Meet the 2021-22 ECD Cohort!
PTC is thrilled to announce our 2022 ECD cohort of playwright-producers: Emmet Hanley, Argel Monte de Ramos, and Alexander Zonjic. From now through the summer they will be assisting on our Unscripted and PTC Platforms work, while training to meet the increasing sectoral demand for producers who understand developing new work. With external mentor June Fukumura, dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel, and guest mentors, they will cultivate their own practices while steeped in PTC’s anti-oppression, artist-first methodology for process design. This program is made possible by the BC Arts Council Early Career Development grant.
Cohort Bios:
Argel Monte de Ramos was born in Manila, Philippines. When he was 15 years old, he moved to Canada with his family to seek a better life and opportunities. As a young immigrant, Argel wants to use the power of storytelling to inspire Filipino youth and other immigrants through his music and theatrical performances. He went to Kwantlen Polytechnic University to take classes in Business and did a Business studies exchange program at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK. Argel also holds a Musical Theatre Diploma and a Bachelor of Performing arts degree from Capilano University. He is an advocate of representation, anti-racism work, and inclusion.
Alexander Steele Zonjic is an emerging playwright and actor. He is also a frightened, anxious millennial with no social media presence and a good poker face. At 8 years old, burglars ransacked his family home in Windsor, Ontario, while he slept, and ever since then he’s been afraid to wake up to find his world unjustly changed, and his place within it uncertain. In his free time he enjoys wrestling with the quotidian concerns and controversies of the present (and how they may repeat the past or reshape our future), a bright-night-light (due to aforementioned home invasion), and struggling to balance a good sense of humour with an overwhelming sense of doom. Through the theatre he seeks to understand, embrace and face his fears by endeavouring to engage in uncomfortable conversations in the name of truth and growth, practicing vulnerability in his thoughts and feelings, being brave enough to have his mind changed in public, and potentially say the wrong thing. Championing the ugly and the honest, Alexander hopes to create work that challenges, while also inspiring transformative justice, empathy, and a will to live together. Alexander is a graduate of the X University Theatre School where he was awarded the Lou Taube Memorial Award and has also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and Ecole Philippe Gaulier. His debut play Enola_Gay earned him the Robert Beardsley Award for Emerging Playwrights from the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and an Honourable Mention in the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition.
Emmett Hanly is a member of the Métis Nation of British Columbia living on the unceded territory of the Squamish (Skxwú7mesh), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ilwətaɁɬ) Nations. Graduating with a BFA in Acting in 2020, Emmett is an emerging playwright, musician, actor, and filmmaker. Emmett is passionate about creating genre-bending art that is both surreal and politically engaged, specifically focusing on topics such as queerness, religious trauma, and decolonization. Emmett also sings and plays guitar in a post-punk band, Goat Rodeo.
Mentor Bios:
June Fukumura is a Japanese-Canadian inter-disciplinary theatre artist with a BFA in Theatre Performance and a Certificate in Sustainable Community Development from Simon Fraser University. June is the Co-Founder of New(to)Town Collective, an artist collective with a mandate to create new experimental works and provide ongoing accessible physical theatre training and experimental research workshops called Training Jams. June is also the Co-Artistic Director of Popcorn Galaxies, an experimental theatre company interested in re-enchanting the everyday through unconventional site-responsive and site-specific works. She is the Curator of Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre’s (vAct) MSG Lab 2021-22 and has been a part of the MSG Lab team for the past three years. In 2022-23 she will take on the role of the Resident Dramaturg at vAct. In addition, she is a freelance actor, performer, creator, producer, dramaturg, director, and clown. junefukumura.com
Joanna Garfinkel lives and works on the the unceded and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səlil̓wətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation). She is grateful, as granddaughter of refugees, to have the opportunity to work in the community, on this land. She is the co-founder of collectively and socially-driven play development company Universal Limited and the co-creator, with Yoshié Bancroft, of JAPANESE PROBLEM, a site-responsive piece about the Japanese Canadian Incarceration, which has been performed Vancouver, at Soulpepper in Toronto, and elsewhere. Co-created and directed the pedicab adventure Tour for HIVE 3, Victoria (Theatre SKAM), and Toronto (SummerWorks). Recent dramaturgical credits include Berlin: The Last Cabaret (PuSh), Poly Queer Love Ballad, (Theatre Passe Murailles), and MX (Cultch). Joanna has been nominated for 3 Jessie awards, winning one (Critics Choice for Innovation); Pure Research grant (Nightswimming Theatre), and has received the Sydney Risk award for directing. MFA directing (UBC). Her focus is in new play development, multidisciplinary, and site-specific work; she also has trained with Anne Bogart and the SITI Company in New York. Upcoming: Catalina La O Presenta: Ahora Conmigo, and development of To the Sea. She is the Dramaturg, Creative Engagement, at PTC.