My artistic voice has been shaped in three key ways:

The first part is the fact that I have moved around so much in my life. I have explored the better part of North America, seeing the various iterations of people from all walks of life. Interacting with people with different abilities and experiences from legitimately all over the world has pushed me to see the global implications of theatre. The politics and the decisions that people make based upon where they come from is something that I love to bring a voice to as a director. The gift of having a college degree in political science has given me some key insights to discuss and meaningfully enact political change through theatre, something that I find myself continually drawn to as a director. When given a choice in topic to bring to life or help create, I will always choose to be involved in shows that push social boundaries, call for political change, or shake up old standards of theatre.

The second part is the passion has come in more recent years with a discovery of my sexuality. Seeing a lack of women in live theatre roles has always been frustrating, but seeing women and female presenting people being excluded from the queer community as well has become extremely frustrating. While queer people are regularly getting more stage and television presence, there has always been a lack of queer women and non-binary people in theatre, something I am working to change. I’m interested in doing new and exciting works with queer characters, along with breathing new life into older pieces. My desire to bring more women into classical theatre has given me the passion of “queerifying” these pieces with lesbian or queer relationships, particularly in texts that were written by female playwrights as they are already “queer” for their time. My MFA work directing The Beau Defeated by Mary Pix did just this, bringing a play by a female playwright from the Restoration era to a modern stage and creating a bisexual-female focused love story at the centre of the hijinks. Exploring Early Modern or Restoration comedies by focusing through a new lens, mine being the queer, political, feminist lens, lends itself to truly letting theatre artists explore their own knowledge about theatre and play roles that otherwise have been strictly limited in the binary of “for men” or “for women”.

The final thing that has impacted me as an artist has been my work with Indigenous peoples, specifically Anishinaabe storytelling traditions. While I am not Indigenous and am in fact a French-Canadian settler scholar, my time in high school growing up on Robinson Huron & Robinson Superior Unceded Territories drastically impacted the scholar and director I have become and wish to become. Seeing MMIW posters go up of girls in my high school, finding bodies on the local university grounds, hearing truth spoken from my friends’ grandparents about the 60s scoop, I want to create theatre that speaks truth and includes people from all walks of life, from as many abilities and languages as possible. One of my goals as a creative is to create theatre that is multilingual, and while I am not yet fluent in French and Anishinaabe, my hope is to continue to collaborate with other creatives who are fluent to create powerful theatre. Whether this is through creating multi-lingual theatre, creating a translation of a piece of theatre (a la Les Belle-Soeurs), or getting the opportunity to work with directors who are entrenched in the French-Canadian or Indigenous communities I am excited to work on these types of shows. Learning from elders is something I deeply respect and is a key part of my foundation as a director.

Overall, my voice has been impacted by the wider world that I have experienced as a student and scholar giving me a very global perspective, but also my voice has been impacted by deeply personal issues tied to my own identity and the pain that my friends and found family has gone through generationally. This is why I turned away from acting and am focused instead on directing. I feel it is my duty to share my own vision, but also to be truthful of what a playwright intends. The director leads the room to success. And while a director does not need to be in love with every project they undertake, there does have to be respect and passion in some way for the project or the rest of the team will feel that lack.