About Us
Being and Becoming: A Community for the Curious is a Toronto based non-profit organization that has a central mission to create a community around the philosophical exploration of ideas, questions, and experiences so that we may live more intentional, connected, and meaningful lives.
By offering activities, spaces, and other opportunities for conversation and co-exploration, we hope to enable the meeting and fusion of individuals and their ideas. Everyone is welcome, regardless of background: indeed, we believe the journey is best undertaken alongside explorers from a variety of disciplines, cultures, backgrounds, and experiences.
Our Community
Being and Becoming is made up of those who attend our events, engage with us online, and support us through donations, and we are incredibly grateful for the amazing people who make our events interesting and engaging!
Whether you have been here since the beginning, or still have to make it to your first Curiosity Café, we look forward to welcoming you to our community!
Our Core Values
Curiosity
Curiosity represents an orientation towards the world that is wondrous. We cultivate curiosity by keeping an open mind, a desire to learn more, and challenging ourselves to consider different perspectives.
Diversity of Perspectives
We embrace the intrinsic value of diversity in all its forms, ensuring that a wide range of experiences and perspectives are represented, respected, and appreciated in our work and activities. We recognize that all perspectives can be valuable sources of information, and so we strive to expand the presence and contribution of many perspectives.
Inclusion
We cultivate inclusion by striving to create spaces and communities that are accessible and welcoming to people from different backgrounds, needs and beliefs. Inclusion entails proactive commitment to foregrounding perspectives that are unjustly excluded from dominant contexts.
Humility
Humility underpins our commitment to recognizing the limits of our abilities, a striving to seek out alternative perspectives, and remain open to feedback and change.
Our Team
Sophia Whicher
Director of Community
Programming
Sophia holds a Masters in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. Outside of her work with Being and Becoming, she does outreach and programming work for a civic education nonprofit, and facilitates various other discussion-based events in Toronto aimed towards building community and making sense of (especially queer) experiences of intimacy. Sophia enjoys all things that make her life sparkle, including long conversations, teaching, eating good food, and sharing experiences with her loved ones. Philosophically, she is most curious about the relationship between practice of love and the process of liberation.
Zachary Grey
Director of Research & Development
Zach is a PhD student studying the social psychology of morality. He is particularly interested in the topic of moral disagreement. He is a self-described “learnaholic”, spending much of his free time invested in learning more about different topics that catch his attention. Zach’s hobbies are listening to podcasts about philosophy, psychology, and behavioural science; watching educational youtube videos and documentaries; and consuming stories, regardless of the medium (books, poems, movies, plays and musicals, video games, etc.).
Adrian Ma
Board Director and Director of Communications
Adrian has a background in English literature and philosophy, and he does various forms of creative writing, including novels, essays, short stories, and poems. He is curious about life’s big questions broadly defined, including perennial questions about existence, meaning, death, love, beauty, and goodness, among other things. Adrian likes nothing better than a good conversation, and he is interested in how honest and genuine communication can make disagreements more productive and less toxic.
Reshma Aser
Director
Reshma is a recent graduate of the University of Toronto with a background in Ethics, Society and Law; Philosophy; and Linguistics. Her philosophical interests include existentialist philosophy, deconstructionism, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of math. In general, she is an advocate for the humanities and its efforts to explain, describe, depict, and make sense of the human condition across various domains. Outside of philosophy, her hobbies include reading literature, hiking, and watching movies.
Jesse Vriend
Director
Jesse has an MA in philosophy, with a focus on personal identity, obligation, and care in ethics. They enjoy writing poems and novels about vampires, fantasizing about a Georgist revolution, and designing tabletop games. They are slowly acquiring a taste for corporate ops analysis and want to learn how it can be used for The Good.
Board of Directors
Sofia Panasiuk
President & Treasurer
Sofia is a PhD student at the University of Toronto studying well-being and happiness. She’s interested in bridging philosophy and psychology in conceptualizing what the “good life” is in theory and practice. When she’s not doing her doctoral research, she’s either listening to a history podcast, trying out a new recipe, or having a long conversation with a friend. She’s currently getting into bouldering and generally thrives whenever mountains, hiking and climbing are involved.
Marybel Menzies
Vice President & Chair
Marybel is a PhD Student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Philosophy. She is most curious about what the nature of consciousness is, whether or not consciousness has value for the person who has it, and how our evaluative tendencies can influence our first-person conscious experiences. More broadly, she is interested in all questions to do with the mind, ethics, and psychology, and how science can inform those questions. For fun, she enjoys swimming, hiking, biking, cooking, travelling, and listening to music. Name an activity, and she would probably enjoy it!
Kenneth Boyd
Director
Ken holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto. He completed a postdoc at the University of Southern Denmark, and has previously taught at Dalhousie University and the University of Toronto at Scarborough. He currently works as the Director of Education at a civic education nonprofit, and is an Ethics in the News Analyst for the public philosophy digital publication The Prindle Post. Ken enjoys baking, printmaking, cycling, and being a cat dad.
Kym Maclaren
Director
Kym Maclaren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University. In her research and with others, she loves to explore issues that raise questions for one’s life—questions, for instance, of how social structures and affective relations enable rationality, human development, and social liberations, but also how they can confine, foreclose, oppress. Kym teaches dialogue-based “Walls to Bridges” courses in philosophy in prison. Trained as a conflict mediator, Kym is excited about the transformative possibilities revealed through conversations that grapple with the meaningful implications of our current situations. Beyond human conversations, Kym has a passion for “eventing”, which, though it sounds like a Heideggerian concept, actually involves trusting conversations between humans and horses as they gallop through water, over ditches and fences, and down banks.
Team Alumni
Dylan Michels (former Director of People and Operations) is a workplace investigator whose academic journey spans Sociology, Criminology, Continental Philosophy, Industrial Relations, and Human Resources. He is dedicated to fostering spaces for difficult yet essential conversations, seeing them as key drivers of personal and collective growth. Beyond academia, he delves into literature, explores the outdoors through hiking, camping, and mountain climbing, and finds balance in bouldering and weightlifting.
Alexandra Gustafson (former Director of Educational Programming) is an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream in the University of Toronto Department of Philosophy. Philosophically, she is primarily interested in the nature and experience of romantic love, including whether or not we love for reasons. She is a two-time teaching award winner with broad teaching interests in ethics, aesthetics, existentialism, and the philosophy of disability. Outside of philosophy, Alexandra is a passionate advocate for mental health and disability visibility. She is also passionate about 4x strategy games, Dungeons and Dragons, heavy metal music, and the colour black.
David M. Peña-Guzmán (former Director) is an associate professor of Humanities and Comparative World Literature at SF State in San Francisco, California. He specializes in animal studies, the history and philosophy of science, theories of consciousness, and 20th century continental philosophy. He is the author of When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, and Philosophy and Its Myths. He is also the co-host of the philosophy podcast Overthink.
Heidi Knechtel (former Director of Marketing) is a lifelong lover of wisdom and will be pursuing her MA in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She is curious about the moral and existential value of love, the phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and how philosophy can help people find and create meaning in their everyday lives. Outside of philosophy, Heidi works as a sexual health educator at the University of Toronto and Western University. In her free time, she enjoys reading novels, baking for her loved ones, and collecting all things pink.