Jo shows how culture can be a form of infrastructure, something that strengthens communities the way roads or schools do, by creating reliable places for people to gather, listen, and belong. A UVic graduate and longtime teacher, Jo has spent more than three decades using music and storytelling to bridge difference and amplify voices, especially in places that are too often treated as “remote” or overlooked.
As the long-time artistic director of the Prince George Folkfest Society, she didn’t just run a festival, she helped reshape what Prince George could be. She grew the summer folk festival into a nine-day, multi-venue event, then reinvented it in 2008 as Coldsnap: The Prince George Winter Music Festival, bringing national-calibre artist, like Bruce Cockburn, Sarah Harmer, Janis Ian, Alpha Yaya Diallo, Matthew Good, Fred Eaglesmith, and The Paperboys, into a mill town in the dead of winter. In doing so, she helped shift local confidence and helped cement Prince George’s reputation as a folk/roots hub. Along the way, she’s supported a wide range of artists, hosted the radio show Off the Beat and Track, and served as a juror for major awards like the Junos and the Canadian Folk Music Awards, carrying a grassroots lens into big-stage decision-making.
When she later relocated to S,DÁYES/Pender Island, she did what changemakers do and started again. In 2021 she founded The Crisp Festival, a community-driven, multi-arts gathering that brought artists like Dan Mangen, Rose Cousins and the Boom Booms to the island and featured a special Mac DeMarco fundraiser supporting Doctors Without Borders. She also helped create the Starfields Festival (2018), designed to bring people of many faiths and no faith into shared spaces across Victoria to have the conversations that rarely happen. Jo’s story is a case study in arts-based changemaking - build the gathering places, and you help build the social fabric.
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