Toronto Cultural Partners

Luminato Festival Toronto is a convenor and catalyst for big, bold contemporary works of art. Each June, Luminato kicks off the summer with a festival to welcome the world to Toronto, commissioning, producing, and presenting exceptional Canadian and international artists. Throughout the year, Luminato works with artists from the diverse cultures and communities of the city’s region, supporting creative development, and bringing their art to the world stage. We connect local voices with global conversations and ground our work in equity, inclusion, accessibility, and sustainability. Most importantly, we believe in the power of art to start conversations and inspire audiences.

“The aim of the Aga Khan Museum will be to offer unique insights and new perspectives into Islamic civilizations and the cultural threads that weave through history binding us all together. My hope is that the Museum will also be a centre of education and of learning, and that it will act as a catalyst for mutual understanding and tolerance.” – His Highness the Aga Khan

The Arab Community Centre of Toronto (ACCT) strives to enable and empower individuals, families, and communities to lead informed, productive, and culturally sensitive lives. As a non-profit model of excellence, we honour our Arab Canadian heritage through community building and service to those in
need of every heritage.

The ACCT has been serving newcomers of all cultures, religions, and ethnicities since 1973.

Every service is as unique as the communities we serve.

Kelly Brownbill‘s spirit name, Wabunnoongakikwe, means Woman Who Comes from the East and she is proud to be WabizhashiDodem, Marten Clan. She is a member of the Flat Bay community of the Mi’kmaq Nation in Newfoundland. She currently lives near Barrie, Ontario and has been an active member of the Indigenous community in this area for the past 30 years.

Kelly has been married to Austin Mixemong for 25 years, and they are happily sharing their life with their daughter, Bailey. Learning how to be a mother under Bailey’s capable tutelage has been the most powerful experience of her life.

One of Kelly’s areas of interest is the recruitment, employment and retention of Indigenous persons working in non-Indigenous organizations. Having been employed in a human resources capacity for a decade, Kelly had opportunity to identify first hand the challenges faced by Indigenous employees and non-Indigenous management. She addressed these challenges through the development of tools and resources that effectively harmonized working relationships and enhanced employer/employee relationships. One such resource that she developed was the “Wellness and Work, Employment Assistance Programming in Canada” article, published by Canadian Scholars’ Press. 

The Brampton Arts Organization (BAO), previously the Arts, Culture & Creative Industry Development Agency (ACCIDA), is a unique organization incubating within the City of Brampton focused on growing, celebrating, advocating for and connecting the creative sector by offering a range of programs, services and resources. We are a key partner in delivering the City’s ambitious vision for the arts, culture and creative industries as articulated in the City’s strategic vision and Culture Master Plan.

Based in Toronto, the Canadian Opera Company is the largest producer of opera in Canada and one of the largest in North America. General Director Perryn Leech joined the company in 2021, forming a leadership team with Music Director Johannes Debus and Deputy General Director Christie Darville.

The COC enjoys a loyal audience, including a dedicated base of subscribers, and has an international reputation for artistic excellence and creative innovation. Its diverse repertoire includes new commissions and productions, local and international collaborations with leading opera companies and festivals, and attracts the world’s foremost Canadian and international artists.

The company is an incubator for the future of the art form, nurturing Canada’s new wave of opera performers and creators with customized training and support. The COC’s purpose-built opera house, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, is hailed internationally as one of the finest in the world.

The Canadian Arabic Orchestra is a professional charitable organization dedicated to connecting audiences with classical Arabic music while celebrating the freedom and diversity of Canada’s cultural landscape. The repertoire covers all parts of the Arab world and spans a time period that goes back to early Andalusia – sometimes with a Western Classical and Jazz twist. We help Canadians get in touch with the cultural roots of Arabic music.

Clay & Puppet Theatre produces plays, pageants and spectacles in public space with and for the community.

We are a “theatre without walls”.

Common Boots Theatre is a Toronto-based theatre company that has been creating welcoming, engaging, and joyful theatrical events and experiences for 40 years. We prioritize the creation of new Canadian work that reflects the place and time in which we live, often in unexpected forms and non-traditional spaces like the outdoors. We value collaboration, care, and comedy in the way we engage both artists and the audiences we serve. Our boutique approach celebrates the intimate and intricate human connections we grow in our communities and into the broader world.

Community Music Schools of Toronto is a registered charity that gives children and youth a rich and rewarding music and social education, by removing the financial obstacle. For over 23 years we have seen that the study of music allows young people to flourish creatively, personally and academically…enriching their lives and future prospects. Our students have access to some of Toronto’s best music teachers and a vast array of musical instruments and options.

Our students’ study everything from classical piano, strings, voice, brass, wind and percussion to electronic music, songwriting and recording. They make music with fellow students, faculty and even the odd celebrity and perform all over the city. We also offer countless leadership opportunities through our Youth Committee and mentorship programs and provide employment experience for junior counsellors at our summer music camps.

In addition to bringing music to kids in Regent Park and Jane Finch we are also giving a music education to Indigenous students at Wandering Spirit School and young newcomers to Canada.

We are truly grateful to many individuals, foundations, corporations and government entities for investing in our students and helping them thrive through music.

Meeting the needs of a diverse society since 1952, COSTI Immigrant Services is a community-based multicultural agency providing employment, educational, settlement and social services to all immigrant communities, new Canadians and individuals in need of assistance.

Dreamwalker’s vision can be summed up in three words: engage, exchange, experience. Our collaborative work opens doors within ourselves and between each other. We continue to do the work to listen, learn, unlearn, and relearn in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action.  Our repertoire raises issues of humanity, relationality, and the choices people make. We are dedicated to offering diverse individuals a safe place to enter, arrive, explore, discover, dream, connect, create, reflect, and to feel supported and challenged. By moving together we explore what it is to be human.

Digging Roots breathe life into songs from their land, Turtle Island, to raise their voices in solidarity with a global chorus of Indigenous artists, activists and change-makers.

For over a decade, two-time JUNO Award winners Digging Roots have traveled the world with a joyful message of resistance, celebrating Anishinaabe and Onkwehón:we traditions of round dance and interconnectedness. As Roots Music Canada says, the band is “…badass, empowering and hopeful all at the same time.”

Frog in Hand  began with a cast of frogs performing circus tricks under the artistic direction of sisters, Noelle Hamlyn and Colleen Snell, who were one and five years old at the time. From this whimsical debut springs our firm belief that art begins in humble places – including the mud and grass of our own backyards.  Although we are now a diverse collective of dancers, choreographers, musicians, actors, spoken word poets,  designers and visual artists, we are still inspired by where we find ourselves.

We are storytellers. We are inspired by local tales, people, and communities that now extend beyond our back yard to include professional training at The Banff Centre, LADMMI, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, London Contemporary Dance School (UK), Shiseikan Budojo (Tokyo) and Barefoot College (Tanzania). With dance at the forefront, we blend disciplines, treasuring the interaction between space, place and the possibilities of narrative. We seek to blur boundaries that separate art forms, artists, audiences and communities; we collaborate with others who have similar aspirations.

Frog in Hand  Company members have trained with Gaga Movement (Israel), Jacob’s Pillow, Third Rail (NYC), Peggy Baker Dance Projects, and ProArteDanza. We are all committed to listening for stories and working in community context. Since our first professional performance in 2012 we have produced 45+ original creations and 3 festivals sharing stories with audiences in parks, schools, gazebos, staircases, fountains, abandoned factories, elevators, galleries, street corners and theatres. 

Herbie Barnes is an accomplished playwright, performer, director and arts educator whose 30-year-career spans stages across North America. He was among the generation of young Indigenous artists in the 1990s breaking down barriers to forge professional careers in Canadian theatre.

The Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto advances humanities scholarship, generates interdisciplinary ways to understand human experience, and provides opportunities for scholars to learn from each other.

Jamii is a not-for-profit arts organization based in the Esplanade community, Toronto. Our vision is to enhance togetherness within the communities we engage. We initiate, welcome, enable, facilitate and produce creative experiences, arts events and workshops with, for and by the people of the Esplanade and beyond with an intent of creating shared memories.

Jumblies is a Toronto-based organization with a national and international reach that engages in collaborations between professional artists and diverse people and communities, and mentors and supports others to do so. Jumblies expands where art happens, who gets to be part of it, what form it takes and which stories it tells. This imperative has led us outside of specialized art places, and to place participation and radical inclusion at the core of our projects. We say Everyone is welcome! and embrace the joys and challenges, social and aesthetic, of meaning or trying to mean it.

KasheDance explore and abstract using the CRP forms and Pan-Africanist based movement to help facilitate a multidisciplinary approach; finding inspiration from visual arts, music, mixed media and spoken word.  Our dancers are diverse in ethnicity, technique and artistic practice.  KasheDance is creatively and socially curious about how dance can fuel focused and progressive conversations around our practice? Situate people and audiences in a cross-cultural  engagement steeped in local and international experiences. This we feel will offer renewing cultural potential and creative building the continued networks in and outside of the  Arts.

ABOUT

KUNE is an eleven-piece collective made up of ten immigrant musicians from all over the world and one Metis-Canadian. Our sound captures the experience of living in Toronto, the world’s most diverse city. Through music, we remember where we came from and we envision a pluralistic future.

MABELLEarts brings people together across real and perceived differences to do something together. We prioritise doing over talking and focus on fun and creative projects with tangible impacts, including economic opportunities for the people who take part. By doing things together, we move from being strangers to becoming neighbours and friends. The resulting social capital knits people together to celebrate in good times and band together when times are tough.

Matthew House is a welcoming community that offers a range of support services to help refugee claimants establish new lives in Canada.  This includes: Shelter, Settlement Support, and Community Transitions.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) provides emergency medical humanitarian care to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or exclusion from healthcare. We provide assistance based on need, regardless of ethnicity, gender, religion or political affiliation. We also speak out about the suffering we witness while carrying out our work.

Celia Franca founded The National Ballet of Canada in 1951 with the goal of presenting the best of classical and contemporary ballet. Today the company is among the world’s finest, with 70 dancers, an in-house orchestra and a permanent home at The Walter Carsen Centre in Toronto. The National Ballet has a history of pre-eminent Artistic Directors and, starting January 2022, welcomed new leader Hope Muir.

Renowned for its diverse repertoire, the company performs traditional full-length classics, embraces contemporary work and encourages the creation of new ballets as well as the development of Canadian choreographers. The company’s repertoire includes works by Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Aszure Barton, Marie Chouinard, John Cranko, William Forsythe, James Kudelka, Wayne McGregor, Kenneth McMillan, John Neumeier, Rudolf Nureyev, Crystal Pite, Alexei Ratmansky, Christopher Wheeldon and the company’s Choreographic Associates Robert Binet and Guillaume Côté, among other creators.

The Nathaniel Dett Chorale is Canada’s first professional choral group dedicated to Afrocentric music of all styles, including classical, spiritual, gospel, jazz, folk and blues.

Toronto Council Fire Native Cultural Centre is an autonomous, vibrant cultural agency that involves and serves the Indigenous community with confidence for and commitment to their well-being.

With a mandate to provide counselling, material assistance and other direct services to First Nations people as well as to encourage and enhance spiritual and personal growth.

Red Pepper Spectacle Arts is a non-profit, community arts organization that co-creates and facilitates multidisciplinary collaborative arts engagement cross-culturally and primarily serves First Nations/Metis/Inuit Communities. Red Pepper works in partnership with social service agencies, community health and educational institutions, municipalities, band councils, neighbourhood residencies and other arts partners, to provide arts programming towards social justice, equity in cultural arts production, representation and arts access. Our services are collaborative and for each project we endeavour to create an environment and opportunities where all skill levels and learning styles are respected to achieve creative success within a wide variety of artistic media.

The Queer Songbook Youth Orchestra (QSYO) is a brand new Toronto based pop orchestra initiative for young musicians in the GTA who identify as 2SLGBTQ+ and their allies. Modelled after the Queer Songbook Orchestra (QSO) in concept and intent, the QSYO aims to provide an avenue for queer, trans, questioning and allied youth to further their musical training while actively engaging in 2SLGBTQ+ representation and community building.

Robert Binet is a choreographer and is currently Choreographic Associate and Creative Producer of CreativAction with The National Ballet of Canada (NBoC). His creations for NBoC) include The Dreamers Ever Leave You, Orpheus Alive, Self and Soul, The Sea Above, The Sky Below and more. His works for the company have been performed across Canada as well as in London, New York and Hamburg. He has also created ballets for The Royal Ballet where he was Choreographic Apprentice from 2012-2013, New York City Ballet, The Dutch National Ballet Junior Company, Ballett am Rhein and more.

Robert built and runs the National Ballet of Canada’s CreativAction programme which creates choreographic development opportunities and shares resources with the local dance community. He has created site-specific works for the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and choreographed music videos for Owen Pallett and Belle & Sebastian.

Rise Edutainment are a collective of Artivist’s providing welcoming platforms for self expression.

SCF serves diverse newcomer and refugee communities with the support of dedicated staff and passionate volunteers. We predominantly work to support refugee women, children, youth, and seniors.

Shadowland Theatre creates theatre that is expressive in style, highly imaginative in concept, and spectacular in execution.  Masks, puppetry, stilts, live music, fire, and evocative visual imagery draw audiences into worlds where stories ​unfold and dreams are unravelled.

Theresa Cutknife is a mixed Nehiyaw (Plains Cree) and Puerto Rican Iskwew (Woman) from Maskwacîs, Alberta located on Treaty 6 Territory and is a member of the Samson Cree Nation. This upcoming May 2020, Theresa will graduate from her fourth and final year at the Centre for Indigneous Theatre (CIT). She is an emerging actor, playwright and director. Theresa is one of five curators as part of a decentralized approach to curatorial decision making, led by Festival Director Clayton Lee, for the 2020 Rhubarb Festival at Buddies and Bad Times Theatre.

War Child was founded to foster the capacity of people within communities to find long-term solutions to the problems caused by conflict.

We are artists, storytellers, community builders. We are creative thinkers. We disrupt. We’re nomadic, without a permanent venue. We support a community of creators. Sharing tools, spaces, and providing essentials like childcare. Together, we shake up the status quo. We question everything and make change as we go.

https://whynot.theatre/