PTC is pleased to welcome our longtime friend and colleague mia susan amir into a co-mentorship with Artistic & Executive Director Heidi Taylor. As PTC’s Dramaturgy Research Associate, mia will advise on inclusive process design for our upcoming WrightSpace residency, and bear witness to the residency in December. Heidi will support mia’s development of access protocols and visioning for future projects. As part of mia’s research, she is visiting disability arts practitioners across the country to exchange practice and foreground the integration of aesthetics and inclusion.

This work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, and the BCAC. Her research is further supported through an LMDA Bly Creative Fellowship, for her project, Unsettling Dramaturgy, exploring the intersections between Crip and Indigenous dramaturgical process design in the studio, on the stage, and in the street. Look for opportunities to participate in Unsettling Dramaturgy later this winter. We look forward to deepening PTC’s knowledge and skills through this collaboration.

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mia susan amir (she/her/hers) was born in Israel/Occupied Palestine. She is a queer, Crip and Mad Jew of mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic ascent who lives and works as an uninvited settler on the unceded and occupied territories of the x?m?θkw?y??m (Musqueam), Skwxwu?7mesh (Squamish), and S?l?i?lw?ta?/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, otherwise known as, Vancouver, BC.

mia works at the intersection of creative and community practice as an educator, cultural organizer, writer, director, dramaturg, and theatre artist creating immersive, interdisciplinary works. Much of her practice centres around explorations of the ways in which sociopolitical events are manifest in the space of the individual and collective body, and the body of the land, resulting in narrative hauntings, which she calls Dybbuk Consciousness. mia is interested in how theatre offers a prefigurative space to respond to the conditions currently shaping our world, to imagine new ways of organizing power for all human and non-human beings, to challenge and expand perception, to unearth relationship, and to engage in democratic narrative production, starting from the site of physical sensation.

mia has been involved in the creation of works for the stage, and works for unconventional performance settings: parks, sidewalks, beaches, parking lots. In her work she draws from her training in somatics, creative writing, performance art, autoethnography, ancestral embodiment, and site-specific/responsive design. mia sees materials, space, and place as collaborators. Her practice, hybrid in form, engages juxtaposition as a critical strategy to bring breath to the unnamed, or ineffable.

Select works include: Geologic Formations (rEvolver, FestivALT); Obscura Lucida: The Land of My Body, co-created with T ’uy’tanat-Cease Wyss (Vines Arts Festival Commission); Across the Salty Waters (Feminist Art Conference); Transmissions: Bodies/Echoes/Ash (Grinn City Collective, Allied Media Conference); The Co(Lab) Showing: An Indigenous Crossroads Laboratory (Urban Ink). As the 2007/8 Artist in Residence with Neworld Theatre, mia wrote her first full length work for theatre, The Map to Zochrot. mia’s work has been developed with the support of the Banff Playwrights Lab, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Recent credits include: Lame… Is (Sick + Twisted Theatre); Burqa Boutique (Virago Play Series); Setting Bones, 2017 Vancouver Fringe New Play Prize (PTC/Kalik); Saving Mother (Vines Arts Festival Commission, The Only Animal); Wyspa (Vancouver Fringe Festival); Umizoko (The Only Animal). mia’s writing/thinking has appeared on HowlRound, SpiderWebShow, Lemon Hound, Digging Through the Fat, and in Sustenance: An Anthology of Writers from B.C. and Beyond on the Subject of Food, Anvil Press. A featured poet of the 2018 Art Song Lab, she collaborated with composer Patrick McGraw in the creation of, City.

A recipient of the LMDA 2018 Bly Creative Fellowship, mia’s current research explores the intersections between Crip and Indigenous dramaturgical practices in the studio, on the stage, and in the street. mia holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Mills College, traditional Ohlone Territory, Oakland, CA. She is the Creative Director of The Story We Be.