ALLab Research assistants

Koby Rogers Hall

is an artist, writer and social practice facilitator dedicated to dialogical arts practices, archiving as cultural activism, and public interventions for political engagement. She has facilitated durational multi-stakeholder arts activist projects with the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, the Politics & Care project, and the tactical media Living Archives with the collective PreOccupations. Her performance interventions have been seen in theatres, warehouses, artist-run centres, street demos, and outdoor landscapes across the Americas. She currently teaches in the departments of Theatre and School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia.

Her PhD in Humanities supports her ongoing research-creation in migrant justice in social arts practices, with considerations for performance in conflict zones, critical curatorial strategies and trauma in social movements. Koby continues building on her multi-year relationships with im/migrant worker-led campaigns, arts activism and migrant justice organisers across the continent. She integrates this with her commitment to radical mothering, collective care practices, and community liberatory projects.

Koby's research-creation thesis is currently supported by a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship, and has benefitted from a Social Justice Fellowship (Concordia's Social Justice Centre), and the Miriam Aaron Roland Fellowship in Humanities. She has recently presented research-creation interventions at the Social Justice Fellows seminar series (Concordia university), the PhD symposium A phenomenology of Misfits: Discrepancies Between Body and World (Greenwich University, UK), and at the Acts of Listening Lab where she was generously hosted in residency with co-creator and performance artist Inti Barrios Hernández (Tehuacán, Mexico). She is a member-at-large of the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research group, of UQAM's Chaire de recherche du Canada en sociologie des mouvements sociaux, and continues to work with ALLab's Dr. Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro on the SSHRC-funded research project: Oral History Performance, Listening and Transformative Justice (2021-ongoing).

Seluna Fernandez

Bachelor’s degree, Fine Arts in Design and Art History from Concordia University. My main interest lie in designing for print and web. I am passionate about telling stories with the images I capture. As a woman designer, I’m constantly wondering how my creations are shaped by the cultural values of the society to which I belong. I define myself as feminist, as a person that cares about human and others beings. As designer, I want my work to both convey my own values and challenge some common assumptions regarding gender. I believe that design may be employed to bring about societal changes, and for this reason my creations are a reflection of my values: equality, respect of nature, and community engagement.

Diego López

is a philosopher with an MA from the Catholic University of Peru (PUCP). He is also a scriptwriter, playwright, actor and theatre director. As an actor, he performed in Peruvian plays like Los Cachorros (M. Vargas Llosa), Padre Nuestro (M. de Althaus), ¿Quieres estar conmigo? (A. Cabada and R. Ángeles) and Dos para el camino (C. De María). He has directed over fifteen plays, including Golosina, Sabotaje (Otras A-puestas Festival Award 2006), Karaoke, La Cantante Calva, Madrugada, Números Reales (PROART PUCP Award 2015), Night Club Bilderberg, La Rebelión de Los Conceptos, and Pana Call Center. Most of these plays were created through collective work. In 2017, he was selected for the VII International Seminar of Dramaturgy Panorama Sur in Buenos Aires. With Peruvian film director Fernando Villarán, he co-wrote Viejas Amigas’s screenplay, which won the Feature Film Project Competition of the Ministry of Culture 2019 (to be released in September 2023). In addition, he has taught Philosophy, Ethics and Academic Research courses. He is currently a student in the Humanities Ph.D. program at Concordia University and a research assistant in the project Oral History Performance, Listening and Transitional Justice.

His research-creation project analyzes Testimonial Theatre as an embodied tool for social transformation. He will try to answer how Testimonial Theatre can guide audiences to search their origins to review their conceptions of masculinity and, eventually, transform them. To do it, he is creating a testimonial play, Find the River, where he performs his testimonies around the search and finding of his maternal grandfather. The play will reflect on the value of searching for our origins and constructing new masculine identities in a Peruvian middle-class context. In parallel, he analyzes the transformations of the performer’s ‘self’ in a testimonial play as a process that facilitates the performer-spectator dialogue.

Past research assistants

Veronica Mockler

Canadian artist Veronica Mockler is a researcher, creator and facilitator of participatory dialogue-based projects that transform the act of listening to others into an art form. Politically collaborative, her work takes on various shapes, including private interviews, public addresses, video performances, and conversation scores. Her pieces have unfolded within diverse settings, spanning from curated art spaces to official governmental bodies, as well as academic institutions and community organizations. Drawing on oral history, the documentary tradition, and radical working-class popular education, her approach encourages us to challenge not just who is granted the opportunity to speak, but also who is genuinely heard within the institutions of art, citizenship, and knowledge. The artist is currently working as a core research affiliate at Concordia University with UNESCO-PREV co-chair Dr. Vivek Venkatesh.

Alana DeVito

is a musician, composer, sound designer and interdisciplinary artist studying electroacoustics and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal. Their career as a touring and studio musician spans well over 10 years, multiple countries and numerous instruments, and has now expanded into new forms and new collaborations in digital arts, experimental composition and improvised performance. In creative A/V installations, compositions and performances, the weaving of ‘virtual kinetic’ soundscapes through vibrant, textural worlds take center stage while unique, sonic architecture project sweeping narratives. Creative computing intertwines immersive environments while blurring the line between the aural and visual sonic space. Earlier this year, Alana’s audiovisual composition, Vacillations was presented at the New York City Electroacoustic and Computer Music festival and their score for the short-animated film Something Else has premiered at numerous film festivals around the world.

Alana is the co-coordinator, resident musician and sound designer at the lab, and is currently working on the score for the Restorative Justice Project, while researching the intersections of musicology and generative soundscapes in installation work. Alana is an experienced audio mixer for live and recorded work, with a specialization in multichannel diffusion.

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