MONTREAL EXPERTS

Adil is a theatre director and educator centering the stories of queer folks and people of color. Directing projects include Gloria by  Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Hatch Arts), Chickens in the Yard by Paul Kruse (Hatch Arts and Quantum Theatre), Desdemona’s Child by Caridad Svich (Carnegie Mellon University), Dark Play or Stories for Boys by Carlos Murillo (Carnegie Mellon University) and an upcoming ensemble generated piece with Pittsburgh Playhouse. Adil’s is currently developing Amm(i)gone, a solo performance adapting Sophocles’s Antigone as an apology to and from his mother. Amm(i)gone is National Performance Network (NPN) Creative and Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Kelly Strayhorn Theater, The Theater Offensive, and NPN.   

Adil has developed and directed new work through NYU, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, and PearlArts Studio. He is a founding member and resident director with Pittsburgh’s Hatch Arts Collective. As an educator, Adil has worked with Sarah Lawrence College, Point Park University, Middlebury College, The Mori Art Museum, The Andy Warhol Museum, and was the Programs and Artistic Director for Dreams of Hope, an LGBTQA+ youth arts organization in Pittsburgh for over 5 years. He is an alumnus of DirectorsLabChicago and Quantum Theatre’s Gerri Kay New Voices program. He is a 2050 Directing Fellow with NYTW for the 2020-2021 season. Adil received his MFA in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University.

Scott is a multimedia artist, working in video, installation, performance, and new media, with a current focus on media/sound design, production, and curation of performance works for stage. These works center around queer futurity, divas and gay icons, LGBTQ+ histories and mythologies, and tensions between the celebrity image and the physical body. These themes take the form of curatorial projects like ‘TQ Live!’, a multidisciplinary variety performance at the Andy Warhol Museum, presented with Suzie Silver and Joseph Hall, ‘Fail-Safe’, a performance series organized with Angela Washko to present works-in progress in a safe space for failure and audience feedback. Artistic collaborations include ‘I Am a Haunted House’, an improvisational movement and projection work as part of the Kelly Strayhorn’s Freshworks Residency, with dancer Jesse Factor, and ‘The Diva Saga: The Legend of the Worst Drag Queen’, a multi-channel mediated one-woman drag performance, with Veronica Bleus (John Musser). These works are speculative fantasies that share in questioning constructions of sexuality, gender, and identity in a digital age, while peering through portals into other worlds, voids, and vortices.

Mishelle is a Vancouver based composer and sound designer whose work is centred around the integration of sound, music, and storytelling. She has an MFA in Musical Theatre Composition from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a BFA in Acting from UBC.

Since gathering restrictions began in March of 2020, Mishelle has been fortunate to find multiple opportunities to make music safely - both through digital streaming work, and socially distant outdoor performances when possible. She has learned a great deal about audio storytelling through this time, and is deeply invested in continuing to find ways to make sound and music accessible through this challenging time.

Some recent projects include Good Things To Do - a digital storytelling experience through text and sound, The Quarantettes - a live and recorded project of poetry set to music, and Made in Canada - an EP of vibrant music written using the verbatim words of Latinx migrant farm workers. Mishelle is a multiple Jessie Award winner and nominee.

In addition to writing music, Mishelle enjoys painting, listening to podcasts, and riding her bicycle.

Emily Soussana is an award winning video and production designer based out of Tiotia:ke (Montreal). They are a graduate of The National Theatre School of Canada's scenography program, the University of Ottawa's Theatre program and spent time as a projection technologist at The Banff Centre. They are the co-founder of potatoCakes_Digital, a multimedia design and technical Integration company. Over the course of the pandemic they’ve pivoted their focus to more pedagogical projects. In 2020 they co-created the Level Up symposium and are currently working with Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal as a digital dramaturg.

Lauren is a social media marketer from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada who now lives in Toronto, Ontario, and works for organizations across the globe.

Lauren has two careers: one as a social media marketer and the other as a theatre artist. She has been working in social media for eight years, starting with launching the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram profiles of a theatre company she was working for at the time. Little did she know that this was going to change her life! Lauren now has experience working with every type of business from one-person-shows to multinational corporations.

Lauren’s purpose is to help companies and individuals realize their goals with their online presence while relieving them of guilt! Running your business is not the same as running your social media, so she wants to find a way to fit your online presence into the rest of your work to keep you and your business thriving and filled with passion!

Lauren’s Website

Shauna is a Montreal based urban curator with a background in professional theatre practice and performance studies. She is working at the intersections of site-responsive, critical, spatial, interdisciplinary, and socially engaged art practices. Shauna is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre, and affiliate in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, Montreal, where she also holds a University Research Chair in Performative Urbanism (new scholar, 2018-2023). She is currently undertaking research in the field of expanded scenographic practices, environmental performance, and concepts such as spatial dramaturgy and performative urbanism.  Since 2018 Shauna has been the Director of the Institute for Urban Futures.

Within the context of urban change, in her curatorial practice Shauna often works with artists to create site responsive performances, interventions, installations, and collaborative community projects. Her projects often involve long-term documentary and site-specific research projects. In her practice Shauna asks how critical curation can be a mode of intervention in the urban realm, and how neighbourhoods in transition might be active collaborators, with artists, in the surfacing of significant pasts, sublimated political positions, and forms of cultural agency, including the agencies of the built environment itself.  Shauna works with oral history, post humanist thought, feminist and queer theory to rethink sites, discourses, and themes such as spatial agency, the public sphere, gender, class, race, gentrification and the right to the city.  Her ongoing research addresses the cultural politics of postindustrial urban spaces, and the role of art/ists in creating politically engaged communities in these spaces. In 2010, Shauna founded Urban Occupations Urbaines, a curatorial platform for artists, communities and the public to creatively and critically engage with cities and urban change. In Montreal, Shauna has collaborated with La Fonderie Darling, the Griffintown Horse Palace Foundation, Heritage Montréal, Centaur Theatre, Montréal Arts Interculturel, Le Corridor culturel de Griffintown, Le Sud-Ouest de Montréal, Parks Canada, and the Centre d’histoire de Montréal. She is a founding member and formerly co-director of Points de vue, a Montreal based community-engaged art, research, and urban activist platform. Shauna has given public lectures and presentations at cultural institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Ephemeral City, 2010),  Articule (“Would you be my curator?” 2012), and The McCord Museum (City Talks, 2013). Shauna has also created and staged collaborative site responsive works and installations in Quebec, Germany, Australia, Italy, Chile, and New Zealand.

Alain Mercieca is a writer and director living in Montreal. His plays, literature and films have received critical acclaim over the past decade. He is the former Artistic Director at Theatre Sainte-Catherine and still spends much of his time teaching, performing and staging plays at this historic theatre in downtown Montréal.

He has written for Assassin's Creed Origins & Valhalla. His projects DéPFLIES, CAFé CAFé and OGOKI NIGHTS were all very well received across various mediums and are currently in various stages of development and distribution.

Working mostly in truly creative ways to inspire great stories and create lasting, memorable human emotion that embrace and criticize the monster of humanity.

HEIST is a live art company committed to creating, producing and presenting innovative, genre-bending and queerly playful performances in Halifax and beyond. An important element to our organization is having a clear and strong commitment to diversity within culture, abilities and gender.

HEIST is the brainchild and new creative platform for theatre director/singer/performer Richie Wilcox and musician/theatre designer/performer Aaron Collier. Together, the two partners-in-crime are responsible for the creation of many recent popular shows including The Princess Show, NATION, and New Waterford Boy.

Heist has recently had the complete privilege of welcoming Sylvia Bell onto the team as our Managing Director. This trio could not be happier.

The company is actually the rebirth and takeover of Halifax’s long-running Angels & Heroes Theatre, co-founded in 2002 by Tara Patriquin, Heather Davis-Fisch and Richie Wilcox, making it a true manifestation of its namesake.

HEIST’s website