COLLABORATOR

Roberta Barker is Professor of Theatre Studies and Women & Gender Studies at Dalhousie University. Roberta’s research interests centre on the relationship between theatrical performance and the social construction of identity. Her work has explored such topics as the representation of gender and class in early modern tragedy, the lives and repertoires of early modern boy actresses, and the theatrical performance of illness and health. She is the author of two books, Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage (U of Iowa Press, 2022) and Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984-2000: The Destined Livery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); the co-editor with Kim Solga of New Canadian Realisms: Eight Plays and New Canadian Realisms: Essays (Playwrights Canada Press, 2012); and the editor of numerous early modern plays, including Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women for The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama (Routledge, 2020), as well as General Editor of the series New Essays in Canadian Theatre at Playwrights Canada Press. Her credits as a stage director include Così Fan Tutte, Aunt Helen, Luisa Miller, The Rake’s Progress, and Orfeo ed Euridice for Opera Nova Scotia; Henry IV, Part One for Windsor Theatre, Mount Allison University; The Cunning Little Vixen for Dal Opera; and The Dog in the Manger, Drums and Organs, She Herself is a Haunted House, The Mill on the Floss, The Witch of Edmonton, Fuente Ovejuna, and Troilus and Cressida for Dal Theatre. She was the librettist for an opera by composer Tawnie Olson, Sanctuary and Storm, which won the Dominick Argento Prize for Best Chamber Opera from the National Opera Association of America and had its professional premiere in Vancouver in November 2023.

COLLABORATOR

Harris M. Berger is a scholar working in the fields of ethnomusicology, folklore studies, and popular music studies. His research focuses on theoretical issues in the study of music and folklore, phenomenological and performance-oriented approaches to the study of expressive culture, applied ethnomusicology, and heavy metal music. His books include Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience (Wesleyan University Press, 1999), Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture, and Theory for Ethnomusicology: Histories, Conversations, Insights (Harris M. Berger and Ruth M. Stone, eds., Routledge, 2019). He, Friedlind Riedel, and David VanderHamm are the editors of The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Berger has served as co-editor of the Journal of American Folklore and co-editor of the Music/Culture book series at Wesleyan University Press. He and Jocelyne Guilbault are the founders and co-editors of Music Research Annual, the first peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to critical review essays on key topics from the full range of academic disciplines that study music. He serves as Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology, Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place (MMaP), and Professor of Music and Folklore at Memorial University. At MMaP, Berger has produced many live events that explore the music and culture of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador and is also the producer of MMaP’s Back on Track Audio Publication Series. Begun by MMaP’s founder, Beverley Diamond, the series publishes CDs and websites that make the richness of the province’s musical traditions accessible to the public.

COLLABORATOR

Heather Davis-Fisch is the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lethbridge. Her research interests include performance historiography and Indigenous and intercultural performance, particularly in historical paradigms. Davis-Fisch is the author of Loss and Cultural Remains in Performance: The Ghosts of the Franklin Expedition, which was the recipient of the Ann Saddlemyer Award for outstanding monograph from the Canadian Association for Theatre Research.

Her scholarly work has appeared in Theatre Research in Canada, Performing Arts Resources, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies and Canadian Theatre Review, as well as several edited collections. Her current SSHRC-funded research project investigates the role of performances in the establishment of settler-colonialism in nineteenth-century Canada and how performance documents and objects can be re-integrated into galleries, archives and museums.

COLLABORATOR

Dr. Christine Mazumdar (she/her) is an artist and SSHRC/Sport Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the department of Art Education at Concordia University where her research considers the interrelationship between sport and art. A former rhythmic gymnast and nationally certified coach, she is an EDI expert who advocates consent, agency, and bodily autonomy in aesthetic pedagogy.

Christine was the recipient of the 2019 Routledge Prize at the Performance Studies international (PSi) conference for her paper “Like Rubber: Hyperflexibility, Contortion, and the ‘Freak-tastic’ Body,” and was longlisted for the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize for “Ballet for the Apocalypse” and the 2019 CBC Nonfiction Prize for her essay, “Reindeer at the Colloquium.” A writer, musician, and choreographer, Christine holds a PhD from the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.

COLLABORATOR

Maria Meindl completed her PhD at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance studies in 2022, where her research was supported by SSHRC and DAAD. Her dissertation, "Reading Elsa Gindler: Tracing the Legacy of a Somatics Pioneer" received the Alumni Dissertation award in 2022. She is working on turning it into a book.

Maria is the author of The Work (A novel from Stonehouse publishing, 2019), and Outside the Box (McGill-Queen’s University Press 2011, winner of the Alison Prentice Award for Women’s History). She has contributed fiction, poetry, essays and comics to numerous journals and has had essays anthologized in The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood, and At the End of Life: True Stories about How We Die. She written two radio series for CBC Ideas: Remembering Polio and Parent Care. In 2005, she founded Draft, a literary reading series now in its 18th season. A proud member of the Gatherings partnership, she co-edited the 2022 edition of the Gatherings chapbook with Stephen Johnson and Jenn Cole, and has contributed articles and interviews to the website.

A Guild Certified Feldenkrais practitioner, Maria has been teaching movement classes since 2002. She also works as a manuscript whisperer on a small number of academic and creative projects. www.mariameindl.com. www.draftreadings.com

GALLERY CURATOR & COLLABORATOR

Jimena Ortúzar is completing a postdoctoral fellowship at York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design. Her research explores labour and migration through the lens of performance and gender studies and her writing can be found in international journals as well as edited collections on art and activism, contemporary theatre, and Latino/a/x performance.

COLLABORATOR

Jenny Salisbury is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, where she is working with Tara Goldstein on verbatim theatre project 60 Years of Queer and Trans Activism. Jenny is a theatre director and arts-based researcher who specializes in new play development. Her SSHRC-funded Ph.D. was awarded from the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, titled, “Community-Engaged Theatre Audiences”. Jenny a director of the Centre for Spectatorship and Audience Research (www.centreforspectatorship.com), and co-artistic director of Gailey Road Productions, “where theatre meets research and research meets theatre" (www.gaileyroad.com).

Current Research: My current research is into activating and performing moments of Queer liberation, activism, and care as found in archives. Under the supervision of Professor Tara Goldstein, we are working on her project The Love Booth and Other Plays a verbatim, documentary play celebrating 50 years of delisting homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the American Psychology Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Building on this work, we have been working with undergraduate students and The ArQuives (https://arquives.ca) to write verbatim monologues about Queer activists from the last 60 years. This work connects to my larger research program on community-engaged and documentary theatre and audiences.

COLLABORATOR, ORAL HISTORIES VIDEOGRAPHER/EDITOR

Sanja Vodovnik is a graduate of the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on science fiction in theatrical and extra-theatrical performance spaces and investigates the roles that science fiction plays in contemporary technologically saturated worlds. She is particularly interested in events that contribute to the production of SF experiences such as immersive theme parks, world fairs and online fan communities.

ACCESSABILITY CONSULTANT & COLLABORATOR

Dr. Jess Watkin finished her PhD at the University of Toronto's Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance studies. Her research focuses on Disability dramaturgy, care-full approaches to performance creation/production, and Disability related activism. She is a Blind artist-scholar living in Toronto, who loves making tactile art and showing up as the Disabled artist in many creative spaces to ensure care is prioritized for all.

PROJECT MANAGER & CONTRIBUTOR

Sarah Robbins is an artist/educator from Toronto, Ontario. She completed her doctoral degree at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in 2022. She studies the relationship between gender and performance in theatrical institutional culture, and the pedagogy of actor training.

Before taking over the role of Gatherings Project Manager in June 2022, Sarah was the project’s Web Designer during her graduate studies from 2016-2022.

The study, “The State of Acting Training in Canada” that Sarah co-authored in 2019 was foundational for the Got Your Back Acting Educator’s Conference in May of 2019. More recently, she co-organized the inaugural Association of Acting Coaches and Educators (AACE) Conference in May 2023. The first of its kind in Canada, this new association offers community and training opportunities to those who teach acting privately and within institutions.

Sarah has taught theatre history, performance theory, and acting training courses for the University of Toronto, Mount Allison University, the University of Windsor, and the University of Waterloo.

Her work has been published in alt.theatre Magazine, HowlRound Theatre Commons, Intermission Magazine and Canadian Theatre Review.

saraherobbins.com

Robert is an artist-researcher. With a background in site-specific performance, Robert has staged work on an active city bus, in a gallery, castle, vacant Target store, in augmented reality, and occasionally even in a theatre space. This work has been supported by the Stratford Festival Playwright's Retreat, Why Not Theatre, Outside the March, and Quarantine Theatre (UK). His writing and research have appeared in Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and in collections from Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan. He holds an MA in Performance from Aberystwyth University (Wales) and recently completed his SSHRC-funded PhD at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. He teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University and the Rotman School of Management.

CONTRIBUTOR

Lisa Aikman is a Ph.D graduate from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies where her dissertation, Dramaturging Encounters: Working Methods and Dramaturgical Structures in Contemporary Canadian Documentary Theatre, examined documentary theatre as a genre that models ways of interacting with would-be strangers. Her current research interests include rehearsal studies, documentary theatre and theatre of the real, theatre of intercultural encounter, audience participation and reception, and theatre for social change/social justice. Within the context of Gatherings, Lisa is interested in how we might archive and study the working methods of independent and/or marginalized theatre-makers to create a fuller picture of how theatre and performance are created outside of mainstream, well-funded venues. She is currently Project Director of Gatherings, Managing Editor of Theatre Research in Canada, and serves as a coordinator and trainer for the Teaching Assistants’ Training Program, housed at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation.

CONTRIBUTOR

Cameron Crookston received his PhD from the Centre of Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, in collaboration with the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto in 2019. He has taught classes on the history of sexuality, queer community engagement and the history of drag at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on drag, LGBTQ2+ history, and queer cultural memory. His work appears in Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture and New Essays on Canadian Theatre and coming soon in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies and The Journal of Homosexuality.

CONTRIBUTOR

David is a designer, manager, and theatre researcher working in Toronto. He has been part of some three hundred productions in Toronto and across Canada, and his designs have been nominated for three Dora awards. He completed his doctoral degree at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies where he developed a new method of reading theatre facilities based on the interactions between theatre company, building, and the city around them.

CONTRIBUTOR

Tania Gigliotti is project manager for the Young People are the Future (YPTF) initiative (youth engagement in living history museums), spearheaded by Heather Fitzsimmons Frey. She presents at conferences (including AAAE, Horizons, and CATR), and has co-authored one article and one book chapter on based on YPTF research. Tania is Communications Manager at YouthWrite Society Canada. She has been working in children’s books since 2005 when she began work at Greenwoods’ Small World, an independent bookstore in Edmonton, AB. She started her journey into children’s comics at Happy Harbor Comics in 2014 and, while there, founded both Drawn to Write comic book camps for young creators ages 9+, which continue now at YouthWrite. She received her diploma in Arts & Cultural Management at MacEwan University in 2020 and is now entering the degree program.

Fitzsimmons Frey, H. and T. Gigliotti. (2021). "Let's Do the Time Warp Again:" Youth Interpreters at Fort Edmonton Park Performing Possibilities Across Time. Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches Théâtrales au Canada, 42(2). 243-263.

Fitzsimmons Frey, H. and T. Gigliotti (2022). Time Travelling Girls: How girl volunteers at Fort Edmonton Park create activism, A Girl Can Do: Recognizing and Representing Girlhood. ed. Tiffany R. Isselhardt. Vernon Press. 213-232.

CONTRIBUTOR

Laurel Green (she/her) is an adventurous dramaturg, interdisciplinary collaborator, and creative producer of new work; from the world premiere of over a dozen new plays to performance events, video games, participatory gardening installations, and secret backyard shows. She is a research associate for the SSHRC-funded project Performance in the Pacific Northwest: Pilot Project, developing new methodologies for performance historiography with Dr. Sasha Kovacs at the University of Victoria. Her primary research recovered early Canadian feminist playwright Louise Carter-Broun for Dr. Kym Bird’s anthology Blowing Up the Skirt of History: Recovered and Reanimated Plays by Early Canadian Women Dramatists, 1876-1920 (MCUP, 2020). She was an artistic advisor for the inaugural Dramaturgies of Participation Summit at Queens University, with an article forthcoming in Canadian Theatre Review. Laurel holds a Masters degree in Drama from the University of Toronto. She currently lives on the unceded traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples, colonially known as Victoria, BC.

CONTRIBUTOR

Jenna Kerekes is an emerging arts manager in Edmonton. She graduated with a diploma in Arts and Cultural Management at MacEwan University in 2021 and plans to go back for her degree in fall 2022. Jenna has also done several community theatre shows at Stageworks Academy of the Performing Arts Leduc participating as an actor, stagehand, and lighting technician. Select credits include Mary Poppins, Mama Mia, and Legally Blonde. She has spent the majority of 2021 and 2022 working as a Production Assistant and Health Captain at the Citadel Theatre. Jenna worked with Heather Fitzsimmons Frey on performance-based historiography research and she has written an exhibit piece for Gatherings.

CONTRIBUTOR

Laura A. Lucci is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication Studies, Dance, and Theatre at Saint Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana. Part of the College's first cohort of Academic Excellence and Inclusions Fellows, Laura is working with the faculty on integrating justice and equity oriented practices into all levels of teaching. A contributor to Gatherings since 2020, Laura completed her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies in 2017. Her thesis, Pirandello’s Dramaturgy of Time, examined the intersections of Luigi Pirandello’s drama with contemporary theories of time and temporality. For more information, visit https://lauraalucci.wordpress.com/.

CONTRIBUTOR

Marjan Moosavi is the Lecturer at Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Outside of academia, she wears multiple hats: she is a dramaturg, dramatic translator, and a diversity practitioner. She has served as a faculty member and designed curricula for the Universities in Iran, Canada, and the US and is the author of several scholarly publications. She is the curator of the Middle Eastern Theatre Photo Exhibition and the Principal Investigator of the First Digital Guide to Theater of the Middle East. Recent collaborations include those with Gatherings (University of Toronto), IPCCR (International Program for Creative Collaboration & Research, University of Maryland), and Nowadays Theatre (Toronto).

CONTRIBUTOR

Lena Onalik (Inuk) is the Heritage Program Coordinator with the Nunatsiavut Government’s Department of Language, Culture & Tourism (Archaeology Division) in Nain, Nunatsiavut, NL. She is responsible for developing and implementing relevant heritage programming, as well as a community-based and field relating to different heritage issues. Originally from Makkovik, Nunatsiavut, she earned her BA in Archaeology at Memorial University in 2006. Since then, she has worked to promote her culture in a variety of roles, serving as the Nunatsiavut Government's first Archaeologist, worked as a Culturalist with Adventure Canada and participating in the annual Trails Tales and Tunes Festival in Gros Morne National Park. Lena has a keen interest in the preservation and protection of traditional Inuit practices such as Inuit throat singing, drum dancing, and traditional clothing making.

CONTRIBUTOR

Michael Reinhart is a theatre/performance creator, performance scholar and theatre instructor. His work (both creative and academic) is based in exploring interdisciplinary art-making and collective-driven devised theatre creation. Much of this exploration, research and creative output has occurred through his work with [elephants] collective and Boundary Conditions/Performance Assembly, both of which he is a founding member. Michael teaches at TMU, the Randolph College for the Performing Arts, Brock University and the University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.

CONTRIBUTOR

Chanel Sheridan is currently completing her Bachelor of Arts at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Majoring in Drama while minoring in Gender Studies, she hopes to one day create theatre that moves people while exploring her interests in directing, stage managing, and set design. Working under Dr. Kelsey Jacobson as a research assistant, Chanel has explored how audiences archive performances and now wonders about her own archiving process as an audience member and theatre creator. Perhaps hoarding show tickets and programs is a useful skill after all.