Vern Navarra Martin-Ivie is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, arts administrator, and cultural worker. Their practice moves between visual art, writing, and digital forms, returning often to themes of intimacy, care, devotion, disability, and queerness. They are interested in the quiet rituals that hold people together and the ways we learn to survive both systems and ourselves.

Community is not separate from Vern Navarra's practice but foundational to it. The questions they explore in their own work are the same ones they bring into collective and administrative contexts. Through roles with Arts Ottawa, Propeller Dance, and the Queer Arts and Culture Network, Vern Navarra has worked to support conditions where artists can make work with integrity and in relation to others. As a new organising committee member with a longstanding relationship to the Ottawa Dyke March, Vern Navarra brings the same values to that work as to their studio practice: a belief that art and culture are how communities understand themselves and stay alive.

Vern Navarra is also a maker in a material sense, with a background in beadwork, textiles, collage, and craft. These forms have taught them that careful, handmade work is itself a kind of community act. Vern Navarra thinks of community engaged art-making as work that takes seriously the people it is made with and for.