bEam arts
CURRENT RESIDENT ARTISTS
LESLI KARAVIL
Lesli Karavil is a stand-up comedian, actress, writer, and multidisciplinary artist. After living between San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, and Istanbul, her work blends humor, storytelling, performance, and personal observation across cultures. Alongside her stand-up projects, she is currently working on a collection of short stories inspired by travel, identity, creativity, and everyday absurdities.
AGOSTINA AVARO
Agostina writes to translate the invisible. Her practice stems from a vital need: to understand what she feels, to give shape to what does not yet have a name. She writes so as not to forget, to echo what beats, to return—again and again—to life.
Her writing is nourished by loss, but also by the tenderness that lingers after pain. It is a constant attempt to weave meaning between what is gone and what remains. Memory, the body, heritage, and transformation appear in her texts; she writes as one who seeks to touch with words what cannot be touched with hands.
Her influences come from the books that always inhabited her home—those silent presences that called to her ear and her gaze—and from other disciplines that dialogue with her writing: photography, the textures and colours of clothing, everyday gestures. She is also inspired by the green and blue of nature, subtle sounds, aromas, the touch and taste of things.
Her creative practice is, above all, a space for listening—gentle. For her, writing is recording what pulsates in the smallest things, in what is barely hinted at. It is an act of faith in language, in its power to unite, heal, and reveal.
GIULIA LEONELLI
Giulia Leonelli (b.1985) is a French/Italian artist who holds a doctorate degree in Visual Arts from University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she teaches as a printmaking instructor. After a BFA in Fine Arts at Rome University of Fine Arts, she enrolled at Sorbonne University in Paris. In 2012, she was chosen as a recipient for the French/American “Young Talents” award, for which she attended the MFA Studio Art Program at New York University.
Her doctoral thesis Entendre le pictural discusses the temporal understanding of an artwork by experiencing its unfolding as space and time, and the implications of rhythm and sensation as philosophical attributes of art.
Her work is oriented toward a pictorial approach of printmaking, led by a musical aspiration and a poetic intent. Giulia Leonelli's process is driven by a tension towards the unresolved and fluctuating qualities of forms, suggesting a sense of flowing that figures both the material elements and effects as well as a reference to the passing of time.
Writing also plays a crucial role in the artist's creative process. The composition of poetic texts follows a parallel path to the creation of engraved images; both are driven by the same quest for poetic abstraction.
The memory of a landscape, of an environment, comes to surface within an agglomeration of lines, or of an aquatint texture. The engraved shapes pursue the physical expression of a place without aiming for resemblance or for a figurative rendering. The pattern gives back to the paper something that could rather rejoin the curve of a sound.
DAVID BOBIER
David Bobier is a hard of hearing and disabled media artist whose creative practice is researching and developing multi-sensory technology as a creative medium and language of expression.
In 2012 he established VibraFusionLab, a creative multi-media centre that has gained a reputation as a leader in accessibility for the Deaf and disability arts movement in Canada and internationally.
As a practicing artist his exhibition career includes 18 solo and over 30 group exhibition projects across Canada and in the United States, France, Costa Rica and the UK. Bobier has served in advisory roles in developing Deaf and disability arts Equity programs for both Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and was a panel presenter at the Global Disability Summit in London, UK. He has recently been nominated by the Canada Council for the Arts for a Governor Generals Innovation Award.