FOOT34 is just around the corner! Meet the organizers behind FOOT34! Get to know who they are and what they’re excited to share with you.
🧠 Ming-Wei Chen is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies. His current research focuses on intergenerational dialogue in theatre, with broader research interests in the theatre of the real, applied theatre, and modern Taiwanese theatre. Ming-Wei is also a theatre producer and performance planner, and a contributing writer for various publications, including a Toronto-based column for Performing Arts Redefined, Taiwan’s leading performing arts magazine. In addition, he is a secondary school drama teacher, director, and traditional theatre performer, exploring diverse possibilities of theatre through writing, practice and pedagogy.
🧠 Lisa Davenport (she/her) is second-year PhD student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies. Her research focuses on drama education, youth and improvisational theatre. She is a graduate of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama's applied theatre MA, and Queen's University's Artist in Education BEd program. Lisa enjoys working with youth in summer programming and at the Drama School at Young People's Theatre in Toronto.
🧠 Aylin (Oyan) Salahshoor is a Toronto-based Iranian performer and playwright and the artistic director of Minor Punctuation Theatre. She is currently pursuing a PhD in drama, theatre & performance studies at the University of Toronto, where her dissertation examines censorship, aesthetics, and political ambiguity in Iranian and diasporic theatre. She has appeared in numerous productions across Toronto in both English and Farsi, with companies and venues including Soulpepper Theatre, the Segal Centre, Toronto Fringe, and Next Stage. Her writing has been recognized with the Hamilton Fringe Best New Play Contest (far-flung peoples, 2024), the Meyer Greenstein Award for Writing Excellence (2022), and the Norma Epstein Foundation Award in Creative Writing (2021).
🧠 Bethany Schaufler-Biback (she/her) is a second-year PhD student at the Centre for Drama Theatre & Performance Studies. Her research lives at the intersection of audience studies and disability studies, where she explores audience reception and engagement with disability theatre and accessibility arts. She is additionally interested in equitable practices in qualitative empirical research methods. Her work has appeared in Studies in Theatre and Performance and The Journal for Consent Based Performance, and at the Canadian Association for Theatre Research Conference, the Conference on Disability, Accessibility and Representation in the Creative Industries, and Canadian Game Studies Association Conference.
