Canadaland Presents: The Backbench Live!

Mattea Roach is a writer and podcaster based in Toronto whose work engages with Canadian politics and media criticism. They are the current host of The Backbench, a podcast from Canadaland focusing on Canadian federal politics. They have been featured as a panelist on CBC’s Canada Reads and Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, as well as at events held by TIFF Bell Lightbox and the University of Southern California. Mattea is best known for their appearances on the game show Jeopardy!, and is the most successful Canadian contestant to ever appear on the program.

Dennis Heaton is a Vancouver-based screenwriter and Showrunner renowned for his deft balance of comedy and the macabre, as showcased in his cult classic zombie movie Fido (2006). Premiering the same year, Heaton’s short film Head Shot – the story of a failed actor fighting for a part in a snuff film – went on to win accolades at festivals around the world, including the prestigious Just For Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. Heaton then served as head-writer and Showrunner on such hits as Call Me Fitz and Motive before going on to create the young adult horror-comedy series The Order for Netflix. The global success of The Order led directly to Heaton’s second series for Netflix, The Imperfects.

Hayden is a Vancouver-based media & entertainment producer and co-founder of ZedDrive.ca. He is the chair of the Black Screen Office (BSO), and sits on the national boards of the Canadian Independent Screen Fund (CISF) for BPOC Creators, and the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA), as well as the Motion Picture Production Industry Assoc. of BC (MPPIA).

Karen has worked full-time in the film and television industry since 2000. Starting her career as a producer and entertainment lawyer, Karen has since written and directed eight short films; three music videos; a true-crime documentary series for Investigation Discovery (US); a web series, Mythos (2015), created for TELUS; and four feature-length films — Stained (2010), Evangeline (2013) and The Curse of Willow Song (2020), which premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival in September 2020.  The film won the award for Best British Columbia Feature Film, and Karen received a Best Director award at the British Columbia Leo Awards (2021).  Karen has also written television scripts for SYFY and Netflix on the series Van Helsing and Ghost Wars. In 2021, Karen directed the seventh instalment in the Bring It On cheerleading franchise, a Halloween horror special titled Bring It On:  Cheer Or Die (2022) that premiered on SYFY. And in 2023, The Curse of Willow Song will finally be available worldwide on September 26.

Matt Hatfield is the Campaigns Director at OpenMedia, a grassroots community of approximately 380,000 people in Canada and the US who collaborate to keep our internet open, accessible, and surveillance-free. He holds degrees in international relations from UBC and the University of Toronto, and prior to OpenMedia, spent 5 years defending freedom of expression from autocrats and violence at IFEX, a global network of freedom-of-expression groups.