CHAIR

Fiona Blaikie is Professor of Art Education and former Dean of the Faculty of Education at Brock University, Canada. She has won numerous awards for scholarship, most recently the InSEA/USSEA 2020 International Ziegfeld Award for visual arts pedagogy. Fiona’s scholarship has shifted from a focus on aesthetic values inherent in studio art assessment practices to looking at visual and cultural identity constructs encompassing social theory on the body, clothing, affect, new materialism, situated knowing, weak theory, and posthumanism. Currently she is chair of the Arts Education Research Institute (AERI) and Associate Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University. Her edited collection Global perspectives on youth and young adults: Situated, embodied, and performed ways of being, engaging and belonging was published in 2021 by Routledge.

PANELLISTS

Christine Daigle is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University. She has published extensively on existential phenomenologists Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. In recent years, her research has focused on posthumanist theory, more specifically material feminism as well as the environmental posthumanities. She is the editor of Interconnections. Journal of Posthumanism/Interconnections. Revue de Posthumanisme and Co-editor of the series “Posthumanism in Practice” at Bloomsbury. Her most recent monograph titled Posthumanist Vulnerability: An Affirmative Ethics is forthcoming in spring 2023 at Bloomsbury. Her current research project focuses on cultural and philosophical understandings of the Anthropocene. She is working to establish the concept of “joyful extinction.”

Katrina Dunn is an Assistant Professor in the University of Manitoba’s Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media. Her scholarly chapters and articles explore the spatial manifestations of theatre, as well as ecocritical theatre, and have been published in several edited collections, as well as national and international journals. In 2021, her dissertation, “Empty House: Real Estate and Theatricality in Vancouver’s Downtown,” co-won the Canadian Studies Network’s Best PhD Dissertation Prize. In 2022 her chapter “Coproducing Mimesis” won CATR’s Richard Plant Award for the best long-form article. Katrina’s long career as a stage director and producer has had considerable impact on the performing arts on the West Coast and has been recognized with numerous awards.

David Fancy, PhD is Professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts, Brock University. His plays have been produced in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Ireland. His text Khalida won the Alberta PlayRITES prize. His most recent project, AnthrApology is a 24-hour play that operates as a truth and reconciliation between humans and the planet. Fancy has a longtime practice as a director of theatre, opera, and circus; he is the editor of a website on the subject of actor training and diversities. He has undertaken politically-engaged theatre collaborations with migrant workers, persons with disabilities, those experiencing Islamophobia, and other minoritized groups. Fancy brings his philosophical interests in immanentist thought to performance studies, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. Recent publications include Fancy, David, and Hans Skott-Myhre, Eds., Immanence, Politics and Aesthetics: Thinking Revolt in the 21st Century (McGill-Queens University Press, 2019); Fancy, David, and Conrad Alexandrowicz (eds), Theatre Pedagogy in an Era of Climate Crisis (Routledge, 2021); and Fancy, David, and Lillian Manzour (eds), Teatro de Tres Americas: Antología Norte (Ediciones Sin Paredes, 2022). Fancy’s current publishing projects revolve around notions of resonance and how these intersect with technocapital and social control, as well as notions of geoartistry, or the ability of the earth’s many other-than-human entities to generate and also receive aesthetic experience.

Lin Snelling is a dancer whose artistic practice brings the qualities of improvisation into dance, theatre, writing, visual art, and somatic practice. She toured the world with Carbone 14 and worked with many improvisation ensembles. She teaches dance, experiential anatomy, and composition at the University of Alberta where she is also Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre. In 2019 she received a McCalla Professorship for a new collective creation, A Sounding Line. Her recent dance collaborations include Far Away and Personal, a dance film with musician/composer Michael Reinhart, and ENTRANCES with writer David Gagnon Walker and multimedia designer Tori Morrison from Strange Victory Performance. Rewriting Distance, her ongoing research collaboration with Belgian dance dramaturg Guy Cools has been performed in 7 countries and 14 different cities: www.rewritingdistance.com

Priya A. Thomas, PhD is a dance/theatre historian, musician, and dancer/choreographer. Her scholarly and creative activities reflect a multidisciplinary critical practice that questions changing historical understandings of the “human” in dance and performance practices. Dr. Thomas’ research on historical configurations of the nonhuman/monster in transatlantic contexts of the long nineteenth century (1750-1913) has been recognized through publications in leading peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, international conferences, and a number of prestigious research awards, grants, and fellowships. Until June 2021, she served as a tenure-stream assistant professor at Texas Woman’s University, and after relocating to Canada, worked as Research Faculty at McMaster University and is currently an assistant professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock. She serves as Review Editor of the peer-reviewed journal, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada (University of Toronto Press) and leads the Mindfulness in Motion Lab at York University, an international research consortium dedicated to the study of mindfulness in movement-based modalities. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded book on monsters in theatrical performance as well as a fictohistorical audiovisual installation project entitled, The Last of the Rhinestone Cowboys: Expo 67’s Sunset Years.

David Vivian is the scenographer in the Department of Dramatic Arts at Brock and teaches courses in production and design for theatre. He holds a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia and is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada. David researches marginalized and virtual spaces through visual arts and theatre design, the application of digital technologies to the collection of performance ephemera, and regional identity construction and transmission through scenographic practice and research. David was the third Director of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts and is currently the Director of the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture