Sebnem Ozpeta, Co-facilitator
Şebnem Ozpeta, Creative Technologist, is an immigrant filmmaker, multimedia artist, mentor, and curator. She has worked mostly on community-focused projects and collaborations with artists on stolen land. At grunt gallery, she supports the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen as a technical coordinator, working closely with programmers since 2018. She also co-facilitates the Digital Storytelling workshop alongside lead filmmaker Lorna Boschman. Additionally, she applies her filmmaking skills to produce Tactile Residency Videos with Kay and the AEP team and document gallery events and artist talks.
She is passionate about experimenting new techniques in digital and analog filmmaking—from hand-processing film to crafting data-driven visual narratives. She is part of “Our World Language Film Programme” led by Lisa g Nielsen where she travels remote areas to share her skills with Indigenous youth and elderly “how to make films” and curate their works.
Lorna Boschman, Co-faciliator
Born in Carrot River, Saskatchewan, Lorna Boschman has been a documentary and media artist since the 1980s. She was awarded the 2016 Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award in Film & New Media. In March 2011, she was a guest of Panorama of Quebec and Canadian Video, 29 FIFI Festival International Du Film Sur L’Art, in Montréal. Curated by Nicole Gingras, the program presented two retrospective evenings of media works directed by Lorna Boschman. Her productions have won two Golden Sheaf Awards at the Yorkton Short Film & Video Festival.
In collaboration with Sebnem Ozpeta and Vancouver’s grunt gallery, Lorna has co-facilitated community digital storytelling workshops for almost a decade. They are featured on Digital Stories Canada. Boschman and Ozpeta co-curated a program, Aftershock from GIV’s collection as part of the Archive/Counter Archive Project, presented in Montréal in late 2024. They were also part of the group that conducted research from 1999-2023 on BC-based community digital storytelling practitioners.
Lorna’s most recent collaborations involve geo-location audio projects with artists, gardeners (Cottonwood Community Garden) and other locally community-led initiatives.
As a media artist, Lorna Boschman is best known for her collaborations with the 1990s lesbian art collective, Kiss & Tell (True Inversions and Drawing the Line), experimental docs such as Scars and Our Normal Childhood and her film Butch/Femme in Paradise. Kiss & Tell are the subject of a 2025 publication, Lesbian Art & Activism, from the Art Institute of Canada.
Since 2000, Boschman has directed several videos, including Before the New Millennium (2007) about the performances of Kiss & Tell, a Vancouver-based collective whose work examined lesbian sexuality and censorship. Lorna wrote and directed Queers, Christians and Canadian Justice about Trinity Western University’s attempt to establish a law school for OUTtv in 2019. Her most recent collaboration, How I Got My Queer Back, was co-written and co-directed with Rojina (RJ) Farrokhnejad and Aerlyn Weissman in 2025.