Team

Marlis Schweitzer is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and Chair of the Department of Theatre at York University. She is the author of When Broadway Was the Runway: Theater, Fashion, and Consumer Culture (2009) and Transatlantic Broadway: The Infrastructural Politics of Global Performance. With Joanne Zerdy, she is co-editor of Performing Objects and Theatrical Things and with Laura Levin she is co-editor of Performance Studies in Canada. Marlis is a former President of the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and Editor of Theatre Survey.

Shannon Elizabeth Hughes is a Ph.D. candidate whose research falls under the umbrella of Applied and socially engaged theatre. As an instructor/lecturer at Brock University, she tries to use her position as an academic to challenge claims within the field while creating embodied platforms for collective critique and creation. Shannon’s experience in applied and educational theatre has taken her across North America, Asia, and Africa, where she received her master’s in Applied Drama and Theatre Studies from the University of Cape Town in 2013. 

Shannon’s publications include: “Mamma Africa: A Theatre of Inclusion, Hope (lessness) and Protest.” Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa, # WelcomeToCanada: Performing Asylum, Defending Nation.” Canadian Theatre Review 177, Stunning, Surreal, and Full of Song — Catalyst Theatre’s Experiments in Musical Theatre. Canadian Theatre Review 171, #Resistance150: Home on Native Land. Canadian Theatre Review 174.

Sara Masciotra-Milstein is an emerging playwright, dramaturg, and researcher, who holds a B.A in Theatre from York University. Currently studying for her MLitt in Playwriting and Dramaturgy at the University of Glasgow, Sara’s research focuses on the false binary between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, the intersections of fandom and performance, the romanticization of Scotland, and Canadian musical theatre. As a dramaturg, she has worked with Tabia Lau and Aaron Jan on their digital shows, The Antigone Play and H.A.G.S respectively, as part of the Theatre@York 2020 Fall Season. With Lau, she has also worked as a TV script assistant. Prior to this, she participated as a shadow dramaturg for the musical In Real Life by Kevin Wong and Nick Green. In 2021, Sara’s one-woman show Jew(ish), which won the York University President’s Award for Best Stage Play, was featured in the Ludlow Fringe Festival.

Jayna Mees is an artist-scholar who specializes in performance studies, playwriting, and devised theatre. She is a PhD student in Theatre + Performance Studies at York University and holds an MA from the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research examines intersections between immersive/site-specific performance and disability theatre and performance. In particular, Jayna is interested in developing place-based dramaturges of care and access-based modes of research-creation. Some recent credits include: co-curator for Moving Publics: An In-Transit Conversation (2019 SummerWorks Exchange) and producer/marketing officer for rochdale at the 2019 SummerWorks Performance Festival.

Denise Rogers Valenzuela is a Ph.D. candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at York University from Santiago, Chile. She is a performer and puppeteer who tends to work in ephemeral duos (The Trinkettes, Sisters of the Soaking Rag, Socorro and Bloody Mess, La Insurgente) with scavenged materials, cardboard and garbage. Her artistic and academic research interests range across puppetry and material performance, decolonial feminism, protest, human and more-than-human relationalities, and ecosocial justice. Denise performs on and off with Bread and Puppet Theatre since 2017, joining various tours, including the Spring Tours of 2018 and 2020, and Little Big Tour in September 2021. Most recently, she created and performed Variety Box with newly minted troupe Corrugated Spectacles (Caitlin Ross and Arvin Heidari) at the OBJECTO Festival in Toronto.

Nassim J. Abu Sarari, a B.A. student in the Department of Theatre at York University, is a musician, writer, and performer. Born in Jaffa in 1996 to Palestinian parents, Nassim moved to Toronto in 2017. Nassim is interested in the many faces of “black” global culture, with particular attention to the cultures of the Middle East and North/East Africa. His work revolves around social justice, cultural studies, and performance studies. His essay “Between The World and Nassim” was published in 2018 in Granta: The Magazine of New Writing (the Hebrew edition). The piece is a mixture of a response to and review of Ta Nahisi Coat’s Between The World and Me (2016), as read by a Palestinian Citizen of Israel. Nassim is currently a research assistant for Prof. Marlis Schweitzer.

Hope Van Der Merwe is an actor, playwright, and poet currently studying at York University’s BFA Acting Conservatory. Her first play, Something Wicked, premiered at York University’s 2020 playGround Festival and received a half-reading in conversation with Kate Hennig for The Canadian Plaything’s Playwright to Playwright series, sponsored by PGC’s PlayConnect program. Hope’s writing contributions to Unhushed Theatre Collective’s Swallow This Skin were also featured in Toronto Fringe’s first Digital Festival (2021). Her poetry debut can be found in the 16th issue of the Temz Review.