Kevin McNeilly teaches Cultural Studies and contemporary literatures in English at the University of British Columbia. He was the UBC site manager as well as the coordinator for the Text and Media research group for the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice research His research focuses on the intersections of improvised music and poetry, on media aesthetics, and on concepts and practices of listening. He has published articles on the music of Charles Mingus, John Zorn, and Steve Lacy, on television programs including The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and on the work of a wide variety of contemporary poets, from Anne Carson to Robert Creeley. His book of poems, Embouchure, was published by Nightwood Editions in 2011. He maintains two blogs: Frank Styles (https://frankstyles.blogspot.ca), which concentrates on poetry and music, and Flow, Fissure, Mesh (https://flowfissuremesh.com), which concerns improvisation, media and pedagogy. His website, http://www.kevinmcneilly.ca, features audio, video, poetry and more.

Dr. Metzer writes about popular music, jazz, and new music.  He has explored a range of topics, including modernism, musical borrowing, emotional expression, and race.  He is the author of Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music(2003) and Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2009).  His articles have appeared in a variety of journals, among them Popular Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Modernism/modernity, and Black Music Research Journal.  He is currently working on a book on the history of the ballad in American popular music from the 1950s to the present.  He earned a BA from Dickinson College and a PhD from Yale University.

As an actor and director, Tom has worked extensively with the application of improvisational methods to the development and performance/production of dramatic feature films. Works Tom has co-created and appeared in as an actor using a variety of these methods include DIRTY (Opening Film – Panorama Section – Berlin International Film Festival 1998), FATHERS&SONS (Winner of a Special Jury Citation for Masterful Use of Improvisational Methodology – Polar Lights Film Festival 2011 – Murmansk, Russia) and SISTERS&BROTHERS for which he received a Leo Award (Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Foundation of British Columbia) in 2012 for Best Supporting Actor. In 2008, Tom led an ensemble of actors through an improvisational screenplay development process before directing the resulting feature film CRIME. After premiering at the Vancouver International Film Festival the film was subsequently licensed for broadcast by Superchannel. Tom’s additional screen credits include a Genie nominated performance in the feature film LAST WEDDING and a Gemini winning appearance on the acclaimed CBC drama DA VINCI’S INQUEST. Since 2010, much of Tom’s research has focused upon the use of improvisation in the rehearsal of scripted plays with a particular emphasis on the “Later Legacies” of theatrical pioneer Konstantin Stanislavski. Tom’s article, The Stanislavski Game, outlining some of the outcomes of this research, was published in the Summer 2010 issue of Canadian Theatre Review. That same year, he also presented The Thermostatic Actor: Improvisation in Stanislavski’s “Cybernetic” System at ICASP’s Sound Lines: Improvisation, Text and Media Conference at UBC.