Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae

Dr. Naila Keleta-Mae is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Waterloo where she researches gender, critical race, and performance studies. Her scholarship appears in publications including Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, Canadian Review of American Studies (forthcoming), and Why Theatre Now (forthcoming) edited by Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman. Dr. Keleta-Mae has been awarded a Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC), a Mary McEwan Award for Feminist Scholarship (York University), an Abella Scholarship for Studies in Equity (York University), and a New Scholars Prize (International Federation for Theatre Research). She is also a poet, playwright, and director who has performed in Canada, France, South Africa, and the United States of America. Her art has been published by The Toronto Star, Playwrights Canada Press, and Fernwood Publishing, it has been produced by bcurrent, Black Theatre Workshop, and the University of Waterloo and it has been released as two full-length albums.

Nina Lee Aquino

Nina Lee Aquino is an award-winning director and dramaturge. She was the former Artistic Director of fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company and Cahoots Theatre Company; and is now the current Artistic Director of Factory Theatre.

She is the editor of Canada’s first Asian-Canadian 2-volume drama anthology love + relasianships and the co-editor of the award winning New Essays on Canadian Theatre Volume One: Asian Canadian Theatre (Playwrights Canada Press).

Awards for her work include: the Ken McDougall Award 2004, the Canada Council John Hirsch Prize 2008, and two Dora Mavor Moore Awards for Outstanding Direction.

Michael Greyeyes

Michael Greyeyes (Plains Cree) is an actor, choreographer, director, and educator. Selected directing credits include: A Soldier’s Tale (Signal Theatre), Pimooteewin (Soundstreams Canada), Almighty Voice and his Wife(Native Earth Performing Arts), The River (Nakai Theatre), Seven Seconds(Super 16mm/ ImagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival). In 2010, he founded Signal Theatre as a platform to create trans-disciplinary and intercultural work that seeks to expand the boundaries surrounding contemporary Indigenous performance. Recent work includes the multi-media installation and solo performance, Winter Home, presented by TRIBE, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He is an Associate Professor in the Theatre department at York University.

Kelsy Vivash

Kelsy Vivash holds a BA from Brock University and an MA from the University of Toronto, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.  Her doctoral research focuses on the secretions and excretions of the body, the long lineage of their relationship with understandings of subjectivity, and the ways in which this relationship has been aestheticized both on historical stages and within the contemporary performative frame.  She has presented at TaPRA (University of Kent, 2012), PSi (Stanford University, 2013), and CATR (Brock University, 2014), and has recently published work in Alt.theatre, Performance Research, Canadian Theatre Review, and Theatre Research in Canada.

Conrad Alexandrowicz

Conrad Alexandrowicz is a director, writer, and choreographer, and the artistic director of Wild Excursions Performance. He is a storyteller who combines elements of theatre and dance in different ways. To date he has created over fifty dance- and physical-theatre works, some of which have been presented across Canada, in New York City, France, and the U.K. An associate professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Victoria, he specializes in movement for actors and physical theatre creation, and continues his explorations into that mysterious territory where dance and theatre overlap.

Alex Tigchelaar

Alex Tigchelaar is the co-artistic director of the multidisciplinary theatre company Operation Snatch. Notable productions include Under the Mink, Les Demimondes, Neon Nightz, Who’s Your Dada?, The Death Show and Dirty Plötz. Operation Snatch’s films Give Piece of Ass a Chance, Creative Trafficking and The Whormons have been screened at international film festivals and galleries including TIFF, Frameline and the MOMA since 2006. For 18 years, Tigchelaar was nationally syndicated sex columnist Sasha. Her column ran regularly in the Montreal Mirror, eye weekly, NOW and the Uptown in Winnipeg. She is currently a graduate student at Brock University in SCLA, focusing on theatre created by criminalized and institutionalized bodies as well as art and legal policy created by non-sex workers about sex workers for non-sex workers. She calls her field of research Whorientalism.

Allison Leadley

Allison Leadley is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, titled “Step Right Up: (Re)Imagining the Freak Show in Contemporary Performance and Disability Theory,” is an exploration of the appropriation of the freak show in contemporary North American performance with a particular focus on how these performances could be considered as a viable framework in which to contextualize broader discussions of disability and disabled embodiment. Allison’s research has been published by Playwright’s Canada Press and in alt.theatre Magazine.

Paul de Jong

Paul de Jong serves as the Program Coordinator and Head of Voice for the Theatre Performance program at Humber College. He has spent four seasons at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival as a voice, text, and dialect coach and has taught at the Birmingham Conservatory for Classical Theatre (Stratford), The National Theatre School of Canada (Head of Voice), The Centre for Indigenous Theatre, The George Brown Theatre School, and The Randolph Academy of Performing Arts, as well at as colleges in the United Kingdom. He received his Masters in Voice Studies from the Central School of Speech and Drama (London, England) and is also a graduate of the Stratford Festival Conservatory for Classical Theatre Training (2000).  As a free-lance coach, Paul has worked on productions such as Soulpepper’s 2009 production of A Raisin in the Sun, the Globe Theatre’s 2010 production of The Syringa Tree, Artistic Fraud’s 2010 production of Oil and Water, and The Grand Theatre’s 2012 production of The Great Gatsby. Paul coaches actors regularly for film, television and theatre.

Laura Levin

Laura Levin is Associate Professor of Theatre at York University. She is Director of York’s MA/PhD Program in Theatre & Performance Studies and teaches courses on devised theatre, contemporary theatre, performance art, and practice-based research. Her research focuses on performing gender and sexuality, site-specific and urban performance, intermediality in performance, and disciplinary genealogies in performance studies. She is Editor in Chief of Canadian Theatre Review; Editor of Theatre and Performance in Toronto and Conversations Across Borders; and Editor of several special issues of journals. In 2015, she was awarded the Canadian Association for Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award for her book Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage, and the Art of Blending In (Palgrave, 2014). Laura has worked as a director and dramaturg on a number of productions in North America and co-curated research-based art projects that investigate intersections of performance, geography, and digital technologies. Most recently, she has been moonlighting as a performance artist and collaborating on activist, photo-based actions in and around Toronto.

Daniel Mroz

Daniel Mroz is a theatre director and acting teacher. Devoted to the creation of original contemporary performance, he leads Les Ateliers du corps, a theatre training and performance studio in based in Ottawa.

Daniel’s directing and choreographic work has been presented by the Évènement Zones Théâtrales (Ottawa), the Canada Dance Festival (Ottawa), the Rhubarb Festival (Toronto), the Summerworks Festival (Toronto) and the Catskill International Festival of New Theater (New York). The Dancing Word, his book on the use of Chinese martial arts in the training of contemporary actors and dancers, is published by Rodopi Press. He is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Theatre of the University of Ottawa where he teaches acting and directing, in English and French, to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Diana Belshaw

Diana Belshaw is the Head of Acting at Humber’s Theatre Performance Program where, over the last fifteen years, she has developed a unique cross-curricular approach to creation and devising which has become the training core of the program. Diana received her MFA from Yale and spent over thirty years working professionally as an actor, director, and dramaturg across Canada.  She recently co-edited Canadian Theatre Review’s Actor Training in a Changing Landscape (CTR 160) with David Fancy. She has received awards for her teaching and research, as well as the Maggie Bassett Award from Theatre Ontario for her services to theatre in Ontario and a Harold Award from the independent theatre community in Toronto.