ALLab PhD and MA students

Alejandra Jimenez

is an actress, artist and educator, developing her Ph.D. studies in Humanities in the Individualized program at Concordia University. She holds a B.A. in performing arts and an M.A. in theatre and live arts from the National University of Colombia. She is interested in creative, transformative and communal experiences that address critical intersectional concerns. Currently, she is a board member of Teesri Duniya Theatre. Editor and workshop facilitator at Kodama Cartonera. She is affiliated with Hexagram, Milieux-LeParc, COHDS, ALlab, and SenseLab-3e at Concordia University.

In the ALLab, Ale was part of the choir “A la escucha”, and research assistant in the projects: “Engaging performance audiences as listeners of a restorative justice process” and “Preventive health techniques for the performer of painful narratives”. www.alemiskag.com

Sue Proctor

has been clowning, performing and teaching in the arts for over thirty years. Creator of six original fringe theatre shows, Sue was a founding member of the Canadian Association of Therapeutic Clowns and co-founded the St. Boniface hospital clown program. Sue uses clowning to inform her work as a dramaturg, and in teaching drama to all ages and abilities. Sue is Co-Director of ‘Inclusion Arts’ in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Sue creates performances combining clown with storytelling and puppets. She is currently a PhD candidate with the INDI program, a facilitator with the Art Hives program at Concordia and was a Research Assistant for Luis Sotelo Castro last fall 2022. Her Master’s thesis is available online - “The Archetypal Role of the Clown as a Catalyst for Individual and Societal Transformation”

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 of Dr. Luis Sotelo in the Acts of Listening Lab.

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.

Joel Bernbaum

is an actor, director, playwright, journalist and the founding artistic director of Sum Theatre. Born and raised in Saskatoon, Joel is the only child of a Buddhist Mother and Jewish Father. He is a graduate of the Canadian College of Performing Arts and Carleton University, where he did his Master’s Thesis on Verbatim Theatre’s Relationship to Journalism. With Sum Theatre Joel created Saskatchewan’s first free professional live Theatre in the Park. To date, over 60,000 people have participated in Sum Theatre’s work. Joel’s produced plays include Operation Big Rock, My Rabbi (with Kayvon Khoshkam), Home Is a Beautiful Word and Reasonable Doubt (with Yvette Nolan and Lancelot Knight) and Being Here: The Refugee Project (with Michael Shamata). Joel is currently an interdisciplinary PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan, investigating the potential of theatre to strengthen cities. Luis Sotelo Castro is serving on Joel's advisory committee and Joel looks forward to the opportunity to visit the ALLab. Joel is grateful to be the first Urjo Kareda Resident from Saskatchewan and the first Trudeau Foundation Scholar from the U of S. Joel lives in Saskatoon with his 7-year old son, Judah.

Ana Vingeland (INDI Master)

Anna Vigeland recently began her MA with Concordia’s Individualized Program in Humanities, where she is developing research touching on performance, history, oral history, and translation. A former circus performer, she currently works by turns as a director, choreographer, performance writer, translator, and arts facilitator.

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).

Deniz Basar (PhD)

Deniz Başar is a theater researcher, award-winning playwright (in Turkish and English), and a puppetry artist. She is currently continuing her PhD in the Humanities program of Concordia University. She had her MA degree in Boğaziçi University’s Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History and graduated in 2014 with her MA thesis titled “Performative Publicness: Alternative Theater in Turkey After 2000s”. She contributed to the books Women and Puppetry: Critical and Historical Investigations (2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2020) with different aspects of her research. Her academic interests cover Middle Eastern contemporary theatre cultures, and puppetry and public sphere theories. Her PhD thesis looks into how contemporary theatre in Türkiye is shaped by the traditional performance forms of Türkiye, specifically the shadow puppetry form known as Karagöz. As of the oral historiograpy aspect of her PhD research, she will conduct in-depth interviews with women puppetteers/puppet makers of Türkiye who have innovated the theatre field of the country through their creative juxtapositions of traditional and international puppetry techniques on modern stages.

Manuela Ochoa

is an artist and a Humanities PhD student at Concordia University. She holds a Master's degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in History and Theory of Contemporary Art. She is the co-founder of the digital projects Oropéndola, arte y conflicto (now part of the Museum of Memory of Colombia) and Mirlo Podcast. Manuela was co-curator for the exhibit Feliza Bursztyn, Elogio de la chatarra at the Museo Nacional de Colombia and producer for BBC Radio’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul (In the studio).

Her research explores the possibilities of podcasts in the Colombian post-conflict scenario and their participatory potential so that the listening experience is not passive and unilateral but rather transformative and empowering.

Nisa Remigio

is an oral history performer, cultural facilitator, and INDI PhD student. Her research explores themes of identity and sense of belonging, memory, and place, walking as art, and performing in non-traditional performance spaces. Her PhD thesis, Santana Airfield: linking place, identity, and memories through performance, asks how an artistic, oral history-based audio walk can be used as a tool for connecting locals, visitors and immigrants with a place and engage them as participants in public debates concerning local development projects, and what role can a facilitated post-walk discussion play in this outcome.

Nisa’s collaboration with Dr. Sotelo-Castro began as a teaching assistant during PERC 464 Oral History Performance (2021) and continues presently with researching oral history performances linked to the subjects of transitional justice and listening.

Past PhD and MA students

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.

Adela Goldbard

is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Mexico City. She holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of Mexico (UNAM). She is currently a member of the National System of Artistic Creators of Mexico. With her work, Goldbard investigates how radical community performances can subvert the imposition of official narratives and how performances of violence and destruction can become aesthetic tools of resistance against power. She is especially interested in how collectively building, staging, and destroying has the potential to generate critical thinking and social transformation, and can help heal collective trauma. Goldbard’s practice draws on archival and field research, and brings together sculpture, video, photography, sound, text and traditional textiles, pottery, woodwork, and pyrotechnics. Her recent projects include: a pyrotechnic play for/with the Mexican community of La Villita in Chicago, commissioned by Gallery 400 (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2019-2020,) and a socially engaged art project for/with the P'urhépecha community of Arantepacua, commissioned by the XIV FEMSA Biennial (Michoacán, México, 2020). Goldbard’s doctoral investigation focuses on developing a Poetics of Violence: an interdisciplinary research-creation project proposing that the aesthetic potential—ritual, collective, affective—of violence, once torn from the dominant and colonizing discourse, can become a powerful tool for epistemic decolonization and liberation.

Amanda Gutiérrez

(b. 1978, Mexico City) Trained and graduated initially as a stage designer from The National School of Theater. Gutiérrez completed her MFA in Media and Performance Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently elaborating on the academic dimension of her work as a Ph.D. student at Concordia University. Gutiérrez has developed a set of pedagogical practices in over a decade of teaching in educational settings such as NYU Abu Dhabi, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Rutgers University. Gutiérrez, interest in sound studies and listening practices is reflected in collaborative initiatives as a board member in The World Listening Project, Red Ecología Acústica México and formerly in The Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology in Chicago.

Research proposal

The research project, "Walking inside the soundscapes of four immigrant Diasporas: a media study on place-making," focuses on the aural and cultural process of urban settlement by the Filipino immigrant diaspora in Montreal. The research will consider the practice of walking, storytelling, and media production as tools for collective and critical engagement. The project's essential questions are:
How can we listen and gather information to develop a collective research-creation? How can we create a collective experience of critical urbanism while listening and walking? How are the creative relations established between the artist/researcher and participants? How does the study of soundscapes bring innovative observations of immigrant settlements? How can immersive technology serve as a reflective tool of social interactions in the urban context?

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