Evaluation Juries

Since 2013, Isabelle Marazzani has managed the organizational, administrative, pedagogical and integrated development of the college-level activities and training services at Campus en Arts et Divertissement numérique (ADN) in a perspective of educational success, customer service and profitability.

From 2007 to 2012, she offered her freelance consulting services in business strategy to major clients in the digital media sector, including Alliance numérique, SECOR Group, Electronic Arts, Dionne+Gagnon, Telefilm Canada, Innovation PEI and the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. She also served four years as a startup coach at Inno-centre, where she helped more than 100 Mexican and Québec technology firms to take their first commercial steps.

After obtaining a bachelors’ degree in Communications with a major in Journalism from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 1992, she worked for several years in media, and then, from 1994 to 2007, held several management positions in marketing and communications within various companies, including Matrox, Behaviour Interactive, Transcontinental Group, as well as at École NAD.

For over 20 years, Isabelle has been contributing to the rise of Québec’s video game development industry. She has served twice as a member of the jury for Québec’s digital industry NUMIX Awards—in 2013 in the Video Games category and in 2016 in the Games Startup category. Isabelle is co-founder and Vice-President of the International Game Developers Association of Montréal (IGDA), for which she has volunteered since its foundation in 2001 untill its dissolution in 2017. She also serves as Vice-President of a R & D centre, the Centre de développement et de recherche en imagerie numérique (CDRIN).

Jacquie Black is Anishinaabe from the treaty 1 territory in Manitoba. She has worked on numerous projects, productions and programs to promote and showcase creative expression and storytelling through print, music and television.

Jacquie began attending university when she was 5 years old along with her mother Yvonne, who went on to become one of the first Indigenous early childhood educators in Canada. Her mother’s dedication to nurturing children and community provided a pathway for Jacquie to explore and embrace her gifts as a writer and community advocate.

Jacquie studied screenwriting at the University of Winnipeg and at the Banff Centre for the Arts, she is a graduate of Creative Communications, with a major in Journalism, and has written for numerous publications including being published in the book First Lady Nation – Stories of Aboriginal Women. She also received the Eric and Jack Wells Excellence in Journalism Award - Honourable Mention, CTV Fellowship Award – The Banff International Television Festival and the Government of Canada Millennium Scholarship, to mention a few.

Jacquie’s career has flourished over the years and she is proud of all her endeavours including writer/junior story editor for the Parents’ Choice Gold Award-winning children’s television series - Tipi Tales.

She has also written for Indigenous Day Live/Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, The Indigenous Music Awards, CA$HING IN – TV series, Planet Echo – children’s TV series, Wolf Joe – children’s TV series, The Seven Teachings – editor/children’s book, and This Place – producer, adaptation of graphic novel to radio series.

Supporting the arts has always been a passion of Jacquie’s and she is one of the original team members that produce the Manito Ahbee Festival and the Indigenous Music Awards in Canada.

Committed to culture, creativity and justice, Jacquie is very proud to have also been a writer and director for Eagle Vision Production’s groundbreaking television series TAKEN, which focused on the heartbreaking stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, men and boys, to provide a platform for these unsolved cases. Jacquie continues to open her life and career to new experiences and opportunities that bring positive influence to the arts and bring positive influence to the arts and community.

Jaime Alberto Tobon has over 25 years of experience in film and television production. After working for numerous Quebec companies such as Sphère Média, Duo Productions, KOTV and Go Films, he is now an associate producer at Encore Télévision. He has worked on several high-profile series and films, such as Pour Sarah, King Dave, Plan B, Léo and La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier. Since October 2021, he has served on the board of directors of the AQPM.

Jamie-Lee Reardon (Ojibwe/Irish) is a member of Flying Post First Nations in treaty 9. JL is the Institute Manager at imagineNATIVE, where she is committed to supporting the professional development of Indigenous Creatives. JL is a multi-disciplinary undisciplined artist and storyteller who creates from a place of love for community, culture, family, and self.

Jason Della Rocca is a game industry entrepreneur, funding advisor, and cluster expert. He specializes in business/partnership development, pitching/funding, and ecosystem/cluster development.

As the co-founder of Executions Labs, he was a hands-on early stage investor to over 20 independent game studios from North America and Europe. Between 2000-09 he served as the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), and was honored for his industry building efforts with the inaugural Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Conference. In 2009, Jason was named to Game Developer Magazine’s “Power50,” a list which profiles 50 of the most important contributors to the state of the game industry. As a sought after expert on the game industry, Jason has lectured at conferences and universities worldwide.

Jason Edward Lewis is a digital media poet, artist, and software designer. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research/creation projects on computation as a creative and cultural material. He co-directs the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, the Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace research network, and the Skins Workshops on Aboriginal Stortyelling and Video Game Design. He is a Trudeau Fellow, and University Research Chair in Computational Media and the Indigenous Future Imaginary as well as Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University, Montreal.

Lewis' creative work has been featured at Ars Electronica, Mobilefest, Urban Screens, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and FILE, among other venues, and has been recognized with the inaugural Robert Coover Award for Best Work of Electronic Literature, a Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention, several imagineNATIVE Best New Media awards and five solo exhibitions. He's the author or co-author of chapters in collected editions covering mobile media, video game design, machinima and experimental pedagogy with Indigenous communities, as well as numerous journal articles and conference papers.

Before joining academia, Lewis spent fifteen years in Silicon Valley exploring early digital and networked media at the Institute for Research on Learning (where he was a Carnegie Fellow), Fitch Design, and Interval Research. In 2009 he founded Arts Alliance Laboratory, the research and development arm of London-based venture capital firm Arts Alliance. Born and raised in northern California, he is Cherokee, Hawaiian and Samoan.

Jason Ryle is the Artistic Director of the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival based in Toronto, Canada. imagineNATIVE is the world’s largest showcase of film, video, audio and digital media works created by Indigenous media artists. In his capacity as Artistic Director, Jason oversees all artistic and programming aspects of the annual Festival and the organisation’s year-round activities, including international co-presentations and special projects. He is an Advisor for the NATIVe - A Journey into Indigenous Cinema special series at the Berlinale (Germany) and has served on numerous festival and council juries in Canada and internationally, most recently at the Tampere Film Festival (Finland).

Jean-Michel Albert holds a BBA (finance option) and a BA from the University of California. He today has a total of 20 years of experience in the completion of development projects, from conception to production. He has also developed innovative and creative projects for many national and international production companies. He currently works as an independent producer and consultant in the field of new media and founded the Marseille Web Fest, an international festival held for the first time in 2011.

Jean-Christophe Yacono (yako) has developed an impressive photographic and digital body of work in numerous artistic projects over the years. His oeuvre has been featured at the Biennale d’Art Numérique (BIAN), the Festival International du Film sur l’Art (FIFA), the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC), the Cirque du Soleil, PdA’s ArTV studio, the Centre Pompidou, and the Centrale Powerhouse Gallery, among many others.

Since 1993, yako has focused on new forms of digital writing on screens and in public spaces. Through photography, interactive “new realities” and “freeze-frame,” he began his ongoing reflection on gesture, on the fly or choreographed, in movement, experimental or theatrical, in forms on image, in sequences, and on the shifts and blurs that motion makes on the sensor itself.

Yako has developed a practice in media and visual arts through projects that include Wonderland (2008), a public performance of immersive theatre and live audiovisual creation, Musicbox 2 (2009), an interactive installation presented at BIAN, and the production of interactive videos in short and medium formats such as Noirceur (2020), and Fear in Motion (2019) presented at the Imperial Cinema during FIFA 38 and in a selected number of other festivals.

Jean-Pierre Faucher is an international business consultant in the interactive media sector, specializing in video games. He also provides expertise as senior business advisor at Inno-centre Montréal and Technology Business Accelerator in Mexico City, serving in this capacity as a coach for Mexican- and Quebec-based firms. He is a member of the executive committee of the UNESCO Chair of International Communication and Development at UQAM, a co-producer of the Canadian Guide to the Video Games Industry. Jean-Pierre was formerly director of partnership development for the Alliance numérique du Québec, founder of the Montreal International Gaming Summit, co-founder of the Canadian Interactive Alliance (CIAIC), publisher and product manager for Quebecor Media and a jury member for the OCTAS Gala of the Réseau action TI du Québec.

Jeff Mignon is the founder and CEO of the RevSquare/Mignon-Media digital agency, which specializes in communications for the corporate, education and media sectors. He is also the publisher of a news site for kids, Kiddoki.com, and an investor in two start-ups: Open Topic and Fuzu Media. He is the co-creator of Quelcandidat.com, the first participatory media site in France, featuring news from both professional reporters and “citizen journalists.” In addition to this, he was the founder of Formules Presse, a Paris-based media consulting firm, where he was co-CEO and creative director as well for 10 years. He also helped create the 5W Infographics computer graphics agency (New York, Madrid) and the Mediapolis media consulting agency (Warsaw).

Jen Goertzen is VP UX at BRYTER and currently based in Berlin, Germany. She co-founded Caribou, a Canadian UX consultancy, in 2011. Over the course of her career, she has led and consulted with design and product teams across a wide range of industries including interactive retail experiences, secure messaging, classical music streaming, and no-code automation.

Jennifer Lufau is actively engaged with inclusivity topics in the video game world. With her Afrogameuses association, she works for better professional integration and visibility of within the sector. Also a content creation expert, she is a Social Media Manager at Ubisoft and has strong experience in managing international communities.

Jerry Wolf is a filmmaker of both Waywayseecapp First Nation and Vietnamese heritage. His stories strive for the strange and fantastical with imagery both dreamlike and nightmarish. His stories are about survival and the victims who refuse to accept the role as inevitable.

He formed CINETHETICA as a boutique production company, where he’s written and directed 20+ short films, webisodes, and music videos, often featuring a culturally diverse cast of young actors.

In 2022, he was a speaker at the Indigenous Screen Summit. With the support of the Indigenous Screen Office, he’s currently writing a feature film which he plans to direct. His films have screened at the Skoden, Asinabka, Caribbean Tales, and Reelworld Film Festival.

Jess Murwin is a nonbinary Indigenous artist and curator of Mi’kmaq, Scottish, Welsh and Irish descent currently based in Montreal, Quebec They received formal artistic training from Notre Dame de la Tilloye (France) and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Canada), as well as informal training on various sets, at artist centres and in workshops in Canada, Europe and India. Their work is largely community-based, combining futurism and social engagement through a variety of mediums.

As a programmer, they have worked for the Atlantic International Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire à Montréal, among others. Their focus in presenting films and media artworks has always been to champion stories by female, 2SLGBTQ+, and Indigenous artists. They see this work as a critical way of reclaiming narrative spaces and as an important political and artistic act.

Their next project, Canoe Body, is in pre-production.

Joan Jenkinson is a founder and the inaugural Executive Director of the Black Screen Office where she works to support Black Canadians in developing talent, accessing funding, and assuming decision-making roles in television, film and digital media. She also fosters relationships with federal funding agencies, broadcasters and distributors.

Joan is a founding Partner/Producer at Artemis Pictures which is focused on developing and producing high- end scripted content for television and the cinema, for international audiences.

Joan was Vice-President of Independent Production for ZoomerMedia Limited, Television Division. She commissioned, developed and executive produced hundreds of hours of award-winning creative content in all genres for VisionTV. Such titles as Songs of Freedom, Inside The Mind of Leonardo, The Naked Archeologist, Rabbit Fall, and Soul.

Joan spearheaded VisionTV’s ground-breaking DiverseTV/NSI initiative which produced award-winning comedy and drama programs and earned her a Visionary Award from the ReelWorld Film Festival.

For five years, Joan served as Executive Director of Women in Film and Television - Toronto (WIFT-T), where she established professional development training and networking opportunities for women in screen- based media.

Lives in Berlin and has been writing scripts for television since 1990. Passionate about new formats and independent production, he created the blog "Web Series Mag" on the French newspaper Liberation website to review the web fictions of the whole world. Also a consultant, he observes, analyzes, criticizes, studies and catalogs this particular format, offering his expertise to online platforms and content producers. He regularly gives lectures on webseries. In 2015, he founded the Web Series World Cup and released the first statistic study (“Web Series Anatomy”), in 2016 he published “Le guide des Webséries – la nouvelle vague” and in 2017 was elected first president of the French web creators’ association (WAF).

John Gill is an independent media consultant providing strategic, business, and programming consultation to Canadian media organizations. Before that, John was the CEO of the National Screen Institute.

He was the Senior Vice President, Dramatic Content for Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. where he had overall content responsibility for the company’s five dramatic channels – Showcase, History Television, Showcase Action, Showcase Diva, and the Independent Film Channel. John was also responsible for launching BBC CANADA and BBC Kids and has directed the programming of the National Geographic Channel.

As Director of Network Scheduling at TVOntario, he designed the network's broadcast schedules and directed the design, production, and implementation of TVO's on-air positioning. John's educational credentials include an MBA from the Ivey School of Business and a BA from Queen's University.

Jonathan Lessard is associate professor of game design and virtual worlds in the Design and Computation Arts department of Concordia University. He has a long history of digital game design and development both within the industry and as independent artist. He currently leads the LabLabLab, a research team focused on playful interactive conversations with virtual agents, for which he has received multiple grants. He holds a Phd in Cinema and has published many scientific articles in such leading venues as Games and Culture, DiGRA, Foundations of Digital Games and the International Conferencce on Interactive Digital Storytelling.

Jordan Molaro is the President of Nu Media Films and is a writer, editor, and director driven by an incredible passion for the art of filmmaking. Born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg Manitoba, Jordan was exposed at a very early age to filmmaking. At 13 he was cast for a lead role in the film “the Fragile”. The film captures the harms and effects of inhalants. As a recipient of a scholarship to the Manitoba Theatre of Young People, it sparked a keen interest within him to expand on creative writing.

This passion along with the Seven Sacred teachings kept him in check and in balance. It became quite apparent that Jordan’s life would be centered upon his passion for filmmaking. His works are often noted for their unique style, elegance, cultural significance, technique and the ability to relate his characters well with his audience.