Research

In 2017, I was sitting in the office of a professor, nervous and sleep deprived after a semester of balancing work, rehearsals and readings. Over her glasses, she looked at me and asked the pivotal question that all young people dread: "what are you doing after this?" At first, I thought she meant after this meeting. Really, “this” was referring to the crucible that is getting an undergraduate degree. I didn’t know what life looked like outside of “this” after being in it for four years. But I knew that I wanted to keep making things — specifically, making things that challenged me, and pushed me to think in a different way.

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In 2019, I graduated from Queen’s University with a BAH and moved to Tkaronto after accepting my offer to the University of Toronto for a Masters degree. During my time as a graduate student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies (CDTPS), I was introduced to the work of Roxane Gay, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, the Combahee River Collective, bell hooks, Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ruby Hamad—and, immediately, I fell in love.

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Through their writings, as well as several (eye-opening and life-altering) personal experiences, I discovered my desire to dig into studies of surrounding gender, performativity (in the Butlerean sense), and whiteness in Canada and the United States. These research interests led me towards several feminist performance projects, such as the completion of my Masters thesis titled "Talk to Me: A Millennial Dialogue of Performance, Testimony, Feminism(s) and social media", the performance of feminist documentary performance work such as Talk to Me and MEAT, as well as other social justice-involved work with Shakespeare in Action, the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative and most recently, my work with the African American Policy Forum as an Arts and Media Assistant. Currently, as a doctoral candidate at CDTPS, I am examining the ways in which one's proximity to a "default performativity" of gender, affects the ways in which they are cared for/about by mainstream society in the United States.

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To view my publication credits, click HERE.