"Hi! I'm Katie, the new programming manager for Debaser. I've spent the past few years exploring online arts spaces, and now I'm so grateful for the opportunity to showcase weird, experimental works IRL in Canada's capital!"
Katie Manners is an arts coordinator and cultural historian with a decade of experience in the non-profit sector. She has coordinated programming and events for several arts organizations across Ontario and Quebec, though her love for the arts really manifests online.
During the pandemic, she found community dancing at Zoom raves, the Internet's DIY answer to quarantine's impactful shutdown of in-person arts spaces. Her curiosity led her throughout the digital underground, where she became one of the first journalists to cover the emerging hyperpop scene in 2020. And in 2021, she founded cat scratch magazine, an online blog and ongoing archive of hyperpop artefacts that platforms queer and neurodiverse youth.
She has acted as a hyperpop consultant for PBS: Soundfield, the editor-in-chief for Underground Underdogs, and is currently writing a book about pandemic-era hyperpop and what happens when an online scene transitions from URL to IRL.