Faculty

Peter Dickinson (Contemporary Arts)—Director of IPS and Chair, IPS Steering Committee  

Professor in the Art, Cinema & Performance Studies (APCS) area in SFU's School for the Contemporary Arts, Peter Dickinson’s research investigates the time- and place-based relationships between audience and event across a range of aesthetic practices (including dance, film, theatre, and performance art) and social formations (from same-sex marriage to urban mega-events).  He is the author, editor, or co-editor of ten books and special journal issues, including: World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place and Politics (2010); Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (2014); Mega-Event Cities: Art/Audiences/Aftermaths (2016); Q2Q: Queer Theatre and Performance in Canada (2018); and My Vancouver Dance History: Story, Movement, Community. His essays have appeared in Dance Research Journal, Modern Drama, Screen, TDR: The Drama Review, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Survey, CinéAction, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, as well as numerous other journals and edited collections. Peter is also a playwright, and productions of his work include The Objecthood of Chairs (SFU Woodward’s, 2010), Positive ID (Berkeley Theatre, Toronto, 2012), Long Division [Part 1 / Part 2] (Pi Theatre, 2016/17), The Bathers (excerpt, Zee Zee Theatre, 2017), and At the Speed of Light (Pi Theatre, 2022).

Sasha Colby (Graduate Liberal Studies)

Sasha Colby's research asks how literary and visual modernism (1880-1950) can be newly explored, represented, and shared through the creation of theatre, literary nonfiction, and fiction. Her most recent book, Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism (McGill-Queen's UP, 2017; funded by SSHRC) uses performance scripts to critically investigate auto/biographical writing of the avant-garde within the social, political, and artistic currents of modernism. Sasha performs all twenty-five roles in the one-woman play about H.D. and has toured the performance in North America, Europe, and Asia. Past SSHRC-funded projects include Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson, a monograph on poetry and archaeology, and Voicing the Mosaic, a large-scale student/community installation and performance project on language and identity in Surrey. Sasha’s current work, funded by a 5-year Insight Grant (2020-2025), uses biographical fiction and literary non-fiction to explore modern photography’s collision with Hitler’s forced labour campaign, particularly through the lives of French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leica Camera heiress, Elsie Kühn-Leitz, and the forced labourers at the Leica factory in Wetzlar.

Lynn Fels (Education)

My research interests and field of expertise is in theatre/drama education, performative inquiry, performative writing, pedagogy, curriculum, instruction and evaluation.

My current research focuses on exploring leadership through the arts, arts and technology, arts for social change, and participatory action research. I conceptualized and articulated performative inquiry as a (re)search methodology for my doctoral work.

Faculty Profile | SFU Faculty of Education

Helen Leung (Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies)

Helen Hok-Sze Leung is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (UBC Press, 2008) and Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). She is a co-editor of the Queer Asia Book Series (Hong Kong UP) and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Routledge), Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP), and the Asian Visual Cultures Book Series (Amsterdam UP). Her current research projects include: (1) “The Sound of Queer Cinema,” a study of sonic issues in queer cinema; (2) “Vancouver as Asian City,” an examination of various trans-pacific itineraries in Vancouver’s urban culture; and (3) (co-authored with Audrey Yue) “Queer Asia As Method,” an exploration of the theoretical impact of Queer Asian knowledge.

Virginie Magnat (Interdisciplinary Performance, UBC Okanagan)

Dr. Virginie Magnat is Professor in Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her monograph Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women received the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honorable Mention. This book and companion documentary film series, featured on the Routledge Performance Archive (http://www.routledgeperformancearchive.com), constitute the first investigation of the artistic journeys and current artistic practices of women who collaborated with influential theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski. Magnat’s four years of embodied research and multi-sited fieldwork were supported by two SSHRC grants, and she discusses her interdisciplinary methodology in book chapters and articles published in North American and international scholarly journals in the fields of theatre and performance studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, sociology, qualitative inquiry, and literary criticism, in English, French, Polish, Italian, and Spanish. Her most recent book is The Performative Power of Vocality (Routledge, 2020, which offers a fresh perspective on voice as a subject of critical inquiry by employing an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach.

Coleman Nye (Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies)

Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. She earned a PhD in Performance Studies from Brown University. Her research and teaching works across the fields of  feminist science and technology studies, critical race and gender theory, theatre and performance studies, bioethics, disability studies, environmental politics, and anthropology of medicine and reproduction.

Celeste Snowber (Education)

Celeste Snowber, Ph.D. is a dancer, writer, poet and educator, who is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She has written and published over thirty essays in journals, and chapters in books, as well as numerous poems. Author of Embodied Prayer and co-author of Landscapes in Aesthetic Education, she is also finishing up several collections of poetry. She has focused her work in the area of embodiment, arts-based inquiry, holistic education, health education, curriculum studies and performative ways of writing, particularly through the body, and mentors a significant amount of graduate students exploring arts-based research methodologies. Celeste creates and performs as a solo dance artist in collaboration with other poets and musicians and continues to create/perform site-specific work in connection to the natural world. She has created and performed her full-length show of dance and comedy called, “Woman giving birth to a red pepper,” which she hopes to tour in the future. Her website can be found at www.celestesnowber.com and her blog at www.bodypsalms.com.