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.   

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. 

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

Pablo Gershanik 

is an actor, clown, director, and university lecturer whose work blends performance, metaphor, and memory. He created the Intimate Maquettes Lab, an artistic and therapeutic tool showcased in museums, universities, and institutions in Canada, France, Argentina, Mexico, the UK, the US, and Belgium. Trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq (Paris), he holds a Master’s in Dramatherapy from the University of Paris and is pursuing a PhD in Arts at Concordia University (Montreal) under Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro. He is a 2025–2028 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar. 

He teaches at the National University of San Martín (UNSAM, Argentina), where he also directed the Diploma in Mask Making and Interpretation. His research and teaching span Argentina, France, Mexico, and Canada. 

Pablo has performed with Cirque Éloize and currently with Daniele Finzi Pasca’s 52. He has directed over twenty stage productions, including Canterville (Javier Villafañe Prize) and The Fibonacci Project, co-directed with Samuel Tétreault of Les Sept Doigts de la Main. He has collaborated with Philippe Genty, Gare Central, and Tchaïka. His writings appear in Trauma-Informed Placemaking (Routledge, 2024) and Art & Thérapie (INECAT, 2023).

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.

Sara Lucas 

is a composer-performer, educator and PhD student in the INDI program at Concordia University whose arts-based research creates original musical works as a form of civic engagement aimed at repairing our social fabric. With her former music ensembles, LADAMA and Callers, she has co-composed and co-produced five albums of original music and toured internationally as an independent artist for almost two decades. A 2025 Vanier Scholar, 2018 TED Speaker and 2014 OneBeat Fellow, she has presented her work at Carnegie Hall Education, Joe’s Pub, NPR Tiny Desk, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She has designed open-source, culturally relevant music curriculum that is used in K-5 classrooms across the United States. Lucas is developing a methodology for rendering and performing cultural memory as part of a collaborative, mixed community/academic oral history, research-creation process. With this arts-based approach, she will explore how community music practices in her hometown of University City, Missouri were historically developed to innovate teaching and learning music in the public schools.     

 As a research assistant for Dr. Sotelo Castro’s project, “Llamado y Respuesta: ¿Quién escucha a Cesar Lasso?”, she helped develop a collaborative research praxis that centers choral music as a participatory art process that centers choral music as a participatory art process that aids in performing listening in transitional justice settings. 

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.

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”

Franklin R. Bonivento van Grieken 

As the son and grandson of Indigenous Wayuu women and the son of a Jewish father, his academic journey centers on understanding and communicating his roots. Drawing from the stories he grew up with, he explores Caribbean histories, Wayuu cosmovision, oralities, migrations, frontiers, and musicology. His work spans academic writing, creative storytelling, and, since 2015, radio and podcasting (). He holds an Honours degree in Anthropology (2019) and a Master’s in History (Cum Laude, 2022) from the National University of Colombia. He is currently a second-year PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University in Montreal, and a member of the Oralities Cluster of the Hemispheric Encounters Network (HEN) and the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS). 

The ALLab is a good space for his work because it is a creative environment where his current research resonates with the possibilities of exploring the relationship between oral history, music, and storytelling. It offers a stimulating space to think and create .

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.

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).

Vanessa Terán Collantes 

is a socially engaged artist and visual anthropologist from Ecuador.  A teacher in the Photography Minor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. She works with photography, video, and oral history through collaborative, community-centered practices that explore belonging, migration, and territory. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Humanities at Concordia University, where she is co-supervised by Luis Carlos Sotelo. Her research builds on Sucúa Haven, a ethnofiction project created with Ecuadorian migrants in Connecticut during her 2023 Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellowship at Yale. Influence by Boal, this project, participants staged memories, alternative lives, and imagined futures to reflect on transnational experiences of place-making. 

At Concordia, Vanessa expands this work through the anthropology of the senses and deepening its exploration with performance, oral history and the anthropology of the imagination.

Anna Vigeland 

is a PhD student in Concordia’s INDI program, where her FRQSC-supported research is driven by overlapping interests in oral history, circus and other performance histories, memory, translation, and research-creation. Her approach also draws on close to 20 years working in circus – as a performer and later as a choreographer, dramaturgy collaborator, cultural worker, and translator. Drawn to experimentation and crossovers between genres, she has also co-devised and presented interdisciplinary performance collaborations in Bulgaria, Serbia, Norway, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, the US, and Québec. Fascinated by intersections between oral history and live performance, she’s thrilled to be a student affiliate of the ALLab.