The Graduate Program in Theatre & Performance Studies is proud of its accomplished, award-winning faculty. Faculty members are listed here based on their primary program (or faculty) appointment.
All faculty listed here are eligible to serve on masters and doctoral committees. However, please note that only those faculty with an asterisk (*) beside their name are eligible to serve as PhD dissertation supervisors.
Ian Garrett
Graduate Program Director MA & PhD
Ian Garrett is a designer, producer, educator, and researcher in the field of sustainability in arts and culture. He is the director of the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts and Associate Professor of Ecological Design for Performance. He is also producer for Toasterlab, a mixed reality performance collective. He maintains a design practice focused on ecology, accessible technologies and scenography. His research interests include sustainability, ecoscenography, ecodrama, mixed reality performance, digital environmental humanities, locative technologies.
igarrett@yorku.ca
gpdtaps@yorku.ca
Members of Graduate Executive:
Bridget Cauthery
Bridget Cauthery is a dance and cultural studies scholar focusing on the impacts of post/neo-coloniality and the processes of globalization on contemporary dance practices in the Global North. Her on-going research includes a three-year SSHRC Insight-funded project to recover John Kim Bell's 1988 ballet "In the Land of the Spirits," and a forthcoming monograph entitled Choreographing the North: Settler affinities in contemporary dance-making from McGill-Queens University Press. Her most recent publications include chapters on Indigenous and diasporic subjectivities in the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (2021) and Moving Together: Dance and Pluralism in Canada (2021). She is the founder of the Somatics Working Group at York University.
Alberto Guevara *
Contemporary performance theory and practice; theatricality of violence, nationalism and spectacle; ethnographic methodologies; the body in performance; evocation through film and theatre/performances of resistance; power and revolution, power and protest; and postcolonial theory; areas of expertise are Latin America, Nicaragua, Nepal and Canada.
David Jansen
David Jansen is a theatre artist: actor, director, teacher, and dramaturge. I’ve worked professionally for 30 years, mostly as an actor and mostly in Toronto, though I did spend several seasons at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, and with the Peter Hall Company in the U.K. I’ve performed in all kinds of productions from the classics to new Canadian work in every kind of venue you can imagine. Some of those shows I’ve devised, too. Mostly notably Ubuntu, which premiered in 2009 but has had a healthy afterlife touring across Canada ever since. And I’ve acted for television—though theatre is my real vocation.
djansen@yorku.ca
Spotlight on Faculty: David Jansen
Guillaume Bernardi*
Guillaume Bernardi is an Associate Professor in the Program of Drama and Creative Arts. He holds a doctorate from the Université Paris-Sorbonne. As a stage director, his work covers a wide range of genres, from theatre and opera to movement pieces and has been presented on many of the world’s most prestigious stages in cities including Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris and Rome. In Toronto, he has directed productions for The Canadian Opera Company and Le Théâtre Français de Toronto among others. His scholarly research is primarily focused on performance issues of Baroque theatre.
gbernardi@glendon.yorku.ca|
Profile
Belarie Zatzman*
Drama and education; theatre for young audiences; arts education; Holocaust education
Theatre & Performance Studies Faculty
Patrick Alcedo*
Southeast Asian dance; folk festival production and cultural authenticity; cultural heritage and communal expressions.
Natalie Alvarez
(Adjunct Faculty)
Research interests include: performance theory; North American contemporary performance; performativity in simulations and reenactment culture; Latina/o-Canadian theatre and performance; genealogies of nostalgia and performance; as well as performance analysis and pedagogy.
natalie.alvarez@ryerson.ca
Profile
Eric Armstrong
Voice and speech.
Erika Batdorf
Performer, choreographer, playwright and director; mime, clown, comedienne, masks, voice and dance. Recipient of York Faculty of Fine Arts Dean's Senior Teaching award 2009/10.
Rhonda Blair
(Adjunct Faculty)
Main areas of interest include acting theory — particularly looking at applications of cognitive science to the acting process —, performance studies, theatre and politics, feminism and theatre, alternative performance, and Chekhov. Southern Methodist University.
Marcia S. Blumberg
Theatre, Arts and Culture; Contemporary theatre; South African theatre.
Katherine Boydell
(Adjunct Faculty)
Exploration of the methodological, theoretical and ethical challenges of engaging with arts-based research. Engages arts-based methods in the creation and dissemination of research. University of Toronto, Department of Psychiatry, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and Senior Scientist and Scientific Director of Qualitative Inquiry, Hospital for Sick Children.
katherine.boydell@sickkids.ca
Profile
Kym Bird *
Canadian Women’s Drama 1880–1920; early and contemporary Canadian women’s writing.
Sheila Cavanaugh
Gender and sexuality studies; body studies; film studies; queer and psychoanalytic theory.
Gwenyth Dobie
(Graduate Program Director, MFA)
Movement for actors, devised theatre, the Alexander Technique, acting pedagogy, and stage direction.
Jennifer Fisher *
Contemporary art and cultural studies; art history; curatorial practice, display culture and the aesthetics of non-visual senses; contemporary art.
Mary Fogarty*
Sociology of the arts, cultural sociology, popular culture, Hip Hop dance (Breaking), popular music, sound studies, film and media studies, everyday aesthetics, body techniques, intersections of critical race theory and somatics, globalization, ethnography, ethnomethodology.
Honor Ford-Smith
Performance and social movements; race, gender, nation and colonialism and post-colonialism, Caribbean societies and their diasporas, community and environmental arts and education.
R. Darren Gobert *
Comparative modern and contemporary Western drama; dramatic and performance theory; 17th-century French theatre; philosophy of theatre.
Terry Goldie *
Canadian and postcolonial literatures; gay studies; sexuality studies; literary theory.
David B. Goldstein
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature including Shakespeare, performance studies, theatre history, food studies, poetry writing, avant garde poetry and poetics, literary and cultural theory, and book history.
Kathleen Gould-Lundy*
Co-ordinator of Destination Arts in Faculty of Education. Literacy, equity, arts educator, inventive inclusive teaching for at-risk students.
kgouldlundy@edu.yorku.ca
Profile
Julia Gray
Adjunct Faculty
Dr. Julia Gray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto (Scarborough Campus). Dr. Gray is an interdisciplinary cultural and performance studies scholar, artist-practitioner (playwright/theatre director), and critical social scientist. Her research interests include disability and aging inclusion; performance and cultural studies; Queer/Crip/Feminist Studies, Aesthetic Philosophy; Interpretive, arts-based (research-creation) and qualitative methods.
julia.gray@utoronto.ca
Profile
John Greyson
Filmmaker, video artist, writer, activist, and educator.
Julia Harrison
Primarily interested in the nature of the tourist interaction and experience; and most recently on Ontario cottage culture. Other research interests include the politics of representation of Canadian Aboriginal cultures in museums; the history of Canadian anthropology; and the culture of non-profit institutions.
Sharon Hayashi
Architecture and Cinema, New Media and New Social Movements, Historiography, Politics of Archives, Japanese Cinema and Media Studies.
Kirsty Johnston
Adjunct Faculty
Specializes in dramatic literature and theatre history with particular interest in disability arts and intersections between health, disability and performance.
kirsty.johnston@ubc.ca
Profile
Patricia Keeney
Canadian drama and theatre; Canadian drama by and about women; modern Canadian culture and literature; children's theatre and literature; theatre and poetry; creative writing.
Shawn Kerwin
Stage and costume design.
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston*
Anthropologist, performance theorist and theatre director. Research interests include: performance of migration and exile, decolonizing research methodologies, race and ethnicity, imaginative and performance ethnography, violence and terrorism, affect theory and embodiment, gender and sexuality, political and activist performance, community-based theatre, physical theatre, research-creation, practice-based research. Founding member of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. She is the 2014 recipient of the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design Junior Faculty Teaching Award in recognition of her contribution to excellence in teaching in the Department of Theatre.
Laura Levin *
Contemporary theatre and performance art; performance theory and disciplinary genealogies in performance studies; gender and sexuality in/as performance; urban, site-specific, and environmental performance; performance, space, and cultural geography; intermedial, digital, and online performance; practice as research; devised theatre practice; photographic theory and performative photography; intersections of performance and the visual art
Gabriel Levine
Adjunct Faculty
Interdisciplinary performance, performance studies
political and aesthetic theory and performance object theatre, puppetry and material performance, postcolonial and Indigenous theatre and performance twentieth-century and contemporary theatre, vernacular music and arts
gabriel.levine@concordia.ca
Profile
Kenneth Little
Analysis of society as spectacle, visual culture, and popular cultural performance in both Euro-North American and postcolonial societies.
Janine Marchessault
Cites and cinema; feminist/post-colonial media; social media and activism; film festivals and utopias; micro-cinemas; curatorial studies; theories of spectatorship; phenomenology and affect; experimental cinema.
John Mayberry
Master of Winters College. Theatre Production. Current research interests include 19th century theatrical effects, ritual drama, street theatre, and health and safety issues in the entertainment industry.
James McKernan
Theatre production, sustainable theatrical scenographic technologies.
Allyson Mitchell
Feminist performance art, fat activism, craft resistance, feminist theory, popular culture.
Gail Mitchell *
Integrating the arts in research dissemination; the ethics of nursing practice and education; nursing knowledge and nursing theory; transformative leadership; unitary thinking & global health; human science nursing; lived experiences of dementia and diabetes; ehealth technology; teaching-learning through discussion; human becoming theory and criticism; development of moral consciousness.
Julie Nagam
(Adjunct Faculty)
Space, place and race, Indigenous, cultural and post-colonial theory, art and activism.
Modupe Olaogun *
Aesthetics of African drama; African literature; postcolonial literatures.
Elizabeth A. Pentland
Renaissance literature; Shakespeare; political relations in England’s literature during French civil wars.
Teresa Przybylski
Theatre design.
Danielle Robinson *
Dance Ethnography; cultural studies; dance history; critical race theory; social dance reconstruction; multicultural dance education; popular dance practices; African diaspora within the Americas; Latin American dance cultures.
Don Rubin
Emeritus
Canadian theatre and cultural politics; Canadian theatre history; Modern and Contemporary Canadian and world theatre; applied theatre criticism; African theatre and drama; Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov; Modern Drama and the avantgarde; Shakespeare and the Authorship Question; theatre publishing.
Judith Rudakoff *
Developmental dramaturgy; contemporary Canadian theatre and dance; playwriting.
Julie Salverson
(Adjunct Faculty)
Political popular theatre, community engaged theatre, critical pedagogy, playwriting; violence, witnessing and testimony in performance. Playwright, Instructor, Libbrettist, Queen's University.
Leslie Sanders *
African American literature; black writers in Canada; Women’s studies.
Barbara Sellers-Young
Interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of dance, theatre and performance. Her interest in all forms of art and diverse performance styles informs her research on the moving body and globalization.
Marlis Schweitzer *
Theatre history & historiography; consumer and commodity culture; 19th and early 20th century popular entertainment; fashion studies; gender and sexuality in/ as performance; transnational performance culture; theories of material culture.
Abigail Shabtay*
Dr. Abigail Shabtay teaches in the Children, Childhood, and Youth program in the Department of Humanities. She has also lectured in the fields of childhood studies, creative arts, and education at McGill University, the University of Toronto, and Ryerson University. She has received awards for excellence in teaching and research in her field, including the Ada Slaight Drama in Education Award (2018-2019), the Jackie Kirk Fieldwork Award (2018-2019), the DISE Outstanding Teaching Award (2018) and the Dean’s Graduate Award in Education (2015-2018). Abigail’s published work focuses on children’s rights, child-centred pedagogies, youth activism, social justice, and drama-based participatory action research. She is currently the Principal investigator for two SSHRC-funded projects related to children, youth, and the performing arts. She has served on organizing committees for six national academic conferences in her field and is the primary organizer and conference chair for this year’s Children, Youth and Performance Conference at the Toronto Young People’s Theatre. Research Interests: Children, Youth, Youth Activism, Social Justice, Drama-Based Research, Childrens Rights
David Smukler
(Professor Emeritus)
Voice; directing; experimental theatre. Awarded a 2000-2001 Graduate Teaching Award from the Faculty of Graduate Studies.
Jenn Stephenson
Renaissance drama, contemporary Canadian drama, metatheatricality, autobiographical performance, and performativity in fictional worlds-within. Undergraduate Chair, Drama, Queen’s University.
jenn.stephenson@queensu.ca
Profile
Ross Stuart
Musical theatre history and practice; Canadian theatre history; summer festivals and theatres, Stratford Festival history and practice; improvisation and adaptation, play development and production for educational and community theatre, playwriting.
Doug Van Nort*
Digital performance, performance and sensorial immersion in technologically-mediated environments.
Deanne Williams*
Medieval Literature, Girlhood Studies, Children's Literature,, Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, Theatre History, History of Book, English.
Mark Wilson
Directing; acting.
Hersh Zeifman
Canadian drama; Contemporary British and American drama; Samuel Beckett.
Joyce Zemans
Arts and media; Administration; Non-profit management and leadership.
Cynthia Zimmerman
Canadian theatre and literature in English; Sharon Pollock; dramatic writing by contemporary women; psychological approaches to literature.
