Areas:

Patti is committed to theatre in education, and directs theatre for young people at the Vancouver Youth Theatre, and is a Drama Artist in Residence for the Vancouver School Board. She has adjudicated numerous theatre festivals. In addition to teaching at SFU School for the Contemporary Arts, she has taught for the Arts Club Summer Musical Theatre Intensive, The Emily Carr School of Design for Film students, The Vancouver Playhouse Community Outreach Program, and has lead acting workshops for film maker’s for Praxis and Cineworks.

Bio:

Patti Allan is one Vancouver’s best known actors with a career that spans film, television and theatre. A graduate of the Simon Fraser’s School for the Contemporary Arts, she is a "many time" Jessie nominee, and 4 time recipient of Jessie Richards Award for her roles in Theatre in Vancouver.

Patti Allan has appeared numerous in film, T.V. and theatre productions, locally and across the country and has performed in cartoon voiceover projects, and on several radio drama’s for CBC radio.

Patti also sings with the Swing Sisters, a swing/jazz girl group that performs in and around Vancouver.

Patti Allan in IMDB

Areas:

Screenwriting, filmmaking.

Bio:

Ric Beairsto is an award-winning screenwriter, director and producer who has written more than a dozen feature-length screenplays, and whose TV writing credits begin with The Beachcombers for CBC and extend to Mixed Blessings for APTN, where Ric was the Creator and Head Writer.  Ric has also written, directed and produced extensively in the area of nonfiction film, including both one-hour and documentary series for CBC, Knowledge, Global and Bravo!

Ric has taught screenwriting on a part-time basis at various post-secondary institutes, including the Vancouver Film School, SFU, Trinity Western University, Langara College, Emily Carr University of Art + Design and UBC, where he has actively workshopped more than 1500 short screenplays.  He is the author of THE TYRANNY OF STORY: Audience Expectations and the Short Screenplay, a book that has been used as a textbook in over a dozen North American film schools, including UCLA and the American Film institute.

Website: 
www.laughingmountain.ca

Degrees: 
B. Ed, U of A
MAA, ECUA+D

Areas:

Lisa is a Linklater trained voice teacher and studied with David Smukler at York University.   She is also on faculty with Canada’s National Voice Intensive and teaches a voice-over component in the University of British Columbia’s BFA theatre program.

Bio:

Lisa has been a sessional instructor in the theatre department since 1997.  She teaches both second and third year voice and speech and has also taught first year acting. 

Outside of the classroom Lisa has gained a reputation as one of the Vancouver’s leading dialect coaches and can often be found on any one of Vancouver’s numerous film and TV sets.  As a voice-over artist she can be heard in numerous animation series and commercials. She has been integral in developing a new project within Canada’s National Voice Intensive, complementing its 25-year successful history.  This new project saw her direct Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in 2011 and David Hare’s The Bay at Nice in 2010.

Areas:

She is interested in examining the discursive constitutions of public spaces and in subverting everyday interaction with these spaces through the embodied interactions. She is currently researching the potential of interstitiality as an instance of non-definition, which, as such, remains non-identified because it is situated in between what has been delimitated. 

Bio:

Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte is a recent graduate of Concordia University’s Studio Arts Program and has moved from Montreal to Vancouver to pursue an MFA degree at Simon Fraser University. She is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who accomplishes interventionist performances in public spaces and plays with the documentation of these actions to create visual installations. 

She is the co-founder of MAAM, a Montreal-based art dissemination company, that published the artists’ book Lettres/Letters in October 2010. Recently, she co-curated the exhibition Furtive Conundrum at the 1612 Gallery, Vancouver, with Ryan Mathieson.

Areas:

Performance Studies

Bio:

Peter Dickinson is a Professor in the English Department at SFU. Although trained as a literary critic, he now works primarily in the interdisciplinary field of performance studies. This means that in addition to having published widely on theatre, dance, and film, he has also conducted research on the performance and politics of same-sex marriage, civic memorials and the protocols of public mourning, and the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics. His most recent book is World Stages, Local Audiences: Essays on Performance, Place, and Politics (Manchester University Press, 2010). He has also recently begun to write for the stage; The Objecthood of Chairs, a collaboration with Contemporary Arts faculty, students, and recent graduates, premiered at SFU Woodward's in September 2010. Currently President of the Board of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival Society, Peter also blogs regularly about Vancouver performance at performanceplacepolitics.blogspot.ca.

Degrees and Studies:
B.A., University of Toronto
M.A. and Ph.D., University of British Columbia

Links:
www.sfu.ca/~ped
performanceplacepolitics.blogspot.ca

Areas:

Theatre - Acting, Directing, Theatre History, New Plays
Classical Mythology - Greek Tragedy, Homer

Bio:

Bill Dow is an award winning actor and director and occasional writer in theatre , film, and television, with scores of credits over a long and varied career.  Dow has directed and performed in several award-winning productions.  He served as Associate Artistic Director at the Vancouver Playhouse, Blyth Festival and Belfry Theatre, and resident dramaturg at the Banff Playwrights Colony.

Areas:

Desirée recently received a MFA in choreography and performance at the School of Dance at the University of Arizona, Tucson.  Her Graduate Concert, The Astro Dance Project was presented at UA Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium.  Desirée is honoured to have been a dancer in Judith Garay’s repertory company Dancers Dancing since 1998 and has performed in over twenty new works by various distinguished choreographers from across the country.  She has also had the pleasure of dancing with companies Mascall Dance and Wen Wei Dance with whom she toured throughout Canada and as far away as Columbia, South America.  While in Vancouver, Desirée has originated various community dance projects in collaboration with Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre including Startdance, training and performance ensemble and annual cultural and contemporary showcases LINK and The Connecting Community Dance Series.

Photo credit photographer: David Cooper with permission from Dancers Dancing

Bio:

Areas:

Contemporary modern dance, choreography, voice and movement, Ashtanga Yoga.

Bio:

Shauna Elton has been active in the dance community for 20 years. She is an independent choreographer, modern dance teacher and rehearsal director. For 7 years she was a senior dance artist and resident choreographer with Le Groupe Dance Lab (Artistic Director Peter Boneham)based in Ottawa. As a company member she has worked and performed with numerous acclaimed artists from across Canada and abroad. Her choreographic works have been showcased in the Canada Dance festival, Dance in Vancouver, the Ottawa council for the Arts, Dances for a small stage, 12 minutes max, and the Studio A series at Le Groupe Dance lab. She also teaches professional and pre-professional classes in Vancouver. She is a certified yoga instructor having studied traditional Ashtanga yoga in Thailand and India. She is currently studying holistic nutrition part time at the Institute of Holistic Nutrition in Vancouver, and is a full time mother of two.

Degree and Studies:
Graduated with a BA Honors in Dance From the University of Winnipeg in affiliation with Winnipeg Contemporary Dancers. Is a Certified RYT-200 Yoga instructor, Yoga Thailand.

Areas:

Film studies; Canadian cinema; Exhibition Studies and the History of Film Technologies

Bio:

In addition to sessional teaching in Film Studies at Simon Fraser, Peter Lester is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of British Columbia.

He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from Concordia University in Montreal, where he taught a variety of courses in film and media studies for three years prior to moving to Vancouver.  He has published widely on the history of film in Canada, with a particular focus on 16mm and alternative screening environments. His most recent publications have dealt with Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, and contemporary IMAX technology (both forthcoming).

Degree and Studies:
B.A., History – The University of Guelph
M.A., Canadian Studies – Carleton University
Ph.D., Communication Studies – Concordia University
Postdoc, Film Studies – The University of British Columbia

Areas:

Dance critic, historian and essayist

Bio:

Kaija Pepper’s fourth book, the co-edited anthology Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s, was published in 2012 by Dance Collection Danse. Her criticism and essays appear in newspapers, magazines and journals, including The Walrus, Queen’s Quarterly, the Globe and Mail, Dance International (where she has a column on Vancouver dance) and at thedancecurrent.com. Kaija recently edited a series of booklets on criticism and aesthetics for The Dance Centre, available online at thedancecentre.ca/publications. The latest – Dance Aesthetics: The Significance of Space – will be launched in January 2013.

Degree and Studies:
BA, Communication Arts, Concordia University; MA, Liberal Studies, Simon Fraser University.

Areas:

Theatre, Performance

Bio:

Raina Von Waldenberg recently moved to Vancouver after having been full-time faculty at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she taught a physical approach to acting based on the work of Jerzy Grotowski at the Experimental Theatre Wing for the past 17 years.

Founder of the Center for Embodied Performance Raïna has taught workshops in the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. Trained under Stephen Wangh and Ryszard Cieslak (Jerzy Grotowski’s principal actor and protégée), Raïna served as research assistant and editor for Stephen Wangh’s book An Acrobat of the Heart: A physical approach to acting inspired by the work of Jerzy Grotowski, published by Vintage Press. A performer in the downtown NYC experimental theatre scene for the past 13 years, Raïna has recently been nominated for the New York Innovative Theatre Award for her Outstanding Solo Performance in Oysters Orgasms Obituaries produced at La MaMa E.T.C. in December 2011. She has worked closely with director Zishan Ugurlu as principal actor in other productions at La MaMa E.T.C., including The Father, Request Programme, and The Last Supper, as well as Enescu and Youth (WFMT Live Radio Network/Romanian Culture Institute).