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Canadian artist Bruce Le Dain studied at Sir George Williams College. Le Dain has exhibited at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts at the end of the 1940’s and the beginning of the 1950’s before moving to London. He settled back in Canada in 1966 and exhibited almost exclusively in Montreal from there, his solo exhibitions at the Walter Klinkhoff Gallery attracting crowd records. Le Dain passed away in 2000.

• In October 1984, Bruce Le Dain was honoured by the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) for his contribution to the art of painting.
• Le Dain was the President of the RCA Council in 1992-1993.
• Le Dain received an Honorary Membership from the Arts Club of Montreal on May 7, 1994.
• In 2007, Concordia University established the Le Dain Fine Arts Award, an entrance bursary in Le Dain's honour.

September 1998: Establishment of the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, thanks to a $1 million donation by Andrea and Charles Bronfman and the Seagram Company Ltd during the Campaign for a New Millennium. The institute is dedicated to the study of the Canadian Jewish experience through research, education, and community partnerships. CICJS supports a wide range of projects of local, national, and international interest, which contribute to this field of inquiry.

Frances Belfrage McDonald was born on June 17, 1920. She was married to Peter McDonald with whom she had a daughter named Molly McDonald. Belfrage wrote several radio plays for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of her works include Blues for Charlie, Neon Sign in Green and Red, and The Exile. She also wrote for the British Columbia Department of Education’s Youth in Search of a Future series dealing with vocational guidance.

Frances Belfrage McDonald died on March 13, 2011.

Peter McDonald was born in Scotland, in 1919. He moved to Canada in 1929 and attended the Vancouver Provincial Normal School. From 1940 to 1941, McDonald worked as a teacher, and between 1942 and 1945, he worked in several radio stations as a freelance actor, writer, announcer, and soundman. Notably, he wrote several scripts for the show The Carsons, Canada’s longest-running radio serial. He joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Vancouver, as an announcer in 1945, and worked as a producer of documentaries, variety programs, and dramas between 1946 and 1950. In 1950, McDonald moved to Toronto, Ontario, where he continued to work as a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio. Between 1952 and 1953, he worked as a TV drama producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto. In 1953, McDonald returned to Vancouver as Director of Television for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at CBUT, the first television station in Western Canada. In 1956, he returned to Toronto as Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Assistant Director of Program Planning and Production, and in 1957, McDonald was appointed National Director of Television Network Programming. Notably, he introduced the shows Close-Up and Front Page Challenge during this period and was responsible for liaison with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s French network and the National Film Board (NFB).
Between 1959 and 1969, Peter McDonald was the vice president of Music Corporation of America (MCA). Then, from 1969 to 1971, he was the President of Universal Education and Visual Arts, a division of Music Corporation of America. In 1971, Peter McDonald was appointed Director of the Broadcast Programmes Branch of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC) in Ottawa.

Peter McDonald died on October 15, 1995.

Howard Fink started teaching at Sir George Williams University as an Assistant Professor in English on May 1st, 1964. Fink, Roy Kiyooka and Stanton Hoffman created the Sir George Williams Poetry Reading Series in the Fall of 1966, helped by Wynne Francis and Irving Layton.
Fink was promoted to Associate Professor on September 1, 1969. He was instrumental in the organization of the Face to Face national conference on contemporary English-Canadian theatre that took place at Concordia University in February and March 1975. Fink had worked on rescuing CBC radio drama scripts from the 1930s to 1970 for four years when they were officially transferred to Concordia at a ceremony held on December 7, 1976. The Radio Drama Project would grow up and blossom into the opening of the Centre for Broadcasting Studies in 1981. Fink was promoted to Full Professor in 1985 and was Acting Chair of the English department in 1993. He was granted the Distinguished Professor Emeritus title upon his early retirement in June 1997. Fink would later become the Centre for Broadcasting Studies’ head of archives. He wrote and co-authored many articles and publications on the history of radio broadcasting of theater and drama. Fink passed away on January 21, 2023.

• Howard Fink was the faculty advisor of the Literary Society of Sir George Williams University in 1967.
• He was one of the founding members of the Association for the Study of Canadian Radio and Television (ASCRT). The association was created after the Learned Society convention held in Fredericton, in 1977. Their first annual Congress was held at Concordia in October 1978.
• Fink was the Canadian editor of the international literary publication Stand in 1982.
• Fink’s collaboration with Philip Rouyer, head of Institute for Theatre Research resulted in an agreement with the University of Bordeaux in 1985, encouraging interchanges of students, professors and researchers in the fields of theater, communications and press studies.

Writer, editor and anthologist and photographer Terence Byrnes received his Master degree in English from Concordia University in 1980. He started his career at Concordia as a lecturer at the department of English the same year and was instrumental in the creation of the Creative Writing Program’s new curriculum. He became assistant professor in 1994 and associate professor in 1997 and was Chair of the department from1999 to 2005. Byrnes was a member of various committees within the university, most notably the Arts and Science Faculty Council (1995-2005) and the University Senate (2002-2005).

• Byrnes received a Concordia Graduate Fellowship in 1975.
• Wintering Over, Byrnes’ first collection of short stories, was published by Quadrant Press in 1980.
• The Concordia University Alumni Association (CUAA) presented its first Outstanding Teaching Award to Byrnes at its Alumni Recognition Awards banquet held on November 26, 1992.
• Byrnes was part of the editorial board of the literary and cultural magazine Matrix when it moved from John Abbott College to Concordia in 1994.
• Byrnes was the moderator at the Up Close and Personal, a public literary discussion held at Concordia on April 23, 2009.

The Department of English of Concordia University has its origins in the respective departments of English of the University’s two founding institutions: Loyola College and Sir George Williams University (SGWU). A formal Department of English was established at the beginning of the 1960s in the two institutions. The administration and faculty of both departments were joined together in 1977 in the wake of the Loyola College and Sir George Williams University merger in 1974.

Between 1966 and 1972 members of the Sir George Williams University (SGWU) Department of English hosted a series of poetry readings that was conceived as an on-going encounter between local (Montreal) poets and some writers from the United States and the rest of Canada. Sponsored by The Poetry Committee of the SGWU Faculty of Arts and the Department of English, these readings involved more than sixty poets from across North America. The series was the creation of three SGWU professors: Howard Fink and Stanton Hoffman from the Department of English and Roy Kiyooka from the Department of Fine Arts.

John Reginald George (Jack) Gillmore was born on July 15, 1902 in Boston, Massachusetts to Reg and Jean Gillmore. In 1910 he moved with his family to Vancouver, British Columbia. He has one child, Barrie, with his first wife Elsie Swann who he married in 1929. He married Margaret Johnston in 1949.

Gillmore was instrumental in the creation of Canadian radio dramas, writing, directing, and acting in the first radio plays. He began as an actor and director with the Vancouver Little Theatre Association and Arthur J. Foxall’s National Players before breaking from Foxall in 1926 and forming the Associated Players.

In 1925 Gilmore participated in the Vancouver radio station CKCD’s experiments with radio drama. Later when Canadian National Railway’s Vancouver station (CNRV) commissioned a series of plays in 1927 he continued his work adapting stage plays for the radio, directing, and acting with the CNRV Players until 1932. After the cancellation of the CNRV series, he continued his radio career with the Radio Artists Revue on CKWX from 1932 until 1935.

His professional life also included work in sales and advertising for Birks and Southard Motors where he sold Essex and Hudson cars. Switching from cars to boats in 1929 he ran Marine Sales and Service Ltd. until 1941, and Jack Gillmore Ltd. from 1941-1947. In 1947 he transitioned to real estate, which remained his profession into the 1970s.

Thomas Waugh was born on April 24, 1948 in London, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a BA (Honours) in English Language and Literature in 1970. He then attended Columbia University School of the Arts where he subsequently completed a MFA in Film in 1974 , a M. Phil. in film in 1976 and a Ph. D in Film in 1981 (with Distinction). In 1976, he joined Concordia University as assistant professor in Film Studies. He became associate professor in 1981 and was promoted full professor in 1994. In 1989, Waugh co-taught Concordia’s first gay film and literature course with Robert K. Martin. In 1992, he was instrumental in organizing La Ville en Rose, the first Québec lesbian and gay studies conference which drew over 1,500 activists, academics and media to Montreal from around the world. Professor Waugh was also active in departmental, Faculty and University committees such as the Faculty of Fine Arts’ Permanent Review Committee on the Status of Women, and Concordia’s Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Life.

In 1993, as head of the academic sub-committee of the Concordia HIV/AIDS Advisory Committee, he founded the HIV/AIDS Project. The same year, the HIV/AIDS Lecture Series was launched with contributions from leading academic thinkers, scientific experts, artists, and community leaders who have been diversely affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In the fall of 1994, the course HIV and AIDS: Cultural, Social and Scientific Aspects of the Pandemic was introduced.

In the fall of 1998, he became the Director of a newly launched minor in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality, which included courses on queer cinema, lesbian issues and realities, cultural, social and scientific aspects of AIDS/HIV. From 2000 to 2001, he was Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Between 2008 and 2015, he was Concordia Research Chair in Documentary Film and Sexual Representation. In 2015, he established the Queer Media Database Canada-Quebec Project with filmmaker Kim Simard, an online catalogue of LGBTQ films made in Canada, and the makers involved in their creation. Thomas Waugh retired from Concordia in 2017.

Apart from his teaching activities, Thomas Waugh pursues research interests in sexual representation, documentary film and video, Canadian cinema, queer cinema, and photography. He published several articles and books on these subjects (anthologies, collections, monographs).

articule is an artist-run centre dedicated to social engagement, experimentation and interdisciplinarity.
articule was founded in 1979 by a group of artists to create a place for multidisciplinary artistic presentations focused on research and experimentation. The centre’s founding members shared common values such as bilingualism, collaboration, and management of the gallery through its members’ participation, which remain central to the centre’s operations to this day. The first exhibition “Pile ou Face, mur-mur”, took place in a rented space on de la Montagne Street. articule was incorporated as a non-profit organization the 14th of July 1980.
Since the gallery’s beginnings in 1979, articule’s programming considers equally the work of internationally praised artists as well as that of emerging artists, offering many a first opportunity to exhibit their work in a professional environment.
Following the desire to take art outside of the gallery space, several exhibitions and events take place in locations such as apartment buildings, hospitals, theatres, or parks.
Since its foundings, articule contributed significantly to the development of performance art in Montreal. With thematic conferences, publications such as the newsletter Discussion (1981 to 1989), and workshops, articule became a centre for dialogue and knowledge sharing.

In 2012 the gallery held for the first time the conference Montreal Monochrome?, addressing the mis- and under-representation and systemic oppression of marginalized groups in Montreal’s contemporary art milieu. The several days lasting annual event soon became the gallery’s programming centrepiece.

articule moved several times since its beginnings in de la Montagne Street.
From 1983 to 1991, the gallery shared a building with several other arts-related organizations and galleries at 4060 St-Laurent. In 1991, the centre moved to 15, Mont-Royal West. From 1996 to 2006, it was located at 4001, Berri Street. Thereafter, it relocated to Fairmont Street in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood in 2006.
articule is presently located at 6282, St-Hubert Street, Montreal.
articule was a member of the Société du 5 avril, and is currently a member of the RCAAQ [Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec].

The Société du 5 avril was founded April 5, 1990 when seven artistic enterprises, all tenants of the building at 4060 St. Laurent Blvd., were threated with eviction by the building's owners who had decided to sell their spaces as part of a condominium development. The hastily formed group included Articule, DARE-dare, Dazibao, La Centrale, Main Film, Skol and Vox Populi and was incorporated on June 6, 1990 under the name Société du 5 avril. Its purpose was to develop a centre for non-profit groups. The Société's mandate was to purchase, adapt and manage a centre for self-managed organizations in the visual and media arts. It aimed to provide greater visibility for its members as well as adequate permanent spaces; the Société would also allow its members the benefits of purchasing their supplies in bulk.

The members were forced to vacate their premises at 4060 St. Laurent before May 1, 1991, and the Société quickly ordered an initial pre-feasibility study which recommended a temporary relocation. DARE-dare, Dazibao, La Centrale and Skol moved to rented quarters at 279 Sherbrooke St. West; the other three organizations moved elsewhere. Next, the Société undertook a feasibility study regarding acquisition and development of a permanent building. The first phase of the study, a presentation on the parameters of the project, was completed in October 1993. The second stage began with a study of the technical aspects of the project. Meanwhile, the Société du 5 avril chose the building which best suited the members' needs. It was a former foundry situated at 735-745 Ottawa Street in the up-and-coming Faubourg des Récollets adjacent to Montreal's Old Quarter. An architect's report on the building concluded the second phase of the feasibility study; the three-volume document was deposited in the spring of 1995.

However, the Ottawa Street project was not realized. After some reconsideration, several members of the Société moved to spaces in the building at 460 St. Catherine Street West. The Société du 5 avril officially wrapped up its operations on February 28, 1997.

Christopher Jackson was born on July 27, 1948 in Halifax and died on September 25, 2015 in Montreal. He was married to trombonist Dominique Lortie and had three sons.

He attended the École de Musique Vincent d’Indy from 1966 to 1970 and then studied at the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal where he graduated in 1975. In 1974, he co-founded the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal (SMAM) and became its artistic director in 1988. Christopher Jackson joined the department of Music at Concordia University in 1978 as a full-time professor. He served several administrative positions, including Chair of the department from 1983 to 1988 and Associate Dean from 1991 to 1994. He became Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1994 until 2005.

A specialist in vocal polyphony of the Renaissance as well as the great works of the Baroque era, he was a renowned organist, with an active well-established career as harpsichordist, choral and early opera conductor. He was a regularly invited as guest conductor for ensembles in Europe, the U.S. and Canada and had made numerous recordings, both as a conductor and a soloist.

• Christopher Jackson was instrumental in the creation of Hexagram, an inter-university research institute for new media and the arts with the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 2001.
• In 2001, Jackson received a Doctor of Sacred letters from the University of Sudbury, in recognition of his work with the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal.
• Jackson was a member of the Comité des orgues of the Fondation du patrimoine religieux du Québec from 1988 to 2009 and acted as a technical consultant, advising on the state of different church organs in Québec.

Ken Whittingham attended Loyola College and worked on its weekly newspaper, the Loyola News, first as a reporter in 1967, then as desk and news editor in 1968-69, and associate editor in 1969-70. He became editor-in-chief in the fall of 1970. He graduated with a BA (Cum Laude) in Political Science in 1971.

From 1970 to 1979 he worked for the Montreal Star as a reporter and re-write editor covering the fields of education, health and social services. From 1978 to 1980, he was subsequently the Québec and Canadian correspondent for Washington D.C’s Chronicle of Higher Education. As such, he edited a weekly column on political, scientific and research developments and wrote articles about university and junior college education. During that period he also taught political science courses in the Continuing Education Department at Dawson College and worked as a story editor for CBC television Public Affairs programs. In 1980 he became a Public Relations Officer at McGill University, leaving in 1982 to join Concordia University’s Public Relations department as Assistant Director.

Ken Whittingham was named Concordia’s Public Relations Interim Director in 1984 and became Director in 1987. He developed marketing and communications strategies and co-chaired several key committees that oversaw the university’s communications and public relations activities.

After leaving Concordia in 1996, Whittingham became the Director of Communications and Research at Development and Peace, a position he held for ten years. In 1997, he received the Distinguished Service Award at Concordia’s Alumni Recognition Awards Banquet for his ongoing commitment to the Concordia Alumni Association and to the University.

Since 2006, he has been the Communications Officer at the McGill University Faculty of Engineering.

• Ken Whittingham received a Distinguished Service Award from the Concordia University Alumni Association (CUAA) at their Alumni Recognition Awards banquet held January 30, 1997.

Mark Abley is a non-fiction writer, journalist, travel writer, and poet. He was born in Leamington, England, on May 13, 1955, and grew up in Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. He now lives in Montreal.
Abley studied literature at the University of Saskatchewan, obtaining a BA in 1975. He continued his studies as Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, where he completed a second BA with first-class honours in 1978 and a Master’s degree in 1983, both in literature.
After his studies, Mark Abley and his wife Ann moved to Montreal, where he began to work as a freelance writer. His first book, Beyond Forget : Rediscovering the Prairies, was published in 1986.
With the birth of his first child in 1987, Abley joined the Montreal Gazette, where he worked as a feature writer, book-review editor and literary columnist for the following sixteen years.
During his career at the Montreal Gazette, Abley won the National Newspaper Award for critical writing (1996) and was nominated for a National Newspaper Award for international reporting. In 1995, he received a “Dateline Hong Kong” fellowship sponsored by the Canadian Association of Journalists. In 1997, he received a Maclean-Hunter Fellowship in arts journalism from the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Mark Abley left The Gazette and returned to freelance writing in 2003 with the publication of Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Language. In 2005, Abley was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to write The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English, published in 2008, as the second of three books about language. Abley also wrote a memoir of his father, The Organist : Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, and a book about Indigenous and colonial history, Conversations with a Dead Man : The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott. In his book Strange Bewildering Time: Istanbul to Kathmandu in the Last Year of the Hippie Trail, published in 2023, Abley is reflecting back on his travels through Asia as a young man, in spring 1978. Abley also wrote the text of a children’s picture book, Ghost Cat.
In 2022 Mark Abley received an honorary doctorate from the University of Saskatchewan for his contributions to the literary community.

Abley was a participating member of poets’ workshops during his time in Oxford and later in Montreal. He has published three books of poetry, Blue Sand, Blue Moon (1988), Glasburyon (1994), and The Silver Palace Restaurant (2005), as well as the chapbook Dissolving Bedrock (2001). He received the QSPELL awards for poetry in 1989 and 1995.

Mark Abley has taught writing and literature at various writers’ workshops, at the Banff Centre for the Arts, at the English Department of Concordia University, and he has guest lectured in Concordia’s Journalism program. Abley has also served on juries for the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des letters du Québec, and the Quebec Writers Federation, of which he is a member. He is also a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Canadian Association of Rhodes Scholars, and PEN Canada.