 2021; and presented together with Christine O’Kelly, Age Friendly Universities Coordinator based in Dublin, Ireland at the International Federation on Ageing, 15th Anniversary Global Conference in 2020, Niagara Falls, Ontario.
Currently, she is Community Representative on the Governing Board and Planning Committee (B/OLD 2024) of Concordia University’s engAGE Centre for Research on Ageing; an active board-member-at-large of The Alcuin Society based in Vancouver, BC; a member of the Editorial Committee, Who am AI? Book Club and on the Board and Planning Committee of Festival Bloomsday Montréal.
Kerry McElroy is a cultural historian and writer holding a doctorate in humanities from Concordia University, Montreal. She specialises in histories of women and histories of the arts, especially including cultural histories of misogyny and sexual assault in various industries and historical moments. She has published articles on women, history, culture, politics, trauma, and cinema in Irish America, The Independent, Montréal Serai, and narrative paths among other magazines and scholarly anthologies. She holds a master’s degree in modern European studies from Columbia university and another in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University. Her doctoral thesis was a labour and industrial history of the abuse of women in performance systems and is currently in manuscript process. She divides her time between Europe and North America.
Miles Murphy grew up in the heart of the North American continent, in Winnipeg, Canada. He’s worked variously as a writer/researcher, prospector, bookstore manager, produced talking books for the blind and a directed a variety of adult learning programs. He is an independent scholar with a wide range of interests. Miles is a graduate of Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies with a lifelong interest in Joyce and Ireland.
Howard Krosnick, the past President of the Jewish Public Library of Montreal, was instrumental in establishing a successful relationship between the JPL and Bloomsday Montreal.
Kathleen Fee, born and raised in Ottawa, has little but Irish blood in her veins.
Kathleen attended La Maison Jeanne d’Arc, a bilingual convent day school, where she excelled in recitation. Her first leading role, age seven, was as the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, foreshadowing a long career as a character voice specialist. She found her feet acting in community theatre, studied at the Banff School of Fine Arts, performed with Carleton University’s Sock ’n’ Buskin, apprenticed at the Stratford Festival, toured rural Ontario and the BC interior bringing live theatre to audiences young and old, graced main stages from Vancouver to Halifax, appeared on film and television in features, series, and movies-of-the-week as well as countless TV and radio commercials. Along the way, she earned a Certificate in Translation from McGill which led to her expanding her capacities in post-production beyond voice acting and voice direction to script translation and adaptation.
She continues working as a character actor, narrator, and voice director in documentaries and animated films.
Volunteer work has included serving on the Montreal ACTRA branch council and the board of Persephone Productions. She has an ongoing commitment to the community leadership program at Landmark Worldwide.
She loves nothing more than curling up with a juicy murder mystery book and a cat in her lap.
Her association with Festival Bloomsday Montreal began in our first year, 2011, when she was asked to perform Molly Bloom’s reverie—chapter 18 of Ulysses—now an annual tradition. She later joined the board and, when COVID made public performances impossible in 2020, took on the task of organizing an on-line festival. As Artistic Director, she strives to bring intriguing, original Irish-themed arts events to a wider audience.
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