SCA Speakers Series: Carmen Rosen
Monday, October 5, 2026 | 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema (Room 3200)
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W Hastings St., Vancouver
Please join us for the first of a series of artist talks and presentations being programmed by the different areas of the SCA. These free public talks, scheduled on Monday evenings throughout this academic year, will advance the SCA's commitment to community engagement by offering our students and local community members opportunities to exchange ideas with artists and scholars from around the world.
Talk 1: Carmen Rosen: “Location, location, location: 26 years of place-based community art engagement—Carmen Rosen with Still Creek and the Renfrew-Collingwood community”
This talk will be of particular interest if your are curious about: working with grown or harvested natural materials, questioning how art can intersect with environmental stewardship, seeking to ground an art practice in neighborhood specificity and community building, and the challenge of effectively organizing large public events.
Presented by the SCA’s Performance Production & Design Area
Biography
Carmen Rosen, artist, singer and community organizer, is the Founding Artistic Director of Still Moon Arts Society. She holds Fine Art degrees from UBC and Emily Carr and has received the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award, the Queen’s Jubilee Award, and the BC Achievement Award for her art with the community. She focuses her creative projects on the Still Creek Watershed in her Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood on the un-ceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and T’seil-Waututh people. Her work is inspired by nature, her passion for environmental sustainability and her love of working with people.
Through Still Moon and in collaboration with many community partners, Carmen founded the Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival (now in its 24thyear), celebrating nature and intercultural community creativity. Her current Water Woman Project brings together community members and artists to create a 3.5. m tall puppet as that embodies and investigates our complex relationship with water. Other recent projects include: Joining the Indigenous-led Wild Salmon Caravan three times to honour and support wild salmon; co-lead artist for Birds on Parade for the 2018 International Ornithological Congress and the Vancouver Bird Festival; 2022-24 collaboration with artist/mycologist Willoughby Arevalo to create Beaver Pondering Lodging, growing and weaving living willow to create a giant beaver and her “Dodge Lodge” RV on the banks of Still Creek as a commentary on habitat loss for wildlife and humans in the city; 2023/4 Carmen and community worked with Mud Girl Clare Kenny to build a cob garden shed to learn about natural building and to support working in the Colour Me Local Dye Garden.
Renfrew Ravine Moon Festival
September 7 – 26, 2026
This year’s theme invites artists and festival-goers to slow down, look closely, and celebrate the small, often overlooked wonders that thrive in Renfrew Ravine and our local greenspaces.
“Tiny Life” is an invitation to notice the quiet magic of the miniature: a dragonfly hovering in the sun, a caddisfly weaving its shell of silk and stones, darting waterfleas feeding on jewel-like diatoms, a water strider gliding across the water surface like a tiny skater.
Renfrew Ravine and Still Creek are home to rich, hidden worlds. Along the mossy stream banks and among the leaf litter and stream bed sediments are tiny creatures that live extraordinary lives while supporting larger ecosystems.
Artists are encouraged to create lanterns, performances, and installations that magnify or draw attention to the small. “Tiny Life” isn’t just about size, it’s about perspective. It invites you to move slowly, look closely, and discover beauty in the small elements of the natural world. It is a celebration of all that is small, fragile, and essential.