Team

Ben Barry (he/him) is Dean of Fashion at Parsons School of Design and Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Toronto Metropolitan University. As a fashion activist, educator, designer, and researcher, he is devoted to intervening into fashion systems to systemically shift power and design a future where worldviews and bodies that are currently stigmatized are instead valued and desired. He was previously Chair of the School of Fashion at Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada where he led the department through a deep transformation by embedding and prioritizing inclusion, decolonization, and sustainability in the curriculum and culture.

Ben’s teaching and research centers the intersectional fashion experiences of disabled, fat, trans, and queer people and engages them in the design of clothing, fashion media, and fashion systems. He is currently the Principal Investigator of Crippling Masculinity, a research project that explores how disabled, D/deaf and mad-identified men and masculine people navigate the world and make new worlds through fashion. He has published in Fashion Theory, Textile, Gender & Society, Fat Studies, Harvard Business Review, and The Business of Fashion, among other outlets, and he leads education programs on inclusive fashion practices for global brands and shares his insights on these topics with international media.

Sarah Kuaiwa is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia. Her dissertation looks at the transition between kapa and cloth in the early Hawaiian Kingdom (1800–50). Kuaiwa completed her BA cum laude in Art History and Visual Arts from Occidental College and her MA in History with a focus in Hawaiian History from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Kuaiwa is also the acting Curator of Hawaiian and Pacific Cultural Resources at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

Riley Kucheran is Assistant Professor of Design Leadership at The Creative School, part of Toronto Metropolitan University. As an Indigenous fashion researcher Riley supports a movement of Indigenous communities that are revitalizing ancestral ways of making. With experience in fashion retail and entrepreneurship, they mix theories of decolonization and sovereignty to mobilize sustainable Indigenous business models, both in their own community of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg (Ojibways of the Pic River First Nation) and globally. They are also Associate Director of the Saagajiwe Centre for Indigenous Communication & Design and an Indigenous Advisor at the Yeates School of Graduate Studies.

Presley Mills is a designer, illustrator, and researcher currently based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary, Alberta). She holds a Master of Arts in Fashion from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Bachelor of Design in Advertising from the Alberta University of the Arts. She describes herself as a chaotic maker, taking on many different forms of art and craft. She inherited this creative curiosity from her grandma who never let something go to waste without trying to transform it. Her work as a designer is primarily focused on branding and illustrations, while her personal art practice explores painting, embroidery, and beadwork.

Presley is a descendant of the Lizotte and Tourangeau families who were located in Fort Vermillion. Presley was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta and is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. Her Métis heritage inspired her research while attending Toronto Metropolitan University for her Masters of Arts in Fashion where she focused on the embodied experience of decolonization through fashion. Presley's research centers making as a practice-based method of inquiry to emphasize Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing.

Presley is currently working on an article with Justine Woods (Doctoral Student in the Media and Design Innovation PhD program at Toronto Metropolitan University) entitled: “Beading is Medicine: Beading as a Therapeutic and Decolonial Practice.”

Shawkay Ottmann is a PhD student at Cornell University in the Apparel Design program. In 2021, Ottmann received her MA from the Royal College of Art in the V&A/RCA History of Design Programme and taught the inaugural Indigenous Fashion course at her alma mater, Toronto Metropolitan University, where she graduated with a Major in History and a Minor in Fashion Design in 2019. In the past, Ottmann has worked as a research assistant, aiding research for articles on Indigenous methodologies and Indigenizing the academy, along with researching Indigenous participation in the First and Second World War for the Juno Beach Centre. In her own name, Ottmann has been published writing about clothing in Canadian Indian Residential Schools for Fashion Studies, Indigenous participation in D-Day for Active History, as a travel writer for Gapyear.com, and for a short story in the Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues.