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Syrus Marcus Ware is a Canadian artist, activist and scholar. He lives and works in Tkaronto, Ontario, Canada and is an assistant professor in the school of the arts at McMaster University. He has worked since 2014 as faculty and as a designer for The Banff Centre. Ware was the inaugural artist-in-residence for Daniels Spectrum (2017), a cultural centre in Toronto, and a founding member of Black Lives Matter- Canada. For 13 years, he was the coordinator of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s youth program. During that time Ware oversaw the creation of the Free After Three program and the expansion of the youth program into a multi pronged offering. 

He has published four books and in 2020 co-edited (with Rodney Diverlus and Sandy Hudson) Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada, a bestselling collection of reflections on the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada. 

Now Magazine awarded Ware with the “Best Queer Activist” award in 2005. He received the TD Diversity Award in 2017.He was awarded the Min Sook Lee Labour Arts Award, Mayworks Festival of Working People in the Arts in 2017. Ware is a Vanier Scholar and a Sylff Fellow. In 2012, he received the Steinert & Ferreiro Award for LGBTQ activism, the largest award of its kind in Canada. 

Susan Irons-Ware was born in Tkaronto and is currently living in Gravenhurst, Ontario in Muskoka. For 25 years she taught art in post secondary schools in the TDSB, mostly at York Memorial Collegiate Institute in Tkaronto. Her work has been shown widely in Ontario, including with the Toronto Watercolour Society, the Colour and Form Society and Muskoka Arts and Craft. Moving to Muskoka, where she has lived now for 16 years, has been incredible for her creatively. She is part of an arts collective called 45th Parallel Painters, a collective of Non-Indigenous and Indigenous painters painting across the 45th parallel. Susan teaches art to a group of seniors in Muskoka weekly, and is part of the vibrant arts community there.