Performative Urbanism Lab for Spatial,
Social, and Scenographic Experimentation
Research Fellows - current (2023-2024)
Sarah Bengle
Sarah Bengle is a spatial designer (UQÀM 2017) and a current graduate student in Geography (Concordia 2023) with a background in Art History (UdeM 2013). Their research deals with utopian geographies, social economy and notions of commons. Previously, Sarah was a co-founder of Dimanche Design, worked in the Quebec film industry and was a project manager at Architecture Without Borders Québec. Their Master’s research looks at alternatives mode of city making through a research-creation project anchored in a transitional urban planning project in Montréal.
Jacob Caines
In 2021, Jacob began his doctoral work with the INDI PhD program at Concordia University, where he is researching the role that Canadian communities of Queer+ classical musicians play in shaping the culture of cities.
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Jacob Caines is a conductor, musicologist, and performer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Jacob is on faculty at Dalhousie University, where he is the director of the DAL Wind Ensemble and occasional professor of music history. Jacob has also been on faculty at The Maritime Conservatory of Performing Arts as the head of the woodwind and theory departments. He is also the founder of classicalqueer, a project dedicated to interviews with Queer+ performers, writers, musicians, administrators and artists.
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As a performer, Jacob was the music director for the award winning national tour of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He is also a founding member of the ALKALI Collective which performs and commissions works by living Canadian queer and BIPOC composers. The group is proud to be funded by the Canada Council. Jacob is an active adjudicator and clinician and has worked with the Canadian Music Competition and dozens of ensembles and arts groups across Canada.
Keith Fernandez
Concordia Undergraduate Student Research Award (2022)
Adela Goldbard
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Adela Goldbard is an interdisciplinary artist/educator/scholar from Mexico City. She holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of México (UNAM).
She is a PhD student in the research-creation stream at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society (CISSC) at Concordia University and a member of the National System of Artistic Creators of México. Her doctoral research focuses on developing a Poetics of Violence: a research-creation project proposing that dramatic violence with its aesthetic potential—ritual, collective, affective—can become a tool for the unsilencing of non-hegemonic narratives, for epistemic decolonization, and to support struggles for justice and autonomy. Her research-creation will take place in the Andean region of Bolivia and Perú.
Goldbard’s art practice draws on experimental/collaborative/sensory field research and brings together sculpture, video, photography, sound, text and traditional textiles, pottery, woodwork and pyrotechnics. Her recent projects include a pyrotechnic play with/for the Mexican community of La Villita in Chicago, commissioned by Gallery 400 (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2019-2020) and a socially engaged art project with/for the P’urhépecha community of Arantepacua, commissioned by the XIV FEMSA Biennial (Michoacán, México, 2020-21)
Shauna Janssen, PhD
PULSE Creative Director & Principal Investigator
Shauna (she/ her) is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Theatre, Concordia University. She also holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Performative Urbanism (2018-2023) and between 2018 and 2020 Shauna was the Director of Concordia's Institute for Urban Futures. She is currently the studio director for the immersive storytelling studio at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture & Technology.
Her teaching, on-going research and interdisciplinary creative practice are consonant with urban humanities, critical spatial practices, performative and dramaturgical explorations with and within the urban realm, often taking the form of site-responsive performances/ installations, urban interventions, and community-engaged collaborations.
In Montreal, she has been commissioned to facilitate workshops, create artistic and curatorial public art projects for the Centre d’Histoire de Montréal, La Fonderie Darling, Imago Theatre, Playwright’s Workshop Montréal, and has collaborated on community events and cultural exchanges with institutions such as Mutek, Heritage Montréal, Montréal Arts Interculturel, and Parks Canada. Her contributions to research and the advancement of knowledge in critical urban spatial practices beyond academic audiences include a number of university-community collaborations, and invitations to give public lectures at cultural institutions in Montreal such as Observatoires des médiations culturelles, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Ephemeral City), the artist-run centre Articule (“Would you be my curator?”), the McCord Museum (City Talks).
Internationally, she has given workshops and presentations about her research and urban curatorial work, as well as participated in various interdisciplinary and research-creation activities, events, curatorial and artist residencies hosted by institutions such as the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, and Agora, Berlin (2015); the School of Art, Design and Architecture Creative Exchange Institute, University of Tasmania, Australia (2016); the Department of Spatial Design at Massey University, New Zealand (2017); the XX Architecture and Urbanism Biennial, Chile (2017); Performance Design at Roskilde University, Denmark (2018); Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space (Czech Republic, 2019); The School of Performance Design and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, UK (2022); and the DesignLab, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago de Chile (2022).
Her writing on site-specific art, urban scenography, public space, performance pedagogy, and performative practices have been published in numerous essays and monographs, including with the Journal of Theatre & Performance Design, FIELD: a journal of socially-engaged art criticism, and PARtake: the Journal of Performance as Research. She is co-editor of a book with Anja Lindelof, Performing Institutions: Contested Sites & Structures of Care, Intellect Books (2023).
​Her research is funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, the Fonds de recherché Québec - Société et Culture (FRQ-SC), and the Office of the Vice President Research and Graduate Studies, Concordia University.
Maude LaFrance
Post-doctoral Fellow
Maude is a postdoctoral fellow (CRSH) at the Department of Theatre, Concordia University. She is also a lecturer at the University of Quebec (UQÀM) in Montreal. Her research focuses on the relationship between performing arts, pop culture, cultural hierarchies through affect theories and a feminist perspective. She is currently conducting research aimed at revisiting the historical importance of women in Montreal Theatre from 1950 to today. She is interested in the intersection where theatre history meets feminist history in Montreal.
She has contributed to the works Metteur en scène aujourd’hui: identité artistique en question ? and Faire théâtre sous le signe de la recherche (both at Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017). She has been a Visiting Scholar at the TISCH School of the Arts (New York University). She holds a PhD from UQAM, which focused on the Wooster Group, the Big Art Group, Olivier Choinière and their relation to pop culture and affects.
Olivia Mc Gilchrist
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Olivia (she / her) is a white French-Jamaican multimedia artist and doctoral candidate exploring how colonial legacies extend their reach to Virtual Reality (VR) technology. She completed a Fine Art Photography MA at London College of Communication (2010) and has since been working primarily with video, multimedia installation and VR since 2015 both as an artist and a consultant on interdisciplinary and performance based projects.
She has exhibited in the Caribbean, Europe, South and North America and is pursuing the Individualized PhD at Concordia University (2017-). Her thesis project is entitled “virtual ISLANDs, hybrid identities in Virtual Reality.”
Kévin Pinvidic
Kévin Pinvidic is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. He is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University (INDI program), and holds a SSHRC scholarship. His doctoral research creation project focuses on the multiple crossroads between scenography, urban studies, geography, and computation arts, and draws from performative and collaborative methods for engaging citizens in processes of urban change.
Kévin is a visual artist and in his practice he often works with repurposed architectural representations such as plans, models or digital softwares which give shape to scenographies where residual matters and theatre elements, such as lights and projections, are assembled in site-specific works. Pinvidic trained in design and architecture (Ecole Boulle, Paris, 2008, National School of Architecture of Versailles, 2010), and holds a Master of Fine Arts from UQÀM (2015). Kévin is also an active scenographer and designs for live performances with a number of theatre and dance companies in Montréal.
Anne-Audrey Remarais
MITACS 2020
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Anne-Audrey is currently a Master's student at Concordia University in the Individualized Program (INDI) where she is investigating how Black folks, their stories, and their silences can hold space for each other in order to create a healing and transformative Black space, with the potential to reclaim and validate one's Blackness and embodied knowledges. She is looking for ways to materialize Black belonging.
Anne-Audrey is also a creator, mostly using interdisciplinary performance to explore themes mostly revolving around Blackness, healing, community, belonging, and home. She values the lived experience as a space for resistance and survival. Her work has been showcased in Montreal, Toronto, and New York.
She is the founder and dramaturg of I WOC UP LIKE DIS, a platform for queer and trans femme of color where she conceptualizes and facilitates performance-making workshops to foster healing and dialogue. The platform works to understand the potential for community building/healing on the spectrum of race, gender, and sexuality through the dramaturgical process behind the making of autoethnographic performances. Her background includes mentorship from d’bi young anitafrika at the Watah Theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed trainings, and extensive experience in social and community work with an anti-oppressive practice.
Martín Rodríguez
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Martín is a multidisciplinary artist and independent curator. Martín's work emerges from his Chicanx upbringing along the Arizona-Mexico border. His practice mixes performance with interventions and installations, investigating radio as a transformative medium.
After a surgery to remove a brain tumour left him temporarily paralyzed and physically unable to work as a musician, he was compelled to look for new meaning. One day, in a frustrated attempt to play a basic scale, he heard mysterious voices resonating in the pickup coils of his guitar. Realizing the source was a radio transmission, he seized on the phenomena and began improvising with it. This ear-opening moment revealed the power of radio, and it quickly became his primary material for expression. Notably, his work has been presented by the Musée d’art contemporain Montréal (CA), MUAC (MX), Darling Foundry (CA), Walking Festival for Sound (UK/PL), Spektrum (DE), as well as various festivals and performance venues across Canada, and the US.
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In addition to producing his own work, Rodríguez organises and curates various events, happenings, and festivals encompassing sound and radio having collaborated with Pop Montreal, Suoni per il Popolo, and Eastern Bloc. From 2014 to 2018, he worked in various roles including Director of Eastern Bloc, an artist-run centre dedicated to presenting emerging media artists in Montréal, Canada where he is currently Vice President of the board. In 2022 Rodríguez was awarded the Dora & Avi Morrow Fellowship.
He is currently pursuing his MFA in Studio Arts with a focus in Intermedia at Concordia University.
Jamie Woollard
Jamie Woollard is a musician and researcher. Her work with soundscape, multi-channel spatialization and experimental performance contexts is guided by a focus on place. She grew up on the prairies in Treaty 1 territory and is now based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal, Canada). Jamie creates film scores and performance works, with an emphasis on surrounding the listener with sound to produce an immersive experience.
Jamie trained as a classical pianist for twenty years before becoming interested in electronic composition. She studied piano performance and electroacoustics at Concordia University, where she completed a BFA in Music in 2014 and published research on emergent practices in laptop music. After working with filmmakers for several years, she created "Heat Wave", a large-scale solo work for piano and electronics, and "Immortal Words", a solo album based on the poetry of bixsexual writers throughout history.
Jamie is pursuing aMasters in sound, theatre and urban geography (INDI program). Her work considers how sound and spatialization can be used in theatre performance to emphasize intimacy, complexity, empathy and humour, in order to expand understandings of urban community. Her MA research is funded by a SSHRC scholarship.
The Ragtag Collective
Artistic Collaborators, 2022-2023
Ragtag, founded in 2020, is a Montreal based Queer multidisciplinary arts collective, dedicated to the creation of hybridized art, that strives to blend the essence of live theatre with interactive digital experiences. Ragtag is embarking on their inaugural installation series: QUEERasure, which seeks to memorialize and inform the Montreal community of the moments and landmarks of this city’s queer history that are slipping through our fingers. Ragtag is honoured to be associated with PULSE as they work through the research and creation phase of the first installation, QUEERasure: Sex Garage - a look at the July 15, 1990 raid and subsequent protests.
Rebecca Durocher (she/her) is a queer multidisciplinary artist, writer and creator who is interested primarily in where queerness intersects with space. Rebecca studied English Literature and Drama at Bishop’s University before moving to Montreal to study Production Design and Technical Arts at the National Theatre School of Canada. Rebecca is primarily know in the Montreal English Theatre community as the Production Manager for the Montreal Fringe Festival, a position she has held since 2019.
Cara Rebecca (she/her) is an actor, fight director and creator who is primarily interested in the exploration of identity through movement. Cara studied English Literature, Theatre, and Philosophy at McGill University before attending the National Theatre School’s Acting program. She is known for her award-winning performances of Chana in Indecent at the Segal Centre, and as the titular role in Youtheatre’s digital production of Pandora. She is currently pursuing further accreditation with the Academy of Dramatic Combat.
Past Research Fellows
Mira Baba
Mira completed her MSc in geography and urban studies at Concordia University. With a background in landscape architecture she is interested in the urban aspect of the field, and influenced by the question of 'Whose city?' She works with people-centered approaches to design that respect locale . During her graduate study, she became interested in exploring cultural landscapes and community/informal planning, particularly the indeterminate spaces of the post-industrial landscape, and in how they can act as spaces of opportunity and potentiality. Her research bridges these interests as it explores indeterminate spaces as sites of tension between gentrification and appropriation.
Lisa Marie DiLiberto
Lisa Marie is the Artistic Director of Theatre Direct, one of Canada’s leading theatres for young audiences now in it’s 44th season. Previous to this post Lisa Marie was the Artistic Director of FIXT POINT Arts and Media, a company she founded in 2005 which has grown from a storefront operation into a viable not-for-profit organization with a national reach. FIXT POINT’s most lauded initiative is The Tale of a Town - Canada, a theatre and media project developed with The National Arts Centre that has now toured to every province and territory gathering stories through interviews culminating in site-specific performances with local professional artists. With Lisa Marie at the helm, the continued expansion of The Tale of a Town evolved into an animated series on TVO - Main Street Ontario, now airing its second season, and a federally funded storygathering training which offers skills in interviewing, recording, transcription, and creating art from audio to cohorts of emerging artists.
Lisa Marie has performed in regional theatres across the country including Second City, 4th Line Theatre, The Sudbury Theatre Centre and Carousel Players. She has toured across Canada with the Fringe Festival and premiered original works at the Edinburgh Festival and the Prague International Festival. Past posts include Playwright-in-Residence at Theatre Passe Muraille, Associate Artistic Director at Jumblies Theatre, and Education & Audience Development Coordinator at Canadian Stage. Lisa Marie teaches devising at Brock University and clown at Centennial College. She holds a Masters of Arts in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University and is currently pursuing her PhD at York University (Theatre and Performance Studies).
She is an Artistic Advisor for the National Arts Centre of Canada, a graduate of George Brown Theatre School and École Philippe Gaulier in Paris, France. Lisa Marie is a Dora-nominated director, an advocate for artist caregivers, and the proud mom of two wild children.
Joanna Donehower
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Joanna has been working in professional theatre as a dramaturg and playwright since 2005, and, since 2012, has been artistic director of a theatre company in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal which features site-responsive performance collaborations between university students and theatre professionals. Her dissertation Toward a Dramaturgy of Feminist Spatial Curiosity explored the relationship between performance and its city of situation, putting into practice a spectrum of historical and contemporary performance techniques for engaging critically and creatively with contested urban spaces. Curiocité, the creative component of her doctoral research, is an urban dramaturgy methodology and theatrical device, based on the curiosity cabinet and popular street theatre forms. Abattoir de l’est is the street performance event issuing from Curiocité, an urban fable that engages the histories and presents of rue Ontario and the east end district of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where Joanna lives.
Amanda Gutiérrez
Amanda is currently undertaking a PhD at the Centre of Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University, and holds an FRQ-SC scholarship for her doctoral research on decolonial soundwalking practices. Amanda explores the experience of political listening and gender studies through soundwalking practices.
Amanda trained as a stage designer from The National School of Theater (Mexico City), and completed her MFA in Media and Performance Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She creates with a range of digital media tools to investigate everyday life aural agencies and collective identities.
Amanda has held numerous international art residencies with organizations such as FACT, Liverpool in the UK, ZKM in Germany, TAV in Taiwan, Bolit Art Center in Spain, and her artwork has been exhibited internationally in venues such as The Liverpool Biennale in 2012, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harvestworks in NYC, SBC Gallery, Undefined Radio in Montreal, Errant Bodies Studio Press in Berlin, among others. Amanda is currently one member of the Board of Directors of the World Listening Project.
Katrina Jurjans
Katrina is currently completing a Master of Design at Concordia. Both within and outside of academia, notions of boundaries, transformation, memory, and transition have informed her practice. Whether solidified into the more concrete language of colour and pattern in painting, used as a way to incorporate a more temporary, emotional and unstable understanding of space within architecture, or thought of in relation to the body in installations, these ideas remain a consistent driving force to think about space and spatial experience.
Currently, she is interested in exploring the potential in poetic analogies as a way to set up relationships between things that rarely come in contact with one another - painting, body boundaries and spatial borders - to merge questions of transformation and thresholds that emanate from the body with those characteristic to larger-scale spatial borders and boundaries.
Caroline Laurin-Beaucage
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Caroline is undertaking her MA in Concordia's INDI program.
She has been active as a choreographer, performer and teacher for 20 years. She has danced for choreographers such as Ginette Laurin (O Vertigo), Jacques Poulin-Denis, Paul-André Fortier and Jean-Pierre Perreault. In 2001, she began her own choreographic process and created several pieces such as: Hit and Fall (2009), SOAK (2011), Entailles (2013) and Matière blanche (2015). Her choreographic work has been presented in Montreal at Tangente, Agora de la danse, OFFTA, Festival TransAmériques, as well as in France, Hungary, Germany and South Korea.
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In 2016, Caroline created Habiter sa mémoire, an outdoor performance which has been presented in more than 15 different cities and will continue its tour in Canada, Europe and China until 2020. In 2018, she presents the ambitious diptych Ground and Rebo(u)nd in collaboration with Montreal Danse. Caroline Laurin-Beaucage graduated from The School of the Toronto Dance Theater.
She has been teaching contemporary dance technique at Montreal’s Concordia University since 2005. She is the founder of Lorganisme and has served as the company’s artistic director since its creation.
Andrei Mamal
Concordia Undergraduate Student Research Award (2020)
Andrei Mamal undertaking a BFA in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, with a specialization in performance creation. He is a recent recipient of a Concordia Ungraduate Student Research Award (CUSRA 2020) and joins the PULSE team to work on the dramaturgical potentials of using 360° filming and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in the design of new media performance.
His primary interest is the collaborative aspect of the creation process in theatre, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to new media and technologies in making live performance.
Andrei started his career back in his home city Chisinau, Moldova, where he co-founded a theatre collective called "Etajul 5". The project aims to create space for collaboration between independent theatre artists, exploring dramatic texts, documentary theatre and site-related performances.
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Allison Peacock
Allison has developed an artistic practice committed to expanding the possibilities of dance and choreography, experimenting with forms of presentation, representation, potentiality, and imagination. She holds a BA from the University of Toronto in Political Science and Visual Studies, is a graduate of the School of Toronto Dance Theatre’s Professional Dance Training Program, and completed her MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship at the UdK/HZT Berlin.
Allison has trained, taught, and performed internationally. Her solo and collaborative works have been presented at the Canada Dance Festival, Dancemakers, Fabrica de Pensule, Movement Research at the Judson Church, National Dance Centre Bucharest (CNDB), Salonul de Proiecte, Uferstudios, and numerous non-traditional performance spaces.
From 2006-11, Allison worked as a gardener in Toronto, with a speciality in topiary, hedge, and knot garden clipping. She is currently a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University, researching performance and contemporary physicality through local gardens and gardening practices.
Eduardo Perez
Eduardo trained as an architect at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). His work explores the intersection of architecture, design, performance and new media through research-creation projects and territorial actions oriented to generate critical spatial ecosystems. Perez is co-founder of the architecture collective TOMA, with whom he has exhibited his work internationally, and been awarded with the Graham Foundation Grant for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (2016).
He has collaborated extensively with cultural and educational institutions in Chile, and has lectured at the Faculty of Architecture at UDLA, Santiago. Currently, he is pursuing a Graduate Diploma in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
Becca Redden
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Becca is an MA student in the Media Studies program at Concordia University. She’s a filmmaker and organizer, focusing on uplifting under-heard stories in both documentary, narrative fiction, and through community programs. Her work centers around the ways to use media to talk about issues in social and environmental justice, representation, feminism, queerness, anti-racism, and access. She is currently developing a climate change impact map of Montreal, in order to explore ideas on environmental embodiment and the social justice implications of the future.
Naya Salamé
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Naya is an interdisciplinary Lebanese-Canadian artist, currently enrolled in Concordia University’s BFA in Performance Creation. She has recently moved to Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal from Beirut where she was a sexual and reproductive rights activist. As a feminist, she has been involved in projects concerned with the reshaping of public spaces for women and queer persons in Beirut. In her artistic practice, she is interested in exploring questions of hope, recovery and transformation in a violent, patriarchal, colonial world.
christian Scott
christian designs, researches, and implements participatory initiatives from a playful and justice-oriented perspective.
Their expertise intersects urbanism, sustainability/ecology, pedagogy, games, and technology.
They are the co-founder and Lead Design Researcher of Mutual Design, and a PhD candidate in the INDI program at Concordia University.christian is a member of HEXAGRAM, TAG (Technoculture, Art, and Games), and the Performative Urbanism Lab (PULSE).
Alex Tigchelaar
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As a multidisciplinary artist, activist, and former sex columnist for the Montreal Mirror, Alex has included her voice in the movement to decriminalize sex work for over twenty-five years. Alex is undertaking doctoral research at CISSC (Concordia) and investigates the political economies of cities, social semiotics, and the built environment Alex has held multiple research positions in academia, working on projects with the adult survivors of institutional violence, senior sex workers, and the organizers of safe consumption sites.
Alex’s PhD in HUMA is supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship.
Ella Williams
Ella is an undergraduate student finishing her BFA in Concordia’s Performance Creation specialization. Before she moved to Montreal she studied playwriting at The Theatre School at DePaul University where her works were performed at the Wrights of Spring Festival, as well at Playhouse NOLA in New Orleans. Her practice is especially informed by Chicago storefront theatre and the new play development work she was exposed at Chicago Dramatists. She is interested in immersive, site specific, interdisciplinary, and feminist theatre and theatre practices. She likes to consider herself a playwright and aspiring dramaturg and actor, and is also a classically trained cellist.