Cristina Belmonte is a Vancouver-based communications strategist with over 20 years of international experience in public relations, media relations, and brand positioning across architecture, design, real estate, hospitality, and lifestyle sectors. Before relocating to Canada, she spent more than a decade in London leading global communications initiatives for luxury brands and high-profile creative clients.

Throughout her career, Cristina has developed and executed international PR campaigns for architects, developers, hotels, designers, and cultural projects, helping elevate brands and generate global visibility for projects spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She is known for building strong relationships with leading journalists, editors, and media outlets across business, design, culture, and lifestyle publications worldwide. Her work has secured editorial coverage in all major international media. She brings a global perspective, deep media expertise, and a strong understanding of how to position brands and projects in today’s highly competitive communications landscape.

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Andy Chong is a Professional Engineer and Partner at Focal, a boutique Victoria-based building performance consultancy. He has a particular obsession with how built environments feel to the people inside them – and what it costs the planet to get them there. That conviction has shaped two decades of work behind spaces ranging from prominent Greater Victoria developments – Uptown, the Rotunda, Capital Park, TELUS Ocean – to local eateries, community spaces, small business storefronts, and non-profit organizations closest to Victoria's streetscape and soul.

 Andy is known for translating complex technical decisions into clear design principles, and for his belief that storytelling is as essential a tool in building design as any specification or calculation. His goal, in every project, is the same: aligning purpose, longevity, and the human experience of the built environment – for this generation and the ones that follow.

 Andy's face may be familiar in the Design Victoria community as the originator and past host of Pecha Kucha at the 2024 and 2025 festivals. When not at a drafting table or job site, he can be found chasing a frisbee, overplanning home carpentry projects, indulging his coffee ritual, and raising two small humans.

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My practice explores generation, connection, permanence, and impermanence. Embedded with memory, the materials I work with—wood, predominantly distinct tree forms, and light—are elemental to the story being told, with their story and my own inextricably linked to the Pacific Northwest. This place, as a physical environment and a sensorial experience, has shaped who I am and how I see as an artist. Sculptural and often large-scale or inherently purpose- ful, my work invites the viewer to reimagine their relationship with the natural world.

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Katharine Logan is an award-winning writer on design, sustainability, and well-being in the built environment. She writes regularly for Architectural Record (where she is a contributing editor and where her work formed part of the magazine's Jesse H. Neal Award-winning portfolio) and Landscape Architecture Magazine (where her work won the Bradford Williams Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects). Architecturally trained, she has provided leadership to a varied set of building types and scales, including a Green Building of the Year Award winner from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the Canada Green Building Council.

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Siavash Madani is an interior designer and partner at Gabriel Ross, one of Canada’s premier design showrooms. With over a decade of experience in the industry, Siavash brings a wealth of expertise across residential, workplace, retail, and restaurant design projects throughout Canada. His portfolio reflects his unwavering commitment to creating functional, innovative, and visually captivating spaces tailored to the unique needs of each client. Siavash’s educational journey began with a degree in Interior Design from Montreal, followed by a Master's degree in Florence, Italy, where he honed his global perspective on design.

As a certified interior designer with the prestigious NCIDQ certification, Siavash is dedicated to advancing the profession and continuously enhancing his craft.Throughout his career, Siavash has earned a reputation for his meticulous attention to detail and his ability to transform client visions into exceptional realities. His work has garnered several accolades, including the VODA Award (2018) and the AMAC Award (2019), underscoring his dedication to design excellence and client satisfaction.An active leader in the design community, Siavash has served on the APDIQ Board of Directors from 2018 to 2021 and has been a member of the CIDQ Board of Directors since 2021, currently serving as President. He is also a member of IDIBC and VISID, advocating for the future of interior design on both national and international platforms.

Outside of his professional work, Siavash’s interests include Formula 1, motorcycles, gaming, and cooking—passions that inspire his creativity and drive.

Natalie Rollins is an interdisciplinary artist and emerging curator whose work spans visual, media, and performing arts. Guided by her family lineage —Cree from Driftpile Cree Nation through her father, and English, Irish, and Scottish through her mother—her practice is grounded in relational, place-based ways of learning, walking, and being. Through her artistic and curatorial work, she explores questions of belonging, responsibility, and Indigenous laws as they enact through art, culture, and performance.

Her curatorial approach is a collaborative, and a grounds for a practice in community-centered methodologies that center Indigenous perspectives while creating space for reflection on how we live with and care for the lands, relationships, and the communities we cohabitate.

Natalie serves on the board of directors of the Vancouver Island Visual Arts Society (VIVAS) and is Coordinator of the Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Victoria where she supports research and creation rooted in Indigenous knowledge systems, ethics of care, and meaningful collaboration across disciplines.

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With a background in architecture, Sydney Shilling brings an editorial lens to the cultural, social and professional forces shaping the built environment. As an award-winning writer and editor at Azure Magazine, she has written critically acclaimed features on topics ranging from unionization and architectural criticism to parenthood and caregiving in the profession. In 2025, she received a Gold National Magazine Award for Best Feature Article for her reporting on how the profession can better engage the mainstream.

Nick is co-founder and lead designer of HAVN, a brand rooted in the idea that built environments should be created with intention for the humans who move through them. He’s an entrepreneur and artist, taking bold, unconventional ideas from first sketch to profitable reality, a path he first walked in 2013 as co-founder of Anian Clothing.