Centre

Roen Higgins is an award-winning Spoken Word Poet, Special Care Counsellor and Impact Coach who is regularly featured on different media platforms for her passion and expertise. Higgins’ mission is to engage, educate and elevate others into finding their unique gifts and life skills which she believes is the foundation of well-being. Her focus is helping youth and young adults emerge and women shift with creative and cultural literacy, mental health, social change, and community well-being.

Ash Phillips is the co-founder and CEO of award winning creative agency Six Cinquième. She is an artist, brand strategist, and entrepreneur working in the creative industry since 2015. Over the last few years, Ash has established herself as a powerful business owner and inspiration for WOC. Her goal is to foster an environment that is welcoming for young creatives that look like her, while pushing the bar, and executing high quality visuals backed by strategy and design thinking. Leading by example, she strives to shape a more diverse, healthy, and inclusive future for the creative industry as a whole.

Feven Ghebremariam is an Eritrean Canadian documentary filmmaker with a degree in communications studies and documentary film training at the L’institut national de l’image et du son. Over the years, she has made short films that highlight issues related to immigration, inclusion and linguistic decolonization. Concerned about the lack of diversity in film and television, Feven co-founded Black on Black Films, a non-profit organization whose mission is to represent and professionalize Afro-descendant creators who seek to work in the audiovisual industry in Quebec. Today, Feven is developing her first feature-length documentary and has recently formed her production company, which focuses on showcasing the rich stories and unique voices of underrepresented communities.

After working for several years as a French copywriter and Web content editor, Mylène Augustin enrolled in the Institut National de l’Image et du Son (INIS) intensive program in interactive production in 2013. From 2014 to 2020, she worked as an associate producer on a dozen projects ranging from short to feature documentary, to short animations, at the English documentary and French animation studios of the National Film Board of Canada. In a desire to support emerging and underrepresented filmmakers, she joined forces with Marie Ka in 2020 to found Inaru Films. Their vision for this production company is to shine new faces of auteur cinema and more particularly the voice of Afro-descendant creators in Quebec. Mylène is also a founding member Black on Black Films, a Montreal film collective whose mission is to support Afro-descendant creators and facilitate their access to the audiovisual industry.