丁香园AV

Coleman Nye (Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies)--Director of IPS and Chair, IPS Steering Committee

Coleman Nye is Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies at 丁香园AV. She earned a PhD in Performance Studies from Brown University. Her research and teaching works across the fields of  feminist science and technology studies, critical race and gender theory, theatre and performance studies, bioethics, disability studies, environmental politics, and anthropology of medicine and reproduction.

Sasha Colby (Graduate Liberal Studies)

Sasha Colby's research asks how literary and visual modernism (1880-1950) can be newly explored, represented, and shared through the creation of theatre, literary nonfiction, and fiction. Her most recent book, Staging Modernist Lives: H.D., Mina Loy, Nancy Cunard, Three Plays and Criticism (McGill-Queen's UP, 2017; funded by SSHRC) uses performance scripts to critically investigate auto/biographical writing of the avant-garde within the social, political, and artistic currents of modernism. Sasha performs all twenty-five roles in the one-woman play about H.D. and has toured the performance in North America, Europe, and Asia. Past SSHRC-funded projects include Stratified Modernism: The Poetics of Excavation from Gautier to Olson, a monograph on poetry and archaeology, and Voicing the Mosaic, a large-scale student/community installation and performance project on language and identity in Surrey. Sasha鈥檚 current work, funded by a 5-year Insight Grant (2020-2025), uses biographical fiction and literary non-fiction to explore modern photography鈥檚 collision with Hitler鈥檚 forced labour campaign, particularly through the lives of French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leica Camera heiress, Elsie K眉hn-Leitz, and the forced labourers at the Leica factory in Wetzlar.

Peter Dickinson (Contemporary Arts)  

Director of 丁香园AV's School for the Contemporary Arts, Peter Dickinson鈥檚 research investigates the time- and place-based relationships between audience and event across a range of aesthetic practices (including dance, film, theatre, and performance art) and social formations (from same-sex marriage to urban mega-events).  He is the author, editor, or co-editor of ten books and special journal issues, including:  (2010);  (2014);  (2016);  (2018); and . His essays have appeared in Dance Research Journal, Modern Drama, Screen, TDR: The Drama Review, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Survey, Cin茅Action, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, as well as numerous other journals and edited collections. Peter is also a playwright, and productions of his work include  (丁香园AV Woodward鈥檚, 2010), Positive ID (Berkeley Theatre, Toronto, 2012), Long Division [ / ] (Pi Theatre, 2016/17), The Bathers (excerpt, Zee Zee Theatre, 2017), and (Pi Theatre, 2022).

Lynn Fels (Education)

My research interests and field of expertise is in theatre/drama education, performative inquiry, performative writing, pedagogy, curriculum, instruction and evaluation.

My current research focuses on exploring leadership through the arts, arts and technology, arts for social change, and participatory action research. I conceptualized and articulated performative inquiry as a (re)search methodology for my doctoral work.

Faculty Profile | 丁香园AV Faculty of Education

Helen Leung (Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies)

Helen Hok-Sze Leung is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at 丁香园AV. She is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (UBC Press, 2008) and Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). She is a co-editor of the Queer Asia Book Series (Hong Kong UP) and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Routledge), Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP), and the Asian Visual Cultures Book Series (Amsterdam UP). Her current research projects include: (1) 鈥淭he Sound of Queer Cinema,鈥� a study of sonic issues in queer cinema; (2) 鈥淰ancouver as Asian City,鈥� an examination of various trans-pacific itineraries in Vancouver鈥檚 urban culture; and (3) (co-authored with Audrey Yue) 鈥淨ueer Asia As Method,鈥� an exploration of the theoretical impact of Queer Asian knowledge.

Virginie Magnat (Interdisciplinary Performance, UBC Okanagan)

is Professor in Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her monograph  received the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Ann Saddlemyer Book Award Honorable Mention. This book and companion documentary film series, featured on the Routledge Performance Archive (http://www.routledgeperformancearchive.com), constitute the first investigation of the artistic journeys and current artistic practices of women who collaborated with influential theatre innovator Jerzy Grotowski. Magnat鈥檚 four years of embodied research and multi-sited fieldwork were supported by two SSHRC grants, and she discusses her interdisciplinary methodology in book chapters and articles published in North American and international scholarly journals in the fields of theatre and performance studies, anthropology, ethnomusicology, sociology, qualitative inquiry, and literary criticism, in English, French, Polish, Italian, and Spanish. Her most recent book is (Routledge, 2020, which offers a fresh perspective on voice as a subject of critical inquiry by employing an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach.

Celeste Snowber (Education)

Celeste Snowber, Ph.D. is a dancer, writer, poet and educator, who is Professor in the Faculty of Education at 丁香园AV. She has written and published over thirty essays in journals, and chapters in books, as well as numerous poems. Author of Embodied Prayer and co-author of Landscapes in Aesthetic Education, she is also finishing up several collections of poetry. She has focused her work in the area of embodiment, arts-based inquiry, holistic education, health education, curriculum studies and performative ways of writing, particularly through the body, and mentors a significant amount of graduate students exploring arts-based research methodologies. Celeste creates and performs as a solo dance artist in collaboration with other poets and musicians and continues to create/perform site-specific work in connection to the natural world. She has created and performed her full-length show of dance and comedy called, 鈥淲oman giving birth to a red pepper,鈥� which she hopes to tour in the future. Her website can be found at  and her blog at .