Directorship Committee

General Co-directors  Jennifer Roberts-Smith (English) and Nicole Nolette (Français)

SBF/MSMA’s General Co-directors lead, advocate for, represent, and convene the overall project, its members, and its activities. As project leaders, the General Co-directors are the “ally researchers” with primary responsibility for overseeing the enactment of the project’s founding commitments, including by ensuring that partner organizations understand their roles as allies in the project’s “collaborative research space” (OFIFC). 

The General Co-directors facilitate the collaborative development of research, governance, archiving, knowledge synthesis, and knowledge mobilization practices across the project. They lead strategic planning and budgeting, co-facilitate the discernment processes whereby project members collaboratively determine the principles that guide their work, supervise and mentor operations staff, and co-supervise and mentor full time research staff. 

The General Co-directors make day-to-day operations and governance decisions together or individually, and ratify decisions reached through discernment and consensus in the Knowledge Sustainability Committee, Research Practice Committee, and Governance Committee. Substantive decisions affecting the project require the approval of all General Co-directors. 

SBF/MSMA’s founding General Co-directors, Nicole Nolette and Jennifer Roberts-Smith, bring complementary expertise essential to the project (relational design research and minority studies respectively), and ensure project governance and direction can be fully bilingual. Nolette has primary responsibility for financial planning and external communications in French; Roberts-Smith has primary responsibility for project governance and external communications in English. They share oversight of operations, research, archiving, knowledge mobilization, and knowledge synthesis activities. 

In 2024-2025, we are focusing on: 

Establishing a reciprocal mentorship program for early-career artist-educators and scholars, with substantive contributions from the Freelance Artist-Educator Caucus, Student Caucus, and Governance Committee, which prioritizes apprenticeships for IBPOC, disabled, queer, linguistically minoritized, and Deaf members. We’re working primarily with Governance Postdoctoral Fellow Sunita Nigam on this project. 

Developing a succession plan grounded in reciprocal mentorship to mitigate the over-representation of white, settler, cis-gendered, tenured faculty in founding leadership positions across SBF/MSMA.