Sedai Youth Creator Lab

Camille Kiku Belair is gosei with French Canadian and German ancestry. They are a composer, classical guitarist and interdisciplinary artist. Camille is a graduate of OCAD University’s Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design MFA program and University of Toronto Faculty of Music’s BMus, specializing in composition. Camille explores connections between listening and imagination through creative visual representations of sound, grid-based patterns generated from melodies, field recordings, text scores, and instrumental compositions. Their compositions have been performed in Toronto and Tokyo, and they have exhibited artwork in the OCAD U Graduate Gallery, Ignite Gallery West, Open Space Gallery, and Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre.

Elliot Kim is a multidisciplinary artist and Fashion Communication student at Toronto Metropolitan University, with a minor in Marketing. As a Japanese Korean Canadian raised between Japan and Canada, with experience growing up in multi-cultural spaces, Elliot has interests in diaspora communities, and cultural identity. Through many of his projects, which involve visual storytelling and creative media, he is interested in sharing personal and community stories in engaging and accessible ways. Elliot hopes to contribute to the JCCC’s oral history collection as a way of learning from and giving back to the Japanese Canadian community.

Grace Miyoko Challenger (She/Her) is a graduate from UofT, where she studied History and East Asian and Caribbean Studies. She recently completed a postgraduate program in Project Management at George Brown Polytechnic and will be starting a Master’s of Information and in Museum Studies at UofT this fall. As a yonsei/gosei, she is passionate about exploring the community's history and connecting with other Japanese Canadians. Grace looks forward to continuing her research of Japanese Canadian heritage, collecting oral histories and sharing them in a creative medium that may make a lasting impact on those who encounter them.

As a yonsei born in Nova Scotia, Isabelle has always been grateful to be a part of the JC community. Her studies at the University of Ottawa culminated in a BA Honours in Psychology with a minor in Linguistics. Though she grew up in a bilingual environment, surrounded by Japanese and British grandparents, it wasn’t until her work at Momiji Health Care Society that she found her passion for working to support an older generation. Getting to hear the life stories of the JC community opened the door to more curiosity and the push to capture and honour this important history.

Mako Kobayashi is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto majoring in Cinema Studies and Economics. Born in Japan and raised in New York, Mako came to Toronto three years ago. Having grown up in diverse settings, she values opportunities to connect with others through culture, language, and the arts. She's very excited to be a part of this program, and hopes to use her academic interests and artistic background to contribute to the Sedai Youth Creator Lab. In addition to her studies, Mako is also passionate about music. She currently plays violin in an orchestra and sings in an a cappella group.

Claire is currently a third-year Film Production student at Concordia in Montreal. She previously attended Toronto Metropolitan University, where she studied Media Production. Her favourite areas of filmmaking are writing, directing, and editing, but she enjoys exploring and learning about all aspects of the magic of movie making. This summer, she’ll be a counsellor at a film production camp, educating kids on how to use video equipment, film and edit their own movies.  Claire is so excited to be working with the JCCC and getting more involved in the Japanese Canadian community!

A.S.M. Kobayashi is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid, interactive work mixes documentary and fiction through video, performance, installation, and illustration. Her critically acclaimed performance, Say Something Bunny!, based on found audio recordings, was heralded as "The best new theater experience in town" by Vogue and a NYTimes critics’ pick. Her video work and performances have been exhibited internationally at museums and film festivals including; The Lincoln Center, GTA24, The Power Plant, Gallery TPW, Nuit Blanche, BFI London Film Festival, Jakarta International Film Festival and Damascus Video Art Festival.

She is based in New York City and Toronto where she is producing her documentary performance Electric Neon Clock. The first chapter of this work was described by the Sense of Cinema as “elegant and hard-hitting. The short film File No. 2034 is an example of how going back and simply looking at the past, and an archive, with fresh eyes, can be transformative.”

多美子 Tamiko Potts (she/they) is a queer Japanese Canadian Toronto-based producer and multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans documentary film, visual art, photography, and poetry. An Emmy-nominated television producer with over two decades of experience in production, they have delivered over 80 hours of content to international broadcasters including Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and the BBC and have produced series for PBS, Prime Video, and Nickelodeon.

In 2023, they founded Unicorn Power Media, a media production company dedicated to inclusive storytelling and amplifying underrepresented voices. The company’s first project, When the Blossoms Fade, funded by the Japanese Canadian Legacies Society, explores Tamiko’s mother’s experience in the Japanese Canadian internment camps. The film won Best Canadian Documentary Short Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography at the 2025 Vancouver Asian Film Festival.

Tamiko is currently studying art psychotherapy at the Canadian International Institute of Art Therapy and was selected for the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre’s 2026 Digital Arts Residency.

Matt Miwa is the proud grandson of the infamous Harold Miwa, a JCCC member and nisei with an attitude, and in many cases, a great deal of charm. In the last decade or so of Harold's life, it was Matt's great pleasure to connect with him and discover the story of his youth; His life growing up on Vancouver Island, his story of internment; but most importantly, his fearless adventures after the war, where he struck out into a new and possible world, for that is how he saw it, despite the ongoing restrictions and limited rights of Japanese Canadians.

Living in Ottawa, Matt is now an artist working in many disciplines. Currently it is visual art, a practice kickstarted by JCLS arts funding, but Harold saw Matt perform his stories, as Harold, and many other nisei, in the documentary theatre piece "The Tashme Project: The Living Archives, created with Montreal's Julie Tamiko Manning. Odori is also a recent passion for Matt; just a few movements, repeated over and over, but it's so hard to get it right!