People

Catherine Graham retired in June 2020 as an Associate Professor of Theatre & Film Studies in the McMaster University School of the Arts, and the graduate programs in Gender Studies and Feminist Research and in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. She has continued to work as Artistic Director with the TSDC project, where her focus is on better understanding how community-engaged performance can function not just as a means of expressing things we already know, but as a way of developing new knowledge that values both “knowing how” and “knowing that” in discussions of social change. She is particularly concerned with the ways theatre workshops can help bring new voices into public discussion by focusing attention on ways people are excluded not because of what they say but because of how they say it. Combining over 30 years of experience using feminist and queer theory, performance theory, and cross-cultural performance critique to create and analyze theatre for social change, Catherine has developed the workshop techniques that are at the heart of the Transforming Stories, Driving Change process. She has also written the scripts, in collaboration with performer-advocates and fellow researchers.

Chris Sinding is a Professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, jointly appointed to the School of Social Work and the Department of Health, Aging and Society. A major focus of Chris's teaching and research has to do with the arts - how social work teachers, researchers and practitioners can draw on the arts to achieve insight, engagement, and social justice goals. Drawing on a number of research-based drama projects she has written about the significance of arts practices as knowledge generation; described what it means for social science researchers to work collaboratively with artists and to create research representations that are genuinely accessible and engaging to lay people; and considered the effects of arts-based knowledge exchange initiatives on care providers (particularly the less obvious and less measurable 'outcomes'). She is especially interested in how art might serve as intervention in the narrowing and erasure of critical practices of care. 

Katherine Kalinowski is the Assistant Executive Director at Good Shepherd Hamilton. Her caring and dedicated advocacy for those who are often found in the margins has helped shape the face of Hamilton’s social services and transformed emergency housing. Building a city that includes, supports and assists all of its citizens is Katherine’s life work and lasting legacy.

Patti McNaney joined TSDC as the Associate Executive Director at the Social Planning and Research Council of Hamilton. Her work focused on project development and management in the areas of the healthy development of children and youth and housing and homelessness. Patti holds an appointment as an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Social Work at McMaster and has recently accepted a position with the Public Health Agency of Canada with their Public and Travel Health team.

Elysée Nouvet is an Assistant Professor in Global Health at Western University in London, Ontario. Trained as a cultural and medical anthropologist, her research explores how cultural norms, values, and power relations shape representations of and responses to disease and suffering.

J. Adam Perry is an Assistant Professor of Adult Education at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. One strand of Adam’s research focuses on how community-based artistic practices, such as collective storytelling and performance, can challenge the socio-cultural obstacles that exclude certain people from full participation in their communities. Adam is particularly interested in designing critical artistic interventions that increase the political participation of immigrant youth and migrant workers in Canada. Adam is also the co-founder of Toronto’s In Forma Theatre. 

Jennie Vengris is an instructor in McMaster’s School of Social Work. Jennie’s past research, community development and policy practice experience revolve primarily around housing and homelessness – especially how policy lands in the lives of individuals and in communities.  Jennie is currently focused on critical social work education and finding ways to teach macro social work using adult education principles, Universal Design in Learning and creative/arts-based methods.  As a member of the School of Social Work’s Field Education team, she is developing opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of community development, leadership, community-based research, social justice, and grassroots advocacy. 

Helene Vosters (PhD) is an artist-scholar whose work explores issues of violence and nationalism and the role of artistic practices in mobilizing processes of community engagement and collective reckoning. Drawing upon a labour aesthetic and a vocabulary of the everyday, Helene constructs task-based counter-memorial meditations that seek to engage the public in a dialogue about our collective relationships as multiply-located beings concurrently inhabiting and manifesting history. Helene has published articles in Canadian and international journals (Performance Research, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Journal of Practice-based Research in Theatre, and Canadian Theatre Review), book sections in Performance Studies in Canada, Performing Objects and Theatrical Things, and Theatre of Affect, and is the author of Unbecoming Nationalism: From Commemoration to Redress in Canada.

Melanie Skene is an artist and puppeteer who creates and performs with puppets and masks that are frequently seen in various parades, marches, festivals and theatrical productions throughout Hamilton. In 2010, she founded Many Hands Art, a community arts organization through which she created a community-based annual summer solstice festival in downtown Hamilton. Much of her art has been aimed at exploring issues of environmental and social justice with the goal of helping citizens engage with their environment through art, creativity and celebration. Since 2014, she has been lending her artistic skills to Transforming Stories, Driving Change. She has an Honours BA from McMaster University in Peace Studies and Religious Studies and received her Masters of Environmental Studies from York University.

Paula Grove is a Hamilton theatre artist who works in the local independent theatre scene as a writer, director, producer, and performer. She obtained her training as an actor at Ryerson Theatre School and completed an MFA in Theatre from York University. In 2015 she won the City of Hamilton Arts Award for Theatre. In addition to her work in theatre, she teaches and is a private coach. She’s also a singer who has performed in concerts and cabarets throughout the area.

2019 - 2021

Maddie Krusto (she/her) is a theatre artist and equity educator based in Hamilton. A graduate of McMaster’s Gender Studies and Feminist Research MA program, her training in devised theatre offers an artistic practice that is collaborative, community-based, and focused on putting care first. She has collaborated on projects such as McMaster’s Transforming Stories Driving Change project, worked with the Stratford Festival Laboratory's Engender Stage and Beyond the Trans Canon workshops, and co-founded McMaster Activist Theatre. Maddie is currently the Community Outreach and Policy Coordinator at Hamilton Fringe, a lead facilitator with The Ripple Effect Education, and works in education at the Kiwanis Boys and Girls Club of Hamilton.

2018 – 2019

Sarah Adjekum is a social worker and PhD student in the Health and Society program with the Department of Health, Aging, and Society at McMaster University. She is a longtime Hamilton resident who has been involved with community organizing on various issues including issues of racial discrimination. Her passions include social inequality, spatial justice, poetry and sketching.

2017 - 2018

Lori A. Chambers, MSW, Ph.D., is a social worker and community health researcher whose work focuses on the health and well-being of racialized women living with or impacted by HIV.  She co-leads “Because She Cares,” a community-engaged, arts-based project stemming from her doctoral research on AIDS service employment as caring work for African immigrant women living with HIV.  She received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences in the School of Social Work at McMaster University in 2018 and currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the Factor Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto.

2018

Dalia holds an MA from McMaster University in Gender studies and Feminist research, where she wrote an IRP titled “Feeling and Performing Race.” In her IRP, she analyzed performance and theatre techniques  to argue  that race should be understood as a technology of power with various facets, focusing particularly on how raced bodies emerge and are reproduced through social interactions.