Meet Our Staff
Jenna Reid, Executive Director/Senior Curator
Jenna Reid (she/her) is a fibre artist who works with the practices of quilting and natural dyes, and banner making as a way to engage with activist based aesthetics. From 2020 onwards Jenna has worked alongside prominent social movements in Tkaronto creating large scale banners and pennants to creatively activate messages for racial justice and radical change.
Jenna has completed a residency on Toronto Island with the Feminist Art Conference, at Banff for both her studio and curatorial practices, and has exhibited her work and presented on panels in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. Jenna’s studio work explores inter-institutional violence informed by the histories of queer, feminist, Deaf, disability, and mad movement organizing. With a studio based PhD in Critical Disability Studies at York University, Jenna’s teaching and research specializes in the emergent field of Mad Studies. Jenna uses art in classroom and community spaces to create ruptures, open up new lines of inquiry, encouraging people to turn away from the need to resolve and instead open up the transformative possibilities that happen when we render things problematic. Jenna has published in The Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Canadian Art, Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Policy, and Practice, Journal of Progressive Human Services, and Studies in Social Justice.
Modeste “Monday” Zankpe, Strategic Development Director
Modeste “Monday” Zankpe is an Afro-Indigenous creative force whose work defies convention and champions liberation. She is Esk’etemc of the Secwépemculecw (Secwépemc Nation) on her mother’s side and from the Ewe people of Togo on her father’s side. Named after the day of her birth in Ewe tradition, Monday channels her heritage into every facet of her artistry.
As a multidisciplinary artist, she seamlessly moves between commanding the stage as Monday Blues and crafting bold, statement-making jewelry through her brand, Monday May Jewelry (MMJ). As a burlesque performer and member of the award-winning Virago Nation, Monday reclaims Indigenous sexuality through fearless storytelling and ancestral power.
Beyond the stage, Monday has served on the board of the Vancouver International Burlesque Festival, worked with Vancouver Indigenous Fashion Week and Supernaturals Modelling, and draws on her background in social work and coaching to mentor others and inspire change. For her, art is more than expression—it’s a call to action, a celebration of identity, and a reminder that the most powerful stories are the ones we tell ourselves.
Jillian Christmas, Curatorial Director
Jillian Christmas is a queer, afro-caribbean writer living on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam people (Vancouver, BC). Jillian works as an artist, educator, curator and consultant, appointed inaugural Poet-in-Residence at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2023-2024), she is the long-time spoken word curator of Vancouver Writers Fest, and the former artistic director of Verses Festival of Words. Jillian was the recipient of the 2021 Sheri-D Golden Beret Award for Spoken Word Poetry and the 2021 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ emerging writers. She has won numerous Grand Poetry Slam Championship titles and represented both Toronto and Vancouver at eleven national poetry events, notably breaking ground as the first Canadian to perform on the final stage of the Women of the World Poetry Slam. Christmas has presented poetry and theory in a multitude of venues including the BC Civil Liberties gala, the SFU 2018 grad conference closing keynote, and numerous panels focussed on the intersections of critical race theory and contemporary art. Her debut collection, The Gospel of Breaking (Arsenal Pulp Press 2020), was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and her children’s book, The Magic Shell (Flamingo Rampant Press 2022) has been recommended by both CBC kids, and the Festival of Literary Diversity. Christmas moves with intentional slowness through creative cultivation processes of personal and collective ceremony, and wears the title ‘Aunty Jilly-Bean’ like a badge of honour.
Hannah Sullivan Facknitz, Graphic Designer
Hannah Sullivan Facknitz is a queer, disabled community historian, writer, and artist whose past work is a classic ADHD smörgåsbord. They’ve worked as a curator of antique textiles, a full time artist, and an educator, as well as in suicide prevention, retail and food service, and even accounting (very briefly). A reluctant activist, they have done work on Medicaid expansion (US), suicide prevention, and disabled access to education. They are the descendant of colonizers, refugees, and refugees-turned-colonizers, arriving themselves on the occupied lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as a student and unofficial medical refugee from so-called virginia.
Living Mad, queer (genderqueer and bisexual), crip, and fat, their art and writing process grief, kinship, and the complexities of queer, crip ancestry, history, and time. With a deep desire to be a fae druid hyper femme remake of Radagast the Brown with a cozy cottage and hundreds of tiny forest creature friends, Hannah’s greatest wish is for all disabled people to have abundant, uninhibited access to softness, gentleness, and ease. They join Kickstart after finishing their Master of Arts in history excited to deepen their crip, Mad, disabled connections to the amazing artists and artistic community here.
