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Sessional Instructors & Lecturers

Norman Armour

Term Lecturer: Interdisciplinary

E: narmour@sfu.ca

Norman Armour is an alumni of the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. He founded Rumble Theatre in 1990 with Chris Gerrard-Pinker and directed acclaimed productions of Blackbird (2009), San Diego (2005), Soulless (2004), Hedda Gabler (2003), Designated Mourner (2003), Three in the Back, Two in the Head (2001), and War of the Worlds (2000). In 2003, he co-founded PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in 2003 with Katrina Dunn, and was Artistic and Executive Director until 2018, when he undertook a new role consulting for the Australia Council for the Arts. Armour received a Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, from the SFU Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology in 2019.

Bojan Bodruzic

Term Lecturer: Film

E: bojan_bodruzic@sfu.ca

Bojan Bodruzic was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and now resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. He holds a BFA in Film Production from Simon Fraser University and a Joint MFA in Film Production and Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.

Jessica Chambers

Term Lecturer: Theatre

E: jchamber@sfu.ca

Originally from Switzerland, Jessica Chambers started out as a freelance lighting and audio technician, working through to Equity Stage Management and then into Technical Direction, Production Management, and Producing. With now over 25 years of experience, her artistic practice is based on field work, which provides a unique teaching context. Over the years, Jessica has worked with the Arts Club Theatre, The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Co., The National Arts Centre, Canadian Stage, Touchstone, Theatre Replacement, NewWorld, Crystal Pite, Lola Mclaughlin, Movent, Action At A Distance, and many, many more. She spent 3 years with TBA Global Events, producing and executing corporate events internationally, and 10 years as the Technical Director at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts. Most recently, Jess turned her project management skills to building a house on Saltspring Island, with her partner and 2 children, where she now focuses on consulting and freelance Production Management. The recent addition of teaching has been an extremely rewarding one.

Joe Clark

Term Lecturer: Film

E: jec10@sfu.ca

Joseph Clark is an historian of film and visual culture, specializing in the history of documentary, newsreel, and non-theatrical films in United States and Canada. His book, News Parade: The American Newsreel and the Mediation of the Public Sphere, 1927-1945, will be published by University of Minnesota Press in Spring 2018. His new research focuses on the role of non-fiction film – including home movies, propaganda films, and documentaries – in the public and private memory of racism and civil rights. He is a Lecturer in film studies in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and has previously taught in Cinema Studies and American Studies at Colby College and Franklin and Marshall College.

josephclark.me

Shannon Cuykendall

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: scuykend@sfu.ca

Shannon Cuykendall is a dance artist, Certified Movement Analyst in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, and a PhD candidate at SFU’s School of Interactive Arts + Technology. Shannon utilizes artistic and scientific research methods to explore the transmission of dance mediated by technology. In 2017 she launched A Performer’s Perspective, an online interactive documentary that translates three dancers' experiences in Judith Garay's choreographic work, The Fine Line ~ twisted angels.

Shannon received her BFA in Ballet Pedagogy (2006) from the University of Oklahoma and her MFA in Dance (2011) from UC Irvine. She previously worked as a research assistant at UC San Diego’s Interactive Cognition Lab where she analyzed the cognitive practices of dancers in Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company. Her research in dance cognition has received international recognition and is published in the journal of Psychological Science and the Cognitive Science Society.

shannoncuykendall.wordpress.com | performersperspective.movingstories.ca

Janet Danielson

Course Supervisor: Music

E: jrd@sfu.ca

Janet Danielson is a composer whose works have been performed in England, the U.S., and Canada by ensembles ranging from the Vancouver Chinese Instrument Ensemble to the Vancouver Symphony and CBC Radio Orchestras. Her recent commissioned works include an opera, The Marvelous History of Mariken of Nimmigen, commissioned by Music in the Morning; The Occupation, a song collaboration with poet Robert Bringhurst, for baritone, marimba and viol da gamba; and In the Very Highest Place, a setting Wu Li’s poetry for chorus and the Orchid Ensemble (marimba, zheng, erhu) premiered November 2007. Her realization of Verbum Caro, a 17th-century Canadian Ursuline carol, was premiered in Rome at Christmas 2007, and a string quartet for the Royal Society of Canada Symposium on War and Peace in November 2008. She has taught courses related to music theory, analysis, music and culture, and composition at Simon Fraser University and at Regent College, and has authored a text, Basic Organization of Music. Her articles have been published in Musicworks and in the Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Composers’ League. Danielson is former Associate Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music and ChairAssociation of Canadian Women Composers, and has served on the Executive Council of the Canadian League of Composers. Current commissions include a work for string orchestra and erhu for Vancouver Pro Musica, for whom she is 2010 Composer-in-Residence, and a cello sonata for the 2010 Vancouver Music/Grail conference. She is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre.

Tanya Elchuk

Term Lecturer: Theatre

E: tanyaelchuk@gmail.com

Tanya Elchuk teaches Voice and Speech at Simon Fraser University and the Vancouver Film School. She holds an M.F.A. in Theatre and a Voice Teaching Diploma from York University, where she studied with David Smukler, and received a S.S.H.R.C. Canada Graduate Scholarship for her research on neuroscience and acting. As an artist, Tanya has written and performed original work throughout Canada and the United States.

Dani Fecko

Term Lecturer: Interdisciplinary

E: dfecko@sfu.ca

Dani Fecko has a long history working in contemporary theatre in Vancouver. She was Managing Producer of Boca del Lupo and spent four years as Associate Curator at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. Dani trained as a Stage Manager, working locally and taking shows on the road and more across North America, Europe and Mexico. Dani was on the host committee for WAA Vancouver 2015. She currently sits on the board of the Alliance for Arts and is on the development committee of ISPA. She is one of the 2016 – 2018 APAP Leadership Fellows. Dani is a graduate of Studio 58 and lives in Vancouver with her husband and their pet fish, Dash.

Martin Gotfrit

Course Supervisor / Professor: Music

E: gotfrit@sfu.ca

Areas: Music (electroacoustics, improvisation), Film (soundtrack), New Media (Interactive systems, coding for music, installations).

Studied electroacoustic music with Bengt Hambraeus, alcides lanza, and Kevin Austin. Before coming to SFU in 1981, musician, sound designer and worked in concert and theatre production. Often collaborating with artists from both music and other disciplines, works in music, dance, theatre, film/video, new media and installations have been presented both locally and internationally. Avid improviser.

Born Montreal, Quebec. Resident of Vancouver since 1977. Married with two children.

BA Music and Film Joint Major, Concordia University 1974
MA Communications, McGill University 1977

sfu.ca/~gotfrit

Tara Gallagher Harris

Term Lecturer: Theatre

E: tgh1@sfu.ca

Tara Gallagher Harris (PhD Student in Performance Studies at York University / MA in Performance Studies from Queen Mary University of London / BFA in Theatre Performance from Simon Fraser University) is a performance maker and academic based in Vancouver and Toronto. She is a member of performance group O, o, o, o. and is currently collaborating with Radix Theatre. Her work centres on research creation, new media, and belief, with a focus on immersive performance and its effect on audience and performer identity.

Su-­Feh Lee

Sessional Instructor: Theatre Performance

E: su-­‐feh_lee@sfu.ca

Lee Su-Feh is Artistic Director of battery opera. How this happened involved: Childrens’ Theatre with Janet Pillai, traditional Malay and contemporary dance with Marion D’Cruz in Malaysia, contemporary dance with Lari Leong in Paris, contact improvisation with Peter BIngham in Vancouver; and many years of Chinese martial arts with infuriatingly exacting teachers. Before coming to Vancouver in 1988, she lived in Paris, London, Indonesia and Malaysia.  She speaks 6 languages badly. In 1998, she won the Prix de Jeune Auteur of the Rencontres Choregraphiques Internationales de Seine-St. Denis for her work Gecko Eats Fly. In theatre, Su-Feh has worked as a choreographer with directors such as Marc Diamond, Donna Spencer and most recently DD Kugler and Steven Hill. She has been nominated twice for a Jessie Award. In 2012, her solo work The Whole Beast won the BOH Cameronian Award for Outstanding Choreography in Malaysia. In 2013 and 2014, she was awarded the Isadora Award and the Lola Award respectively, by the Dance Centre in Vancouver, in recognition of her contribution to the dance milieu through her work as choreographer, dancer, teacher, dramaturge and all-around shit disturber. In 1995, she co-founded battery opera with David McIntosh with whom she has been collaborating ever since she saw him lying, bleeding, in Kota Baru in 1985.

Margarida Maciera

Guest Artist: Dance

E:

Kenji Maeda

Term Lecturer: Interdisciplinary

E: kmaeda@sfu.ca

Kenji Maeda is the Executive Director of the Greater Vancouver Professional Theatre Alliance (GVPTA) and the artsVest B.C. Program Manager for Business for the Arts, which is a sponsorship training program for arts organizations across the province. He has had the opportunity to lead workshops and work with more than 100 arts organizations to strategize private sector partnerships within the arts. For five years he was the Executive Director of DOXA Documentary Film Festival. He has worked in film, TV, and theatre and is a Jessie Award recipient.

Stefan Maier

Term Lecturer: Music

E: stefan_maier@sfu.ca

Stefan Maier is an artist based in Vancouver, Canada. His compositions, installations, and performances, examine emergent and historical sound technologies. Highlighting material instability and unruliness, his work explores the flows of sonic matter through sound systems, instruments, software, and bodies, to uncover alternate modes of authorship and listening possible within specific technologically-mediated situations. Stefan works fluidly between contemporary classical music, sound art, experimental electronic music and installation. In 2017 he received a Mayor’s Art Award from the City of Vancouver and is a 2019 Macdowell Colony Fellow. He in a 2019 nominee for the Gaudeamus Prize in composition.

stefanmaier.studio

Billy Marchenski

Sessional Instructor: Theatre

E: wmarchen@sfu.ca

Billy Marchenski graduated from the Theatre program at Sfu in 2000. He was a founding member of the company Screaming Flea, which he started with fellow acting students. Screaming Flea existed for 8 years and produced original and rarely seen plays. The company was nominated for 5 Jessie Richardson awards for their play inspired by the lives of beat poets William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Billy was the recipient of the Sydney J. Risk prize for Outstanding original play for his piece "slowpoke," inspired by a visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion zone in 2011.

Deirdre Morgan

Sessional Instructor: Music

E: deirdre_morgan@sfu.ca

I hold a Ph.D in Ethnomusicology from SOAS, University of London (2017), an M.A. in Ethnomusicology (UBC 2008), and a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies (UBC 2006). My research focusses on the cultural study of musical instruments, multi-sited ethnography, historiography, music revival, and transnational subcultures and scenes.

My primary research project is an ethnographic study of jew’s harp revival communities based on multi-sited fieldwork in Norway, Austria, Sicily, and online. My work uses the jew’s harp to examine how musical instruments reflect changing tastes, technologies, and social identities, and how transnational music communities are changing radically in the digital age. This research was supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and a Research Scholarship from SOAS, University of London.

I am currently a sessional lecturer in music at Simon Fraser University and Vancouver Community College. My teaching interests include the music of sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora; the trans-Atlantic feedback cycle; music transnationalism through a global, post-colonial lens; exoticism, fusion, and appropriation; gender and sexuality; critical approaches to power and underrepresentation in academia and the music industry. Regions of specialization: West Africa, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, India, and Indonesia.

I serve on the Executive Committee of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and am the Book Notes editor for the Yearbook for Traditional Music. I have been a Board member with the International Jew's Harp Society since 2011 and previously served as Executive Director of the Jew's Harp Guild and the North American Jew's Harp Festival (2011 & 2012), and President of the SOAS Mouth Harp Society (2012-2015).

deirdremorgan.com

Lina Rodriguez

Term Lecturer: Film

E: lrodrigu@sfu.ca

 

Gurp Sian

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: gssian@sfu.ca

I am a Dancer, Musician, TV/Radio Host, Actor/Producer and the Executive Director of South Asian Arts Society. I’ve had the opportunity to participate in over a dozen international Bhangra competitions as a Bhangra dancer and play the Dhol drum at the JUNO Awards with Russell Peters and during the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. I continue to teach Bhangra & Dhol to adults and children at my own studio and at festivals, schools and universities across BC. In September 2010, my business partner Raakhi Sinha and I taught North America’s first ever University accredited Bhangra dance class at Simon Fraser University.

My organization, South Asian Arts Society, also produces theatre and comedy dance dramas. In 2009, The Georgia Straight voted ‘Bollywood Wedding’ as the “Best Outdoor Interactive Theatre Event” of the year.

Aside from performing arts, I co-host a popular TV show called “Punjabi Vibes“, which addresses pressing issues in the South Asian community via comedy sketches. I am also a Radio Host/Producer and Punjabi Music Director at Spice Radio. Monday – Friday from 5-7pm, I co-host a live sports talk show called “Gopi & the Gora” with my co-host Eddy (aka The Big E). Tune in!

My latest endeavour is a global percussion group called Sticks n’ Skins.

Kathy Slade

Term Lecturer: Visual Art

E: kslade@sfu.ca

Kathy Slade works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade has upcoming solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (2020), The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2022), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge (2022). Her recent solo exhibitions include: A Dream and a Drive (with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2019); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); I WANT IT ALL I WANT IT NOW, Walter C. Koerner Library, Vancouver (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London, UK (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: It’s Never Too Late to Speculate; Fluc, Vienna, AU (2019); Uses of History, studio e, Seattle, WA (2019); The Ashtray Show West, Belmacz Gallery, London, UK (2018); and Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver, BC (2018). Slade teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School.

www.kathyslade.com

Megan Walker-Straight

Term Lecturer: Dance

E: mwalkers@sfu.ca

Dancer and artist Megan Walker Straight was one of the few original cast members of The Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1980-1986. She had the opportunity to work alongside Merce himself, performing in multiple pieces, furthering her understanding of dance. She also danced with many prestigious dance companies in New York City, including Kenneth King, Douglas Dunn, and Lucinda Childs (“Merce Cunningham Trust”).

Neil Wedman

Term Lecturer: Visual Arts

E: nwedman@sfu.ca

Neil Wedman was born in Vancouver, Canada in 1954. Making paintings stands at the core of thirty years of studio practice, but he has devoted almost equal attention to producing drawings and works on paper including print editions, book-works and photographs. He has also made a number of short films and musical recordings although not many of the latter.

He lives and works in Vancouver and is represented there by the Equinox Gallery.

Neil Wedman has been a sessional instructor teaching studio courses for the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University since 2000 and at Emily Carr University since 1991.

neilwedman.com

Sophia Wolfe

Sessional Instructor: Dance

E: sophia_wolfe@sfu.ca

Adrienne Wong

Sessional Instructor: Theatre

E: agw10@sfu.ca

Adrienne Wong is Artistic Director of SpiderWebShow Performance, a company that interrogates the impact of digital disruption through art. She co-curates the Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA) with Michael Wheeler and Sarah Garton Stanley. Adrienne's work straddles theatrical and digital spaces. Particular interests are in developing new work and using theatre and engagement as a strategy to promote progressive change. She was the inaugural artist in residence for CBC Radio's q. Landline (co-created with Dustin Harvey) toured nationally and internationally in French and English. Me On The Map (co-created with JD Derbyshire) continues to be adapted for young citizen designers. Adrienne lives in Banff, Alberta, with her partner and two children.

www.spiderwebshow.ca | www.folda.ca

Teaching Assistants / Tutor Markers

Bader, Rahul – TA CA 341
Brazeau, Jean – TA CA 315
Buston, Marina – TA CA 250 & 350
Ching, Christian – TA CA 374
Clarke, Emily – TA CA 142 OLC
Cooper, Charlie – TA CA 104 OLC
Desentis, Rodriguez Karla – TA CA 270
Gamboa, Tin – TA CA 285
Ghamsari-Esfahani, Kourosh – TA CA 149
Ghosh, Aakansha – TA CA 160
Grassi, Alice – TA CA 318
Horrigan, Matt – TA CA 104, 145 & 245
Khakshoor, Somayeh – TA CA 130 & 186
Kong, Yani – TA CA 135
Lee, Wei-Hsin – TA CA 186
Leerink, Casper – TA CA 2/349 & 352
Liu, Xinyue – TA CA 2/362 & 2/369
Mander-Wionzek, Allison – TA CA 117
Mohamed, Doaa – TA CA 186
Patel, Mansi – TA CA 171 & 370
Postalian, Brian – TA CA 357W
Reimer Jami – TA CA 104 OLC
Rezwan, Mohammad – TA CA 135
strauss., ilvs – TA CA 170 & 470
Taslim, Israt – TA CA 135
Tham, Jennifer – TA CA 142 OLC
Valentine-Lewis, Andrea – TA CA 210W
Valenza, Olivia – TA CA 140
Woods, Meagan – TA CA 136
Yamada, Tomoyo – TA CA 127, 129
Yassine, Ghinwa – TA CA 152
Ybarra, Faune – TA CA 260 & 360
Yeo, Katie – TA CA 136
Yousefbigloo, Katayoon – TA CA 149
Zaurrini, Joey – TM CA 386 DE

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